kap er vammelt, al elskov er tovet,
men her under lovet
er ingen bedrovet.

_Livet i Skogen_, then, must not be read as a translation of _As You
Like It_, but is immensely worth reading for its own sake. Schiller
recast and rewrote _Macbeth_ in somewhat the same way, but Schiller's
_Macbeth_, condemned by its absurd porter-scene, is today nothing
more than a literary curiosity. I firmly believe that Wildenvey's
"bearbeidelse" deserves a better fate. It gave new life to the
Shakespeare tradition on the Norwegian stage, and is in itself,
a genuine contribution to the literature of Norway.

SUMMARY

If we look over the field of Norwegian translation of Shakespeare,
the impression we get is not one to inspire awe. The translations are
neither numerous nor important. There is nothing to be compared with the
German of Tieck and Schlegel the Danish of Foersom, or the Swedish of
Hagberg.

But the reason is obvious. Down to 1814 Norway was politically and
culturally a dependency of Denmark. Copenhagen was the seat of
government, of literature, and of polite life. To Copenhagen cultivated
Norwegians looked for their models and their ideals. When Shakespeare
made his first appearance in the Danish literary world--Denmark and
Norway--it was, of course, in pure Danish garb. Boye, Rosenfeldt,
and Foersom gave to their contemporaries more or less satisfactory
translations of Shakespeare, and Norwegians were content to accept the
Danish versions. In one or two instances they made experiments of their
own. An unknown man of letters translated a scene from _Julius Caesar_
in 1782, and in 1818 appeared a translation of _Coriolanus_. But there
is little that is typically Norwegian about either of these--a word or a
phrase here and there. For the rest, they are written in pure Danish,
and but for the title-page, no one could tell whether they were
published in Copenhagen or Christiania and Trondhjem.

In the meantime Foersom had begun his admirable Danish translations,
and the work stopped in Norway. The building of a nation and literary
interests of another character absorbed the attention of the cultivated
world. Hauge's translation of _Macbeth_ is not significant, nor are
those of Lassen thirty years later. A scholar could, of course, easily
show that they are Norwegian, but that is all. They never succeeded in
displacing Foersom-Lembcke.

More important are the Landsmaal translations beginning with Ivar
Aasen's in 185