Performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, directed by Wendy Toye (1964) | Roger Pic / Bibliothèque nationale de France / Public Domain
In 1776, Voltaire penned a letter to the Académie Française. His subject was Shakespeare, his mood grim. He was responding to a new translation into French of the playwright’s work, still little known to France.
In the context of the French Enlightenment, Shakespeare came as a shock. Instead of dramatizing nobility of character and the dangers of passion—the pure ideals of Racine’s greatest tragedies—Shakespeare, according to Voltaire, offered only an “obscure Chaos, composed of Murders and Buffooneries.”
Fast forward: A little more than a half century later, Shakespeare’s work was making an entirely different impression on French luminaries. According to François-René Chateaubriand, writing at the height of French Romanticism, “Shakespeare is, like Dante, a solitary comet, who crossed the constellations of the old sky, returned to the feet of God, and said like thunder: ‘Here I am.’”
A decade earlier, Stendhal had titled a seminal manifesto of the new aesthetic movement Racine et Shakespeare. The former represented outdated Classicism: the latter, its replacement. No longer did literature answer to Classical unities of time, place, and action, or cater to the character of ethical propriety. Instead, it pursued inward feelings, bound only to the transcendent greatness of the sublime—whether in one’s surroundings or self.
It’s an abrupt shift that begs a larger question: To what extent can we use the aesthetic reception of a singular artist to take the temperature of a society?
The very characteristics that placed Shakespeare opposite Classicism aligned him with Romantic values—and made his work useful to French reformers bent on moral and intellectual public instruction.
In the wake of an abortive revolution and the rise and fall of the emperor Napoleon, France had become a sociopolitical mess. As one historian has noted, after the original revolutionary impulse, “it took three revolutions, two monarchies, two empires and a defeat in the war of 1870 before a republic proved sustainable.”
The Romantics admired Shakespeare’s capacity to evoke universal human emotion; “Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of love, just as Othello is of jealousy and Macbeth of ambition,” wrote François Guizot in 1821. The power of Shakespeare, Romantics believed, lay in his command of truth and feeling, his mixture of reality and imagination in perfect conjunction with the tastes of the crowd.
Art, added Guizot, must reflect “the human spirit of the time.” It must be—and was, to them, in Shakespeare’s work—popular, capable of raising the masses through the “moral electricity” of universally and naturally felt emotion.
Understanding how and why Shakespeare gained ground with the Romantics requires both literary and social lenses. Over the course of France’s Romantic Era (1820s–1860s), Shakespeare appealed on the grounds of literary deconstructionism and social reform based on hope for the everyday citizen.
Early Romantics had high hopes for the public. Drama, explained Stendhal, served a popular audience of “young, reasonable, serious people.” Guided by the “true dramatic effect” of human emotion, they would rise in moral and intellectual character. While Molière, perhaps alone among pre-Romantic literary figures, retained “genius” status in Romantic-era France, reformers like Stendhal looked to Shakespeare as a genius aligned with the newly enlightened French popular sentiment and French theater. Drama and reform met in the work of these scholar-politicians of Restoration France, many of whom also worked towards advances in public education.
After all, Guizot focused on public education not only in his Shakespeare criticism but also as a public official in successive French governments. Hugo observed inevitable human progress not only in his historic literary line-up, but also in the repeated revolutions of his day (and while he was never prime minister, like Guizot, he, too, served in government).
By mid-century, Shakespeare was “known and appreciated in France,” as one theater review concluded in 1844. Right in line with Romantic preferences, Shakespeare owed his fame—as one renowned translator put it—to energy, originality, and a capacity to “illuminate the human soul.”
But if illuminating the human soul was still in, enlightening the public mind had gone out.
By the last half of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848, faith in public judgment had diminished—and Shakespeare’s reform value waned with it.
By 1856, George Sand, citing recent stage productions, observed that modern theater lacked conscience: “Its ardent thirst for success at any price … makes it descend into public mores.” In other words, playwrights had a duty to write high-quality content, despite the low quality of public demand. In a statement that would certainly have disappointed the early Romantics, she added, in her preface her translation of As You Like It, “The main peril of today is giving into the frivolity and thoughtlessness of the crowd.” Sand thus defended her choice to omit elements of the play that she believed inadvisable for French society to be exposed to.
Yet as Shakespeare lost moral firepower in the eyes of literary critics, he would gain a new role amid the era’s admiration for singular genius. Already in 1836, Chateaubriand’s comet comment had expressed this sentiment in all its grandeur. Henri Taine and Victor Hugo, writing in the 1850s and 1860s, would exemplify this shift in thinking: from Shakespeare as a public reform mechanism to Shakespeare on a pedestal, from Shakespeare as practical to Shakespeare as transcendent.
By the 1850s, Henri Taine had devoted the better part of a book to discovering in Hamlet a sublime mirror image of his author. Around the same time, the prominent translator Benjamin Laroche fit Shakespeare into a long string of geniuses starting with Homer. Shakespeare had gained “immortality” but lost applicability.
Victor Hugo, expounding on his own theory of genius in 1864, added the finishing touch. To Hugo, Shakespeare numbered among the brilliant few, born to illuminate and guide all populations always (as for the old Romanticism-versus-Classicism debate, Hugo’s idea of genius was apparently non-partisan: By 1878, Hugo had admitted Voltaire to the happy club as well).
Comet or not, when it came to French literary thought, Shakespeare had certainly covered ground. In just a few decades, he had served as a reform vessel for an emerging Romantic school, enjoyed a winning reputation as that school pushed out Classicism, been retooled by some critics as a medium for expressing distrust of public mores, and, finally, settled comfortably into the French literary canon.
Ironically, as Shakespeare’s value, in nineteenth-century French eyes, became increasingly abstract, France’s whole literary scene began moving in the opposite direction. Pragmatic in focus and interested in ordinary people, the Realist movement sought to expose “society at its best, its worst, and its average.”
When Voltaire penned his letter in 1776, Shakespeare was not only his subject but also his window onto a French society that was rapidly changing—and heading toward the storming of the Bastille a little over a decade later. What followed was indeed “pure chaos.”
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