Customer Reviews

Shakespeare Goes to Paris

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Shakespeare goes to Paris

by John Pemble.


This is much more than a superb book on the reception of Shakespeare in France, vividly though that is explained, with an abundance of felicitous turns of phrase and with well-chosen quotations from French sources. We see how the Abbé Prévost and Voltaire `discovered' Shakespeare; how 18th century Frenchmen (and actually, as Pemble shows in his last chapter, many English critics, too) measured him against the rules of the classical theatre, recognizing his genius but deploring his lack of `taste' and the many ways in which he broke these rules; how the French Romantics took him to their hearts and extolled his originality against the slavish adherence of French dramatists to the models laid down by the Académie Française; how questions of patriotism came to figure, with the fear that Shakespeare, the outsider from the North, might undermine `l'esprit classique français - a fear that was fanned by political setbacks and by the loss of the cultural hegemony France had enjoyed in the years of Louis XIV; and how this nationalist view was countered by the idea that Shakespeare was beyond race and exemplified a universal Humanism.

In the course of this examination, Pemble throws his net even wider: the book is at the same time something of a survey of French literary theory, taking us from Taine to Sartre, to Structuralist and Postmodernist theories. If sometimes for a while we lose sight in these discussions of Shakespeare himself, they nevertheless provide a wider background against which we can place the more explicit reactions to him in France.

There are fascinating chapters on how Shakespeare was translated into French. There were not only the problems of finding the exact parallel in French of the English text, but also, especially in the 18th century, of making the translation palatable to the taste of the time, by substituting more genteel words for those that Shakespeare had used. This went far beyond what Bowdler would do to spare a maiden's blushes. French taste thought it inappropriate in lofty tragedies to refer to, for example, lowly animals like mice, rats, flies or crabs. There were translations for the study and different translations for the stage. Desdemona's handkerchief spotted with strawberries was all very well for scholarly reading, but unacceptable for the stage; so for two hundred years French theatre audiences never learnt what the fateful article actually was. As taste changed with the French Revolution and Romanticism, so new translations were required and provided; but even Romantic translators like Dumas (1846) made massive concessions to classical tastes, not only in the language but in, for example, a total re-write of the final scene in Hamlet, where the Ghost reappears and sentences three of Shakespeare's corpses to death, but allows Hamlet to live. As late as 1884 there were translations into rhyming alexandrines: the literary critics mocked them, but the actors and the theatre-going public still insisted on bienséance on the stage. In the 20th century even those, like André Gide, who tried to be most truthful to the original found themselves unable to match Shakespeare's full vigour and allusiveness. And, according to Jean-Louis Barrault, writing in 1947, French audiences still refused to take seriously the stage strewn with corpses at the end of Hamlet: "we have the devil's own job to stop them laughing at the sight of the final carnage."

But a momentous sea-change was about to take place in France's appreciation of Shakespeare. In a brilliant chapter, Pemble shows how the very notion of tragedy changed in France. Until the 20th century the French had criticized Shakespeare because he offended against their conception of tragedy, which admitted of terror and pity, but rigorously excluded horror. "The French averted their gaze from what was desolate and painful". The Catholic Church preached an ultimately benign Providence; the 18th century Enlightenment and 19th century Positivism believed in Progress and the Perfectability of Man. God said, "Let Newton be" because Newtonian science spoke of divine purpose and harmony. But then religion became eroded; Darwinism seemed to replace orderly with random development; and above all, the horror of two world wars and of the Nazi occupation of France showed how shallow the classic conception of tragedy was. In reality what is tragic is purposeless suffering, life amidst mindless cruelty, a shaky moral compass or none at all - all the horror that the earlier conception of tragedy had banned. When Cocteau, Giraudoux, Anouilh, and Sartre rewrote the Greek myths, they reinstated the original bleak vision which had been expurgated from the classic French drama.

Against this background, the worry of just how to translate Shakespeare becomes relatively insignificant: instead of being regarded as a somewhat archaic and flawed genius, who "seems more topical to us than does Molière" (Barrault), he is seen as unblinkingly presenting the tragic absurdity of life while giving "form and intelligibility to the hazards of existence." (Venet). More than ever, he appears as our contemporary.

This book is an entertaining chronicle of the various twists and turns of Shakespeare's odyssey from a barbarian threatening to storm the walls of French culture to his triumphal entry into the literary and theatrical halls of fame in France. Starting with Voltaire's careful introduction of Shakespeare to his compatriots and nailing it with Andre Gide's postwar translation of `Anthony and Cleopatra', the French struggled to deal with Shakespeare both as an artist and a dramatist. The literary reaction is amply represented in an enticing sampler of commentary and analysis from artists and critics throughout the roughly 250 year period covered in the book The other major parallel strand (and the most fun to read about) is the attempt to translate England's iconic playwright to the French stage, and is most strikingly demonstrated by the tale of the one hundred and fifty year effort to mount a recognizable Hamlet on the French stage. However, there are any number of other telling anecdotes that Pemble employs to show the difficulties of staging Shakespeare--Romeo and Juliet was rewritten with a happy ending because audiences were outraged by the deaths of the lovers, and substantial alterations had to be made to Othello because the words for `handkerchief' and `strawberry' were considered too improper for public use. The literary and dramatic strands are dovetailed together in an argument showing why the end of Hamlet does and must work, it was pretty good--almost good enough to convince me, but nevertheless I still think it's one of the great literary non sequiturs of all time, and virtually anything could happen at the end of the play. There are a good number of other theatrical gems mentioned in the text--my favorite was the reaction of French actors to their first exposure to English dramatics. The native style adhered closely to what was known or conjectured of Greek and Roman conventions particularly for tragedy, so there was no real action on the boards, just speeches and reports of battle and death coming from off stage. Anyway, after seeing a few melodramatic and over-the-top performances by a British acting troupe, there was a sudden demand for plays with death scenes for the French thespians to wallow in. It was an amusing inversion of the cliche about actors 'dying to get the part'. Even the discussions of the history of different eras staging of Shakespeare's plays, with their many and various scenes is quite fun in Pemble's hands. Other technical subjects are also handled adroitly--discussions of the evolution of translations are surprisingly lively and Pemble doesn't get bogged down in the details which translators typically obsess on.

Speaking of translation, there's some French in the book. Most of it is translated, and it would be pointless to translate some of the examples left in their original tongue without benefit of footnote or parenthetical, as in the case where we're looking at samples of some wretched verse (though frankly there are instances where it would have been useful). Pemble also has a strange reluctance to identify the exact passages in Shakespeare which correspond to some of his French quotes. I read French fairly well, but that didn't noticeably enhance my enjoyment of the book, so don't let the language intimidate you if you think you'd like to read it. The one `benefit' I derived from being francoliterate was coming up with a rather pricey shopping list of hard-to-find or musty out-of-print French books, which kept growing as I read `Shakespeare Goes to Paris'. One last subject to address, for a topic like this, most readers (most definitely including myself) rely on the author's knowledge and judgment, so we need to ask if he seems reliable or credible. On the few occasions where I do know something of the matter at hand, Pemble is normally spot on. One opportunity that he missed perhaps is finding some things in the French perspective which might allow us see Shakespeare in a new light, after all in the English speaking world the upstart crow's work has attained a near sacred status, and tampering with it or acknowledging its warts is well nigh blasphemous. All in all, Pemble's book is very entertaining and quite informative