The Other French Revolution
Racine inspires me with an emotion that Shakespeare never gives me – the emotion that comes from perfection.
ANDRE GIDE, novelist and translator of Shakespeare1
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m not saying it’s a good thing that Shakespeare played integrally should succeed integrally in front of a French public . . . I’m saying that when this happens – if it happens – the French race will have changed absolutely.
EMILE FAGUET, cultural historian, 19042
‘The slow and chequered conversion of France to Shakespeare,’ writes John Pemble, ‘was the other French Revolution.’3 In the early twentieth century, he was enrolled in the avant-garde, alongside Ibsen and Strindberg. The first complete performance in French ofKing Lear took place in 1904, with the experimental director Antoine as Lear, and the first complete performance anywhere of Troilus and Cressida was given at the Paris Odéon in 1912. Yet for much of the twentieth century, Shakespeare in France remained an exotic spectacle, with large casts and lavish staging. Just as two centuries earlier, his work was regarded as embodying the gulf separating French and English cultures, intellects, and even races, now he was seen as embodying the foggy ‘north’ versus the sunlit ‘south’, infidelity against faith, the ‘Teuton’ against the ‘Latin’. For many nationalist, Catholic and neo-classical writers of the 1920s and 30s, the gulf must have seemed even wider than in Voltaire’s day between a ‘theatre of bestiality . . . instinct . . . and blood’ and ‘a theatre of exquisite ideas, of refined sentiments’.4 But the successive catastrophes of the twentieth century made the classical perfectionism of orderly plots, strict versification, ‘refined’ language, and happy endings seem relics of a vanished age. As the Existentialist writer Albert Camus put it, there was now no hope of a promised land. Shakespearean tragedy finally entered French consciousness. His bleak universe, in which ‘as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport’, had become, in the words of the Catholic novelist François Mauriac, ‘terribly present’ to ‘survivors struggling on the surface of a Europe three-quarters destroyed, in this glacial May of 1945’.5 Shakespearean themes and language appeared in the works of leading modern writers such as Camus, Jean Anouilh, Samuel Beckett and Louis Aragon. Shakespeare could now be presented for the first time, not as a colourful archaic spectacle, but unadorned, in starkly simple productions. Twenty of his plays were performed between 1940 and 1960, many for the first time in France. The old idea that Shakespeare was quintessentially English, and had to be adapted to a quite separate French sensibility by being made tidier, more logical and more poetic, evaporated. This was the revolution in which the French ‘rejected syntax and structures and happy endings, and opened their minds and their stage to the unruly pulse of Shakespeare’s hours and years’.6 An entirely new French translation, with the full English text in parallel, began to appear in 20027 – a sign both of the acceptance of Shakespeare into the French theatre and of a more general ability to read English. The French habitually refer to English, with a characteristic mix of envy and irony, as la langue de Shakespeare. For two centuries, since Voltaire’s time, there has been a complete translation into French on average every twenty years – one for each generation. As Shakespeare’s English becomes remote from native speakers, ‘each new translation is a resurrection’.8 In that sense, the language of Shakespeare is also French.