are as a dramatist is to be traced
in his women. We have first the domineering scold, reminding him
possibly of his own domestic relations (Lady Macbeth); second, the
witty, handsome women (Portia, Rosalind); third, the simple, naive women
(Ophelia, Desdemona); fourth, the frankly sensuous women (Cleopatra,
Cressida); and, finally, the young woman viewed with all an old man's
joy (Miranda). Again his genius exercises his spell. Then, like
Prospero, he casts his magician's staff into the sea.

In 1896 Brandes published his great work on Shakespeare. It arrested
attention immediately in every country of the world. Never had a book so
fascinating, so brilliant, so wonderfully suggestive, been written on
Shakespeare. The literati were captivated. But alas, scholars were not.
They admitted that Brandes had written an interesting book, that he had
accumulated immense stores of information and given to these sapless
materials a new life and a new attractiveness. But they pointed out that
not only did his work contain gross positive errors, but it consisted,
from first to last, of a tissue of speculations which, however
ingenious, had no foundation in fact and no place in cool-headed
criticism.[16] Theodor Bierfreund, one of the most brilliant Shakespeare
scholars in Denmark, almost immediately attacked Brandes in a long
article in the Norwegian periodical _Samtiden_.[17]

[16. Cf. Vilhelm Moller in _Nordisk Tidskrift foer Vetenskap, Konst
och Industri_. 1896, pp. 501-519.]

[17. _Samtiden_, 1896. (VII), pp. 382 ff.]

He acknowledges the great merits of the work. It is an enormously rich
compilation of Shakespeare material gathered from the four corners of
the earth and illuminated by the genius of a great writer. He gives the
fullest recognition to Brandes' miraculous skill in analyzing characters
and making them live before our eyes. But he warns us that Brandes is no
critical student of source materials, and that we must be on our guard
in accepting his conclusions. It is not so certain that the sonnets mean
all that Brandes would have them mean, and it is certain that we must
be cautious in inferring too much from _Troilus and Cressida_ and
_Pericles_ for, in the opinion of the reviewer, Shakespeare probably had
little or nothing to do with them. He then sketches briefly his theory
that these plays cannot be Shakespeare's, a theory which he later
elaborated in his admirably written monograph, _Shakespeare og