Monsieur Macbeth: from Jarry to Ionesco

Summary

SHAKE SPEARE EN FRANCE

The ‘afterlife of Macbeth’ in France raises issues which any study of ‘Shakespeare offshoots’ must address, but extends them to a different linguistic and cultural situation: what constitutes ‘adaptation’ as it moves towards a new work; the intertextual status of the new work and reception by its audiences; the historical moment and contexts in which it is written and received, from theatrical fashions to national and world events; to politics broadly speaking; to its place in the developing oeuvre of its adaptor. In France, circumstances have coincided to make this play exceptionally intriguing, beyond the defamiliarization which anglophone readers may experience in considering a play beyond our own linguistic boundaries. As a case history, French Macbeths require rather more history than may be necessary elsewhere: in order to draw the portrait I need the landscape, setting Alfred Jarry and Eugène Ionesco in a series of conjonctures, for however well established and confident French theatrical culture was in either period, it was always vulnerable to innovative attack. The treble, even quadruple context means beginning with a brief reminder of early French translations of Shakespeare; moving to how Shakespeare was known (not quite ‘read’ and ‘seen’), via the French Opera composer, Verdi (whose second version of Macbeth was revised for Paris, with Paris conventions in mind); before concentrating on a schoolboy publicist and a Rumanian playwright. Two things above all: in France, as elsewhere in continental Europe, ‘Shakespeare’ never implied ‘familiar’, and, until the last two decades never implied ‘known’ at all. Concomitantly, unfamiliarity has allowed the erection of a genealogy which is widely accepted, and, as I shall demonstrate, false.