last glimpse of her. Shakespeare's intuitive
knowledge of the soul was sure. The determining fact of her life was her
love for Hamlet: it is significant that when we see her insane not a
mention of it crosses her lips.

Hamlet and Ophelia are the delicate victims of a tragic necessity. They
are undone because they lose confidence in those to whom they cling with
all the abandon of deep, spiritual souls. Hamlet is at last aroused to
desperation; Ophelia is helplessly crushed. She is the finest woman
of Shakespeare's imagination, and perhaps for that reason the most
difficult to understand and the one least often appreciated.

The next chapter in Norwegian Shakespeareana is a dull, unprofitable
one--a series of articles on the Baconian theory appearing irregularly
in the monthly magazine, _Kringsjaa_. The first article appeared in the
second volume (1894) and is merely a review of a strong pro-Bacon
outburst in the American _Arena_. It is not worth criticising. Similar
articles appeared in _Kringsjaa_ in 1895, the material this time being
taken from the _Deutsche Revue_. It is the old ghost, the cipher in the
first folio, though not Ignatius Donnelly's cryptogram. Finally, in
1898, a new editor, Chr. Brinckmann, printed[13] a crushing reply to all
these cryptogram fantasies. And that is all that was ever published in
Norway on a foolish controversy.

[13. _Kringsjaa_. Vol. XII, pp. 777 ff. The article upon which
this reply was based was from the _Quarterly Review_.]

It is a relief to turn from puerilities of this sort to Theodor
Caspari's article in _For Kirke og Kultur_ (1895)[14]--_Grunddrag ved
den Shakespeareske Digtning, i saerlig Jevnfoerelse med Ibsens senere
Digtning_.

[14. Vol. I, pp. 38 ff.]

This article must be read with caution, partly because its analysis
of the Elizabethan age is conventional, and therefore superficial, and
partly because it represents a direction of thought which eyed the later
work of Ibsen and Bjornson with distrust. These men had rejected the
faith of their fathers, and the books that came from them were signs of
the apostasy. But _For Kirke og Kultur_ has been marked from its first
number by ability, conspicuous fairness, and a large catholicity, which
give it an honorable place among church journals. And not even a
fanatical admirer of Ibsen will deny that there is more than a grain of
truth in the indictment which the writer of this article brings against
him.