‘Hamlet’ in France 200 Years Ago

Summary

Only as recently as 200 years ago, on Saturday, 30 September 1769, to be precise, was a French theatre audience treated for the first time to a stage version of a Shakespeare play. The play was Hamlet and its adaptor Jean-François Ducis. This was by no means the first the French had heard of Shakespeare or indeed of the Prince. Voltaire had frequently labelled the play an unbridled monstrosity and its author an ignorant barbarian. True, he had been unable to avoid recognising that Shakespeare had an undeniable natural genius, but what Voltaire could not forgive was the Englishman’s ignorance of the rules of the drama and his abhorrent lack of good taste. Voltaire’s criticisms were repeated, though in less virulent terms, by other eighteenth-century French critics such as L’Abbé Prévost and L’Abbé Le Blanc. The La Place translation of the play, which appeared in 1746, was a miserably emasculated effort which failed to fulfil the promise of its author’s very perceptive preliminary ‘Discours’ and succeeded only in proving once more that the neo-classical concept of tragedy was still very much alive. If at heart Voltaire was a devout Racinian and believed unquestioningly in the validity of Aristotle’s rules, in the unities, in propriety, in dignity of language and in, to use Racine’s own formula, ‘une action simple, chargée de peu de matière’, he was none the less aware of the need for tragedy to speak a little less to the ears and a little more to the eyes and advocated a slightly less stringent application of the basic doctrine.