Classicizing Shakespeare: Jean-François Ducis and the First European Adaptations(Shakespeare and Adaptation)

This book explores the nature and wide-ranging impact of the work of Jean-François Ducis (1733-1816), the first adaptor of Hamlet and of five other Shakespeare tragedies for the French theatre. Jean-François Ducis is anything but prominent in the histories of Shakespeare adaptation, yet he was pivotal in introducing French and European audiences to Shakespeare’s plays on the stage. His Hamlet, tragédie imitée de l’anglais, performed at the Comédie française in 1769, was the first representation of a Shakespeare play on a French stage and was still performed in 1851. Despite his total ignorance of English, Ducis also adapted Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, King Lear, King John and Othello, playswhich were then translated, like his Hamlet, into a number of European languages. Classicizing Shakespeare studies Ducis’s Shakespearean corpusin the context of the neoclassical climate which, a century earlier, had set off a wave of adaptations in England. Within the wider picture of the European representation of Shakespeare on the stage from 1660 to 1850, the study of Ducis’s emblematic case sheds further light on the rationale of these English adaptations as well as on the reception of Shakespeare’s plays in most Continental countries well into the 19th century. Willems’ rich contextual study demonstrates why the translations of Ducis’s own ‘imitations’ were instrumental in exporting Shakespeare all over the Continent. Through attention to the professional relationship with the renowned actor, François-Joseph Talma, Classicizing Shakespeare reveals too how collaborative practices in the theatre impact on the evolution of a text.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Note on the Text/Translation List of Abbreviations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction. Classicizing Shakespeare 1. From Criticism to Adaptation 2. Jean-François Ducis 3. Hamlet 4. Roméo et Juliette 5. Le roi Lear 6. Macbeth 7. Jean Sans Terre ou la mort d’Arthur 8. Othello 9. Appropriation 10. The Construction of a European Shakespeare Notes References Index

About the Author :
Michèle Willems is Emeritus Professor at the University of Rouen, France. She has published on the reception and representation of Shakespeare’s drama, essentially in the 18th century, and on Shakespeare on screen.

Review :
To the intellectuals of Enlightenment France, the Shakespeare canon was a sensationalist and obsolete mess, fit only for the credulous, sadistic and uneducated audiences who filled England’s barbaric playhouses. Michele Willems’ wonderfully measured and intelligent new book shows how the pioneering adaptations of Jean-Francois Ducis rescued Shakespearean tragedy for neoclassicism and gave continental Europe a Shakespeare it could use. As canny about the worldwide reception history of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century as it is about the age of Garrick, this book will transform our understanding of Ducis and his role in making Shakespeare Europe’s most popular playwright. The man who made Shakespeare popular around Europe had adapted his plays without knowing a word of English. By redesigning them to suit the French classical taste, as Michèle Willems brilliantly demonstrates, Jean-François Ducis contributed to the dissemination of something "approximating Shakespeare’s great tragedies" in countries where Voltaire still ruled as elegantiae arbiter. Her Classicizing Shakespeare unravels this paradox, leading readers through the intricacies of Ducis’s revisions, and highlights all that made the genuine Shakespeare both welcomed and feared as a talented but dangerous intruder.