caricature himself!

This is Wildenvey's attitude throughout. To take still another example.
Act IV, 2 begins in the English with a brief dialogue in prose between
Jacques and the two lords. In Wildenvey this is changed to a rhymed
dialogue in iambic tetrameters between Jacques and Amiens. In like
manner, the blank verse dialogue between Silvius and Phebe (Silvius and
Pippa) is in Norwegian rendered, or rather paraphrased, in iambic verse
rhyming regularly abab.

Occasionally meanings are read into the play which not only do not
belong in Shakespeare but which are ridiculously out of place. As an
illustration, note the dialogue between Orlando and Rosalind in II, 2
(Original, III, 2). Orlando remarks: "Your accent is something finer
than could be purchased in so remote a dwelling." Wildenvey renders
this: "Eders sprog er mer elevert end man skulde vente i disse vilde
trakter. De taler ikke Landsmaal." Probably no one would be deceived by
this gratuitous satire on the Landsmaal, but, obviously, it has no place
in what pretends to be a translation. The one justification for it is
that Shakespeare himself could not have resisted so neat a word-play.

Wildenvey's version, therefore, can only be characterized as needlessly
free. For the text as such he has absolutely no regard. But for the fact
that he has kept the fable and, for the most part, the characters,
intact, we should characterize it as a belated specimen of Sille Beyer's
notorious Shakespeare "bearbeidelser" in Denmark. But Wildenvey does not
take Sille Beyer's liberties with the dramatis personae and he has,
moreover, what she utterly lacked--poetic genius.

For that is the redeeming feature of _Livet i Skogen_--it does not
translate Shakespeare but it makes him live. The delighted audience
which sat night after night in Christiania and Copenhagen and drank in
the loveliness of Wildenvey's verse and Halvorsen's music cared little
whether the lines that came over the footlights were philologically an
accurate translation or not. They were enchanted by Norwegian verse and
moved to unfeigned delight by the cleverness of the prose. If Wildenvey
did not succeed in translating _As You Like It_--one cannot believe that
he ever intended to,--he did succeed in reproducing something of "its
imperishable woodland spirit, its fresh breath of out-of-doors."

We have already quoted the opening of Act II. It is not Shakespeare but
it is good poetry in itself. And the immor