Voltaire and Shakespeare

The French have trouble with Shakespeare. This was clear to me years ago when I saw a film that somehow or other included in its plot a production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. (I remember the film as directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, but that can't be right). I'd never heard of Pericles at the time, and although Wells and Taylor print a painstaking reconstruction of the text on the grounds that had the original play survived “it might well have been as highly valued as The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest” it still seems to me an odd item to choose.

W & T are right however when they argue the merits of Scene 21, where “Marina, Pericles’ long-lost daughter, draws him out of the comatose state to which his sufferings have reduced him.” You only have to scan a few passages to become bewitched and moved. Presumably the French film director had been affected too. A fine new book by John Pemble of the University of Bristol discusses the entire history of the French and their struggles to comprehend—Shakespeare goes to Paris: how the Bard Conquered France—and provides the following excerpt about Voltaire.

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The theatre was Voltaire’s passion. While in London he spent many evenings at Drury Lane, as the guest of Colley Cibber the poet. Night after night his small trim figure could be seen in the pit, closely following the play in a text supplied by courtesy of Mr Chetwood, the prompter.

The experience greatly improved his knowledge of the English language, but it diminished his opinion of the English stage. In philosophy and mathematical science the islanders, he decided, were sophisticated and supreme. In the drama they were backward and inferior. There were no Lockes, no Newtons, of the English theatre. The best native dramatist was Addison, whose compositions were refined but frigid.

The most popular was William Shakespeare, who had come too soon into a world too young. Since he had died as long ago as 1616, Shakespeare had, inevitably, been uncivilised, so their addiction to his work had retarded the English in their appreciation of the stage. ‘Their theatre’, Voltaire told his French readers, ‘has remained in a grossly infantile state.’ To Lord Lytton he wrote (in English): ‘The taste of your politest countrymen in point of tragedy differs not much from the taste of the mob at Bear-Garden.’

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Voltaire was shocked and even disgusted by what he saw in the plays of Shakespeare — a Moor strangling his wife; mad royalty; a prince, his mother, and his stepfather drinking together; gravediggers digging a grave while quaffing and singing rude vaudeville songs; a crowd of Roman plebeians haranguing patricians; Roman conspirators washing their hands in the blood of a murdered dictator.

Every now and then, unexpectedly refulgent amid these revolting barbarisms, there was a passage of great dramatic force or striking beauty — of sublimity even. Voltaire translated one such passage — freely, not literally, as he was at pains to explain — for the benefit of the French public:

Demeure; il faut choisir, et passer à l’instant
De la vie à la mort, ou de l’être au néant.
Dieux cruels! S’il en est, éclairez mon courage.
Faut-il vieillir courbé sous la main qui m’outrage,
Supporter ou finir mon malheur et mon sort?...

But Shakespeare was not redeemed by isolated morsels such as this monologue of Prince Hamlet. His work was incorrigibly ‘bizarre’ and ‘gigantesque’ — and quite superseded in the age of sensibility and reason. That was why it had never crossed the Channel. Shakespeare was an insular writer whose work, unlike that of the great French dramatists, could never have an international appeal. ‘French masterpieces’, Voltaire told the Académie Française in 1777,

have been performed before every court and in every academy of Italy. They are played everywhere from the borders of the Arctic Sea to the sea which separates Europe from Africa. It will be time to argue when the same honour has been done to a single piece by Shakespeare.

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Yet the unthinkable was already happening. Even before Voltaire’s first remarks about the English stage had appeared in French (his Lettres philosophiques were published first in English), the abbé Prévost had made a much more favorable assessment. He declared that he knew of nothing, either in Greek or in French, which had more tragic power and emotional appeal, or which demonstrated better dramatic skill, than Hamlet and certain plays by Dryden, Otway, and Congreve.

In his weekly review Le Pour et Contre, which appeared between 1733 and 1740, he reported the news and views of Shakespeare current in England, and repeated his own eulogistic verdict. From this time Shakespeare was written about and talked about in polite Parisian circles, and when David Garrick came to Paris, in 1751 and then again in 1756, he enthralled the fashionable salons with impromptu recitals of famous bits from the plays.

The massive Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert (1751-72) did not contain an entry for Shakespeare, but there were articles on ‘Stratford’ and ‘Tragédie’ which ratified uncritically the verdict of Pope, that Shakespeare was the greatest genius known to dramatic literature. The note of approval amplified, and Diderot wrote to Voltaire’s Genevan friend, François Tronchin: ‘Ah, Monsieur, this Shakespeare was a terrible mortal… a colossus who was gothic, but between whose legs we would all pass without our heads even touching his testicles.’

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Voltaire learnt with incredulity, and with growing rancour, of the advance of the barbarian into France. In 1746 the first, selective, translation of Shakespeare’s works appeared. Thirty years later the whole dramatic canon was published in French — under royal patronage, what is more. When he read the preface by Pierre Le Tourneur, the chief translator, Voltaire was outraged. Le Tourneur claimed that Aristotle would have rewritten his Poetics if he had lived to know of Shakespeare’s work, which was greater than that of Sophocles or Euripides.

‘If our water-carriers wrote for the theatre,’ retorted Voltaire, ‘they’d make a better job of it.’ The English demeaned themselves by remaining attached to this clod-hopping primitive. ‘I still can’t understand’, he wrote to d’Alembert, ‘how a nation which has produced geniuses of taste and even delicacy, as well as philosophes worthy of you, can carry on priding itself on that abominable Shakespeare, who, if the truth were told, is nothing but a provincial clown.’

The growing infatuation with Shakespeare in France was an insult to Corneille and Racine, the monarchs of the French theatre, and it was an insult to himself, their acknowledged successor. Chafed vanity fed the bile of old age, and he gnashed his toothless gums. ‘I’ve seen the end of the reign of reason and taste’, he cried; ‘I shall die leaving France barbaric!’ When he remembered that he was himself responsible for this deplorable state of affairs, he beat his breast and tore his hair:

What makes the whole thing even more calamitous and horrible is the fact that I am the one who first mentioned this Shakespeare; It was I who first revealed to the French the few pearls that I had discovered in his enormous dungheap. Never did I expect that one day I’d be helping to trample underfoot the crowns of Racine and Corneille so that they could be set on the head of a barbaric barnstormer!