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Shakespeare Goes to Paris - How the Bard Conquered France
By John Pemble
Hambledon and London
£19.99
Dateline: 22nd May, 2006
The belief that Shakespeare never made much of an impact in France
seems to be widespread and deeply rooted. The only example of "French
Shakespeare" known to many people is probably Sarah Bernhardt's
gender-bending Hamlet. Yet John Pemble's Shakespeare Goes to Paris
makes it abundantly clear that, although the Bard's posthumous career
in France has been dogged by aesthetic and political controversy, "the
slow and chequered conversion of France to Shakespeare was the other
French revolution".
It took a long time - over a century after his death, in fact - for
Shakespeare's plays to cross the Channel. No less a person than Voltaire
was instrumental in making the introduction, although his admiration
for the Bard was qualified: "It was I who first revealed to the
French the few pearls that I had discovered in his enormous dungheap."
From the beginning Shakespeare was widely regarded as an uncouth genius
utterly devoid of gôut (taste), that defining characteristic
of French culture. His Anglo-Saxon otherness was both fascinating and
disturbing, particularly at a time when France's status as a world power
was being eclipsed by the fledgeling British Empire. But the greatest
obstacle to Shakespeare's acceptance was the nature of French classical
theatre.
To audiences accustomed to the works of Racine, Corneille and their
many imitators, tragedy meant a fairly short play dealing with heavily
moralized stories from Greek tragedy or Roman history. Subplots, comic
relief, onstage violence, soliloquies and indecent or "low"
language were shunned, and playgoers (even in the decadent 1890s) were
outraged by the merest whiff of unseemliness.
Needless to say, the few Shakespeare plays that managed to reach the
stage bore little resemblance to the originals. Unrhymed blank verse
was turned into rhyming alexandrines, half the characters disappeared
and both King Lear and Romeo and Juliet were given happy
endings. One of the problems facing translators was the difficulty of
rendering Shakespeare's metaphors, puns and grammatical liberties into
modern French.
Pemble points out that French translations of Shakespeare over a period
of 250 years represent "one of the most strenuous attempts ever
made to transfer an author from one language to another". Every
twenty years or so an eminent French author such as Voltaire, Alexandre
Dumas, George Sand, André Gide and Marcel Pagnol wrestled with
the challenge. For many years separate translations were made for page
(as accurate as possible) and stage (preserving the outline of the plot
but modifying the language).
The unacceptability of "low" words on stage resulted in some
bizarre alterations. The mouse mentioned in the first scene of Hamlet
became an insect and the rat hiding behind the arras was transformed
into a burglar(!). Such squeamishness reached its apogee in the strange
case of Desdemona's handkerchief. Mouchoir was out of the question,
as was fraise, so for two centuries acting editions went to extraordinary
lengths to avoid mentioning the fatal hankie, even going so far as to
replace it with a "diamond headband". In 1825 Mlle Mars of
the Comédie-Française, using Alfred de Vigny's translation,
made history by becoming the first French actress to call a handkerchief
a handkerchief (although it was not embroidered with strawberries but
"orné de fleurs asiatiques"). The audience was obviously
taken aback by such brutal realism, but on the whole reaction was favourable.
By the end of the 19th century Shakespeare was being performend in
versions that were reasonably close to the original, but alexandrines
were used as late as 1884 in Bernhardt's disastrous production of Macbeth.
But fifteen years later the great actress played the title role in Hamlet,
translated - in prose - by Marcel Schwob. This version was still being
performed at the Comédie-Française in the 1960s. In Pemble's
words, "The rhyming alexandrine…became obsolete and the French
theatre discovered at last that there was life after the death of Racine".
In 1948 the actor/director Jean-Louis Barrault, speaking at the Edinburgh
Festival, could say without much fear of contradiction that "Shakespeare
seems more topical to us than Molière; he is more in touch with
us". Voltaire must have been turning in his grave, but Shakespeare
survived the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and is now an honourary
member of France's literary pantheon.
Shakespeare Goes to Paris is a fascinating and elegantly written
account of the Bard's triumph over cultural adversity. Pemble's light
touch with matters of politics, literary theory and philosophy makes
the book a pleasure to read, and his account of the difficulties faced
by translators is often very funny indeed. Highly recommended for Bardophiles
and Francophiles alike!
J D Atkinson
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