SHAKESPEARE GOES TO PARIS: How the Bard Conquered France
by John PembleHambledon and London £19.99 pp240
The French were so appalled by the vulgarity of Shakespeare’s plays that it took them 300 years to come near to an accurate translation. The item of Desdemona’s on which the plot of Othello hinges could not be mentioned on stage because mouchoir was too coarse a word to be uttered — or heard — in the Comédie Française. It was not until 1829 that Alfred de Vigny first risked the M-word, but that still left the question of the strawberries with which it was decorated, and fraise was considered an even lower word. The handkerchief was thus referred to as being decorated with “flowers” until well into the 20th century.
Through the amusing, sometimes hilarious story of how the French theatre slowly came to terms with Shakespeare, John Pemble of Bristol University aims to show how French culture and its view of the island across the water have changed during the past 250 years, and how important Shakespeare was in that transformation. He goes so far as to suggest that the long struggle to accommodate an alien they viewed as “an extraordinary genius yet deprived of elementary taste” helped redefine French culture.
The French classical theatre of Racine and Corneille lived by rules derived from Aristotle’s high-handed “laws”. The characters, their passions, thoughts and, above all, language were obliged to observe strict limits of what was elevated, reasonable and proper. Ripeness, far from being all, was verboten. The results could only be written in rhyming six-foot alexandrines with a heavy caesura, so each couplet was almost like four lines of three feet each: well adapted, in Racine’s hands, to the expression of noble sentiments, but prone to tinkly repetition and inhospitable to rough passion.
Then came this Englishman — a Caliban from the island of fog and bad food, whose pious and practical people enjoyed violent entertainments and bouts of introspection punctuated by sea voyages to plunder other countries. It was not until the mid-18th century that the intellectual rise of Anglo-Saxon power, following Newton and Locke, obliged France to formulate a proper response to the menace Shakespeare posed. Voltaire, who did so much to bring England to the French, is the key figure in this story, and he went to his grave believing Shakespeare had offered “a few pearls in an enormous dungheap”. He hated the pantomime that accompanied performance, the blank verse with emotion surging through the enjambement, the common characters, and the language where metaphor and association seem to breed without control.
While Voltaire shaped the critical response for a century or more, there was also an idolatrous school of thought that merely bowed the knee and prostrated itself uncritically before Shakespeare’s “genius”. The real work was therefore done in the theatre itself, by successive directors and translators; it was, as always, in the script that the drama lay.
To begin with, Shakespeare was dragooned into the classical alexandrine; Voltaire did attempt a blank-verse translation of Julius Caesar, but only to show that the form was no good — the mechanical metre of a poet too rushed to find a rhyme. The language was then “dignified”. Lear’s sky became a “firmament”; a horse was a “coursier” and Hamlet’s “How now, a rat?” behind the arras, became “Comment, un voleur?” As late as 1904, when King Lear was staged for the first time in Paris, Kent’s lines at the height of the storm, “The tyranny of the open night’s too rough / For nature to endure” became “Il n’est pas possible de rester plus longtemps dehors.”
This reminded me of the hours I spent in Left-bank cinemas as a student learning French by reading the subtitles of English films. My brother claims to have seen a western in which the trail-weary cowboy’s first line on entering the saloon — “Gimme a shot of red eye” — was translated as “Un Dubonnet, s’il vous plaît”. Part of the problem, as Madame de Staël pointed out, was that French poetry, while admired by an international élite, was unknown to most French people because its language held no appeal for them. The French language was admirably suited to philosophy and logic, but not really to poetry, as Shakespeare was starting to demonstrate. His English verse, by contrast, had not only reached the rabble; it had helped define their sense of nationality. He had invented Englishness. Such an idea was incomprehensible in France, where a writer was not an “inventor”, but the sum or epitome of what had gone before.
Still the French theatre clung to its ideas of propriety. When the rhyming resources of the language had finally been seen to be inadequate to the task, Sarah Bernhardt commissioned a prose translation of Hamlet in 1899.
Successive 19th-century translators not only gentrified the diction, they rewrote the plots. The ghost of Hamlet’s father returned in the final scene and told him to survive; Malcolm took republican vows; Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after.
Yet this centuries-long textual rearguard action, Pemble argues, camouflaged a deeper crisis of confidence. Some French critics believed that tragedy could not be written in a republic such as theirs, because a comedy of manners was the natural form in a non-tyrannical society; that, by not having a Reformation, France had locked itself into a dead tradition and could produce only classical rhymesters (like England’s Catholic Alexander Pope); and that their continuing lay revolutions, communes and restorations were not a healthy self-regulation but symptoms of a “chronic distemper”.
Things only began to improve when the much vaunted logic of French culture began to see that it was illogical to try to domesticate an alien, and during the 20th century began to produce translations that allowed Shakespeare to be what he was. The price paid, in Pemble’s account, was nothing less than a second revolution, involving the death of classical French tragedy in a prolonged nervous breakdown that realigned the whole of French culture and its relationship with the Anglo-Saxon world.
These are large claims for the author to make, as he traces a line that links a neurotic reaction to Shakespeare’s first appearance to the consequence, nearly 300 years later, of the impossibility of nationalism, the banality of postmodernism and the silence of Beckett. This book, however, is well written, informative on the main topic of translation and highly entertaining on the subject of that never-ending comedy, Anglo-French relations.
THE LATE HOW
Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet, performed in Paris in 1899, wasn’t a total success. Although it was trimmed, the play went on until after midnight, to complaints from the gallery that “We won’t get home till morning.”
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