[7. Christiania Posten.  Dec. 12, 1852.]

The play was presented by student actors, and the performance was therefore less finished than it would have been under other circumstances. Aftenposten was doubtless right when it criticised the director for entrusting so great a play to unpractised hands, assuming that Shakespeare should be played at all.  “For our part, we do not believe the time far distant when Shakespeare will cease to be a regular part of the repertoire."[8] To this statement a contributor in Aftenposten for Sept. 28 objected.  He admits that Shakespeare wrote his plays for a stage different from our own, that the ease with which Elizabethan scenery was shifted gave his plays a form that makes them difficult to play today.  Too often at a modern presentation we feel that we are seeing a succession of scenes rather than unified, organic drama.  But, after all, the main thing is the substance—­“the weighty content, and this will most certainly secure for them for a long time to come a place in the repertoire of the theater of the Germanic world.  So long as we admit that in the delineation of character, in the presentation of noble figures, and in the mastery of dialogue, Shakespeare is unexcelled, so long we must admit that Shakespeare has a place on the modern stage.”

    [8. Aftenposten.  Sept. 21, 1878.]

Where did Aftenposten’s reviewer get the idea that Shakespeare’s plays are not adapted to the modern stage?  Was it from Charles Lamb?  At any rate, it is certain that he anticipated a movement that has led to many devices both in the English-speaking countries and in Germany to reproduce the stage conditions under which Shakespeare’s plays were performed during his own life.

Of the next Shakespearean piece to be performed in Christiania, All’s Well That Ends Well, there is but the briefest mention in the newspapers.  We know that it was given in the curiously perverted arrangement by Sille Beyer and was presented twelve times from January 15, 1854 to May 23, 1869.  On that day a new version based on Lembcke’s translation was used, and in this form the play was given eight times the following seasons.  Since January 24, 1882, it has not been performed in Norway.[9]

    [9.  See Blanc’s Fortegnelse. p. 93.]

At the beginning of the next season, October 29, 1854, Much Ado About Nothing was introduced to Kristiania theater-goers under the title Blind Alarm.  The translation was by Carl Borgaard, director of the theater.  But here, too, contemporary documents leave us in the dark.  There is merely a brief announcement in the newspapers.  Blanc informs us that Jomfru Svendsen played Hero, and Wiehe, Benedict.[10]

    [10.  See Blanc’s Fortegnelse. p. 93.]

After Blind Alarm Shakespeare disappears from the repertoire for nearly four years.  A version of The Taming of the Shrew under the title Hun Maa Taemmes was given on March 28, 1858, but with no great success.  Most of the papers ignored it. Aftenbladet merely announced that it had been given.[11]