Hamlet in Paris

THE scene is laid at Paris, in the salon of Madame Necker, one evening in the year 1787. The conversation, as usual, turned upon literature, for most of the habitues were men of letters : M. de la Harpe, M. Suard, the Abbe Morellet, the Abbe Galiani, M. de SaintLambert, M. de Florian, Mr. Gibbon, M. de Marmontel. Amongst the ladies might be noticed Madame de Lauzun, Madame de Monaco, Madame de Barbantane, Madame de Blot. Monsieur le Comte de Buff on had put in an appearance in the course of the evening, as also Had Madame de Genlis, but they had left early : M. de Buffon on account of the fatigue of his great age ; Madame de Genlis because the women present were all hostile to her, particularly Madame de Blot. At the supper table the conversation continued, and M. Necker happening to mention the name of an extravagant poet, M. de Piis, who had just published a ridiculous poem on the alphabet, Marmontel said, —

“ In faith, I believe Ducis is as cracked as Piis. Have you read his last pieces ? ” “ Prodigious ! ” replied Madame de Staël; “ but if Ducis understands

Shakespeare, how is it that a sun so pure does not enlighten the poor man with a single one of its rays ? ”

M. de la Harpe did not respond, because he did not like Shakespeare. The school of M. de Voltaire did not understand this prodigious genius, and it was agreed amongst the disciples that Shakespeare was a barbarian and an ignoramus. “ For that matter,” wrote the Duchesse d’Abrantès, who has reported this conversation, " we French were not happy in our judgments at that time. . . . As for Shakespeare, however difficult it may be, it is a sacrilege not to understand him. Shakespeare is the Homer of the theatre! We failed to recognize him for a time; now [1837] that we admit his beauties, may we feel them all! Madame de Staël had one of those souls that anticipate genius; she divined its presence by the perfume that it spreads around. And so, before she could read the celebrated authors in their own tongue, she studied them in translations. But at the epoch of which we are now speaking, being already familiar with the high literary marvels of other nations, she could not endure to hear M. de la Harpe concentrate all literature in our language. She was not then the woman that she afterwards became, — a woman whom the universal voice proclaims the first of her age, no matter which nation claims her as its child ; but already she felt that in order to understand our author w’e must read him in the language in which he wrote. . . . Madame de Stael then asked M. de la Harpe if he read Shakespeare in the original; he replied, No, but with a dictionary. . . . ‘ Then,’ said Madame de Staël, ‘ I will talk to you no longer about Shakespeare ; we should never understand each other.’ M. de la Harpe saw that his position was a bad one, and went back upon Ducis ; luckily, he had there more than an easy triumph, for King Lear and Macbeth had just been represented. The unfortunate Ducis was passed under the scalpel with cruel severity ; and to tell the truth, when M. de la Harpe recited in a mocking tone these verses from Le Roi Lear,

. . . 'Végétaux précieux, Si vous pouvez m’entendre et sentir mes alarmes, Fteurissez pour mon père, et croissez sous mes larmes,'

it was impossible to remain serious. Vegetables that grow under tears ! that hear ! that feel ! M. de la Harpe had the beau rôle here, and Madame de Staël, always prompt in discussion, had forgotten that which is the palliative of sharp debate. Madame Necker remedied this forgetfulness, for she saw the brow of Aristarchus becoming cloudy, and she never allowed a guest to leave her house with a painful impression. ' M. de la Harpe,’ said Madame Necker to him, ‘you must pardon my daughter for having caused you a little annoyance, the more so as I was witness of her emotion when she saw the piece which, on the following day, made us forget the absurdities of Le Roi Lear.’ ‘ Then you have seen Le Roi Lu, medame? It is indeed a ravishing parody, at which you must have cried with laughing.’ ' No, no, not the parody,’ replied Madame Necker. ‘ What my daughter saw was a translation, too, but a beautiful and truthful translation of Sophocles.’ ”

At this point Madame d’Abrantès gives us to understand that La Harpe looked modestly at his boots, while his face flushed with joy at this reference to his translation of the Philoctetes of Sophocles, which had just been played at the Théâtre Français.

But, in spite of their shortcomings, Ducis’s adaptations of Shakespeare met with immense success. Not only were they discussed in the most select salons of the time, as we have seen, but in the majority of the salons they were profoundly admired. This very King Lear, which was the butt of M. de la Harpe’s witticisms, obtained such success that a contagious craze of exaggerated sensibility invaded the society of the day.

The fashion then was to shed tears of tenderness and sympathy, and so in society you heard nothing but gloomy stories, dismal histories, and touching narratives, recited by charming young persons, whose ideal was the sentimental prettiness of Greuze. The théâtre de société was all the rage. The taste for amateur theatricals pervaded all classes, and la, mimomanie reigned supreme at Versailles as well as in the dramatic societies of the Marais and of the Rue Popincourt, in the mansions of the nobility as well as in the parlors of the middle classes. In all the châteaux and maisons de plaisance near Paris, stages were built. From one end of France to the other, society dreamed only of one thing, — acting, jouer la comédie. At the Prince de Conti’s private theatre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s grand opera of the Nine Muses was produced ; Le Mariage de Figaro was played for the first time at M. de Vaudreuil’s theatre at Gennevilliers. But the private theatre that attracted most attention, and that had the privilege of bringing two hundred coaches three leagues out of Paris, was the model stage of M. de Magnanville, at La Chevrette. And what was the pièce de résistance at M. de Magnanville’s ? A tragedy of the Chevalier de Chastellux, “ tiré du théâtre Anglais et accomode au notre,” entitled Roméo et Juliette!

It may easily be imagined that in the country of Racine, Boileau, and Delille the name and genius of Shakespeare had not come into vogue without encountering violent opposition. In 1787 we find the disciples of M. de Voltaire treating Shakespeare as a barbarian. Nevertheless, it was no other than Voltaire who had introduced his countrymen to the beauties of Shakespeare. During his three years’ stay in London, from 1726 to 1729, Voltaire became familiar with the English language and literature; and when he returned to France he brought back with him the sketch of his tragedy of Brutus, inspired partly by Addison and partly by Shakespeare. In 1732 he produced his tragedy of Eriphile, in which certain details, and notably the apparition of Amphiaräus, in the fourth act, were copied from Hamlet; and in the same year he wrote Zaïre, the plot of which is traced upon that of Othello. Meanwhile, in his Lettres sur les Anglais, Voltaire had spoken with enthusiasm of Shakespeare, and had given an excellent translation of the famous monologue of Hamlet. In his prefaces, too, he had frequently spoken of the English poet, and his works at this epoch were full of imitations of him. The remarks of Voltaire were by no means without influence. Public attention was awakened, and France became conscious that there were things curious and admirable outside her own boundaries. The reform movement declared itself frankly and openly. English literature became a favorite study, and Anglomania a fashion daily increasing in extent.

One of the most singular incidents in the literary life of Voltaire is the manner in which, after having introduced and imitated Shakespeare, and after having, during twenty years, lent his approval to the dramatic reform movement which he had himself begun, he suddenly turned round upon his former idol, and appealed, before Europe, to the tribunal of the French Academy to defend Sophocles, Corneille, and Racine, and, last but not least, Voltaire, against the invasion of “ Gilles Shakespeare and Pierrot Letourneur.” This episode is too long to be related here. It is enough for us to remember that the Shakespearean movement in France was begun under the auspices of M. de Voltaire, and that one of the first plays with which the French became familiar was Hamlet.

The earliest translation of this play is that given by De la Place, in the second volume of his Théâtre Anglais (Paris, 1745) ; a publication which, although full of defects, did much to help on the dramatic reform then in preparation, — the cause of the modern drama against the Racinian tragedy. His Hamlet is a mixture of prose and verse, both of the roughest kind ; whole scenes are omitted, others are simply analyzed, and the words and thoughts of Shakespeare are throughout curiously distorted. Nevertheless, the Théâtre Anglais was the book of the day; the enterprise was bold and new, and the author, in his first volume, while sounding high the praises of Shakespeare, was careful to anticipate all objections on the ground of taste, style, and dramatic liberty. At the end of his ingenious and vigorous preliminary discourse he says, “ Let us, then, beware of condemning irrevocably what our grandchildren will perhaps one day applaud.”

In 1769, Ducis, “ le bon Ducis,” began that series of unfaithful imitations of Shakespeare with which posterity has so often reproached him, but which his contemporaries received with applause, such as no modern translations or adaptations have yet obtained. His Hamlet was the first that was produced on the French stage.

At this time the general opinion as regards Shakespeare, both of French people of fashion and of the men of letters who did not belong to the opposition, was summed up in a boutade of the “ roi Voltaire,” in which he characterized the English poet as a “ barbare frotté, de génie.” But Ducis did not attempt to force Shakespeare upon his contemporaries in all the novelty and strangeness of his form and conception ; he simply endeavored to adapt his tragedies to the French dramatic system, and also to the moral ideas and language of his age, knowing that it is easier to change the legislation and constitution of a people than its tastes and pleasures, and bearing in mind that nothing is more obstinate than a fashion — so long as it lasts.

Now it must be remembered that neither the grand siècle nor the grand monarque had loved truth in art. The encouragement of Versailles and the applause of public opinion had guided the efforts of sculpture, of painting, of architecture, and of literature towards a deceitful grandeur and a conventional nobleness that confined the beautiful within the solemnity and formalities of a narrow etiquette. When the century of Louis XV. succeeded the century of Louis XIV., when a France of gallantry issued from a France of ostentation, when men and things became smaller as royalty became more human, the ideal of art and of literature still remained factitious and conventional ; only the ideal descended from majesty to grace. In everything, in the second half of the eighteenth century, we find a refinement of elegance, a quintessence of amiability, of charm, of color, of gracefulness. The stage, books, statues, pictures, houses, rooms, nothing escapes from the invading prettiness of this delicious decadence. Prettiness is the essence and formula of the time. The charm of French women at the end of the eighteenth century was not piquant grace, but touching grace ; they sought not to fascinate, but to produce an emotion. In this age of sensibilité it became the fashion to return to nature, to admire the country, to be humane, to have a heart, to taste the sweets and tenderness of natural affection, to be a good father and a good husband, to have a soul, virtues, religious emotion, to believe in Providence and immortality, to be capable of enthusiasm. Just at the moment when Europe was preparing to send the armies of Brunswick against France, France was seized with the noble and charming craze of universal fraternity. In that much-calumniated epoch, the nation was lifted above itself by great hopes, by noble illusions, by sublime aspirations towards a more elevated ideal. The language of the day was tender, pure, and sentimental; the types of the painters and the heroines of the novelists strove to replace the expression of wit by the expression of sentimentality, and the smile that comes from thought by the smile that comes from the heart.

Ducis endeavored to impregnate the characters and some of the incidents of Shakespeare’s plays with that sensibility which Rousseau and Diderot had brought into fashion. He simply adapted to the taste of his age the “ beauties ” that struck him in Shakespeare ; and so well did he succeed in “nationalizing” his model that up to within quite recent times his quaint arrangement of Othello was constantly played and applauded at the Comédie Française, in preference to the excellent and faithful translation of Alfred de Vigny. Ducis never even professed to translate Shakespeare. “ I do not understand English,” he wrote in his preface, “ and yet I have dared to produce Hamlet on the French stage. Everybody knows the merit of the Théâtre Anglais of M. de la Place. It is after this work, so valuable to literature, that I have endeavored to render one of the most singular tragedies of Shakespeare.” The rôle of Hamlet was created by Molé, and the piece achieved a success which encouraged Ducis to continue his series of Shakespearean adaptations.

Nobody, nowadays, would think of reading the Hamlet of Ducis except out of literary curiosity. However bold it may have appeared at the time, it now seems insipid beyond expression. The object of the tragedy, as arranged by Ducis, is to show in Hamlet a model of filial piety. Hamlet is represented as reigning king of Denmark, and Claudius as the heir apparent, plotting against the throne. In the dénoûment, poetic justice is distributed to all in a calm and dignified manner. Hamlet kills Claudius, and, turning to his guilty mother, he says to her, “ Return to your duty; repair your offense; my vengeance is satisfied with one victim.” Then Gertrude stabs herself, exclaiming, —

So Hamlet lives. His cup of misfortune is full to the brim, but he says, —

“ Ma vertu me reste; Mais je suis homme et roi ; réservé pour souffrir, Je saurai vivre encor; je fais plus que mourir.”

In his excessive sensibility and respect for the sensibility of his audience, Ducis contrived a double déenoûment for nearly all his pieces: one intended for the stage; the other, for the use of “ âmes sensibles” to use a favorite phrase of the day. In the second ending of this tragedy, Claudius is supposed to be torn to pieces by the mob, behind the scenes, and so Hamlet’s hands remain free from the stain of blood.

The success of the Hamlet of Ducis continued far into the present century. Even severe critics like Geoffroy recognized beauties of the first order in the adaptations of Ducis, of whom he said, “ Ducis a son génie dans son coeur, et c’est là, qu’il est bien.” It was in the Shakespearean versions of Dueis that Talma obtained some of his greatest artistic triumphs, and the rôle of Hamlet was one of his finest, after that of Othello.

We may dismiss in a few lines the different French translations of Hamlet, in order to arrive at two capital events in the history of Hamlet in Paris : the visit of the English actors in 1827-28 and 1844-45, and the translation of Alexandre Dumas and Paul Meuriee, the only adaptation of the piece, with the exception of that of Ducis, which has ever been produced upon the dramatic stage. The various translations that we have to mention are that of Letourneur (1776) ; the same revised and corrected by Guizot and Amédée Pichot in 1821, and by Francisque Michel in 1839 ; that of Benjamin Laroche (1841), of Montégut (1868), of F. V. Hugo, which remains up to the present the best literary translation that exists in the French language, and one by Théodore Reinach (1880). None of these were intended for the stage.

The visits of Kean, Kemble, and Macready, between 1827 and 1845, enabled the Romanticists and the generation of 1830 to become acquainted with Shakespeare’s masterpiece, interpreted by native actors. Even in 1827 Shakespeare was not yet accepted in Franee. Most of the Academicians and tragic poets of the time looked upon him with suspicion ; the newspapers made his name the butt of their jokes ; and the grave Duvicquet, the predecessor of Jules Janin as dramatic feuilletoniste of the Journal des Débats, refused even to mention his name. Shakespeare’s only admirers and defenders were a group of young men, writers and artists, who used to meet in the garden of the Luxembourg, under the colonnade of the Odéon, or in the reading-rooms of the Latin quarter, in order to read and declaim in sympathetic company the scenes of Hamlet or of Macbeth. This group was the kernel of the band which, under the leadership of Victor Hugo, was destined soon to bear aloft the banner of Romanticism, and to fight the battle of Shakespearean drama against Racinian tragedy, of truth and nature against the Aristotelian canons. The movement had been begun by Diderot. Madame de Staël had given it a name and augmented its force by making it acquainted with German thought and poetry. But the young Shakespeareans were far from being in harmony with the average opinions of their contemporaries. “The liberalism of the classic Constitutionnel,” says one of them, the Count Armand de Pontmartin, in his Souvenirs d’un Vieux Critique, “ almost accused us of being doubly unpatriotic : first of all, in sacrificing to a foreigner [people no longer said, as Voltaire had said, “ a drunken savage ”] the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine; and secondly, in forgetting too easily the grievances of France against perfidious Albion.”

However, on the first night of Hamlet, performed by the English company, the Odéon was crowded. The band of Shakespeareans had met at the Café Voltaire, on the Place de l'Odéon, and had organized themselves to combat the Philistines, the bourgeois, the readers of the Constitutionnel. the clan of perruques and momies, who still cherished a remnant of national rancor against the victors of Waterloo. The chiefs of the Shakespearean band were Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alexandre Dumas, Alphonse Karr, Alfred de Musset, Eugène Delacroix, the brothers Johannot, the brothers Devéria, Emile and Antoine Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, Chenavard, Barye and Préault, the sculptors, Louis Boulanger, Théophile Gautier, Philarète Chasles, etc., — all the young generation, whose talents were ripening to give lustre to their age.

The Romanticists carried the day easily, and their enthusiasm knew no bounds. From the literary circles and the newspapers the excitement spread to the general public, and English literature again became the craze of the hour, as it had already been in the last century. Almost every day some new translation of Shakespeare, Walter Scott, or Byron, saw the light; the newspapers were full of enthusiastic essays on the subject of English poets and prose writers ; and Kemble and Miss Smithson were the idols of the day.

“ I knew only the Hamlet of Ducis ! ” exclaims Alexandre Dumas, in one of his prefaces. “I went to see that of Shakespeare. Imagine a man born blind to whom his sight is restored, and who discovers a whole world of which he had no idea ; imagine Adam waking up after the creation, and finding under his feet the enameled earth, over his head the flaming sky, around him trees with golden fruits, in the distance a broad silver stream, at his side a young and chaste wife : you will then have an idea of the enchanted Eden whose gate this representation opened for me. . . . Oh, this, then, was what I was seeking ; this was what was wanting ; this was what was destined to come to me! ”

In less hyperbolical terms, in a letter to a friend, written in 1828, Eugène Delacroix wrote, “ The English actors have opened their theatre. They are working miracles, since they are filling the Odéon, until the very paving-stones of the quarter tremble under the wheels of the carriages. In short, they are in vogue. The most obstinate Classicists have lowered their colors. Our actors are going to school, and opening wide their eyes. The consequences of this innovation are incalculable.”

In order to complete the reader’s idea of the progress of Shakespeareanism in France, we will pass over a period of sixteen years, and take up the Journal des Débats in December, 1844. Macready had been playing Hamlet in English to an appreciative Parisian audience. The critic of the great journal, although he found the tragedy of Hamlet wanting in what he considered the first element of dramatic interest, namely, action and the struggle of the passions, still hung with ecstasy on the lips of the melancholy dreamer, Hamlet the Dane. The reason was, he says, that “ the voice of Hamlet awoke sentiments and thoughts that have worked upon all the hearts and minds of our times. In this unique tragedy Shakespeare is more than a great poet; he is a great prophet and a precursor.”

The task of familiarizing the French with Hamlet, begun so brilliantly by Kemble, Kean, and Macready, was completed by Eugène Delacroix and Alexandre Dumas. Eugène Delacroix, the only French painter of the century who takes undisputed rank beside Rubens, Veronese, and David, was profoundly influenced by Shakespeare. Many of his finest pictures and lithographs were of Shakespearean subjects, — scenes from Macbeth, Henry VI., Othello, Romeo and Juliet. But it was particularly to Hamlet that Delacroix gave his thought and care, and it is, perhaps, more from Delacroix’s compositions than from any translation that the figure of Hamlet has become familiar to the French. From the picturesque point of view, Delacroix’s conception of the feudal Middle Ages corresponds to that of Anglo-Saxon artists ; his figures, however, are rather the lean and nervous creatures of the South than the stalwart and ruddy men of the North. Although the type varies in some of the pictures and lithographs, Hamlet is in nearly all of them represented as a beardless youth; and in one of the compositions, that of the gravediggers, Delacroix’s model appears to have been a woman. This extreme youthfulness of Hamlet does not harmonize entirely with the text of Shakespeare, nor with the age and experience which the irony and skepticism of Hamlet imply. Still, from the French plastic stand-point, we can understand that this type was found perfectly satisfactory. On this subject George Sand has written, “ Personne n’a sent comme Delacroix le type douloureux d’Hamlet; personne n’a encadré dans une lumière plus poétique et posé dans une attitude plus réelle, ce héros de la souffrance, de I'indignation, du doute, et de l’ironie, qui fut pourtant, avant ses extases, le miroir de la mode et le moule de la forme, c’est à dire un ‘ homme du monde accompli.’ ”

The Hamlet that Delacroix has represented is not the harsh, unhappy, violent, and almost turbulent creature that the actor Rouvière afterwards made to live on the stage ; it is a delicate, pallid Hamlet, with white, feminine hands and tapering fingers, an exquisite nature, but without energy, undecided, and with an almost expressionless eye. In this figure Delacroix seems to have sought to express the very essence of that singular and obstinate melancholy which was one of his most remarkable qualities, and which manifests itself in all his works in the choice of subjects, in the expression of the figures, in their gestures, and in the style of the color. Dante and Shakespeare, the two great painters of human sorrow, held the highest place in Delacroix’s affection.

The history of the translation of Hamlet, in five acts and in verse, played at the Théâtre Histonque in December, 1847, has been related at length by one of the authors, the elder Dumas, with his usual exuberance and inexactitude of detail. The authors who figure on the title-page are Alexandre Dumas and Paul Meurice. Being curious to know to what the collaboration of Dumas amounted, the present writer recently asked M. Meurice to give him his version of the matter, which is recorded here almost in M. Meurice’s own words :

“ I was then quite a young man, almost a boy ; a freshman, in short. Ostensibly I was a law student, living in the Latin quarter. Being already a great admirer of Shakespeare, and with a view to getting practice in dramatic verse-writing, I had translated the principal scenes of Hamlet. I was at that time fairly familiar with English ; at any rate, I could read it with facility. And so, without any special idea of having my work played, I continued until I had translated nearly all the piece ; I had omitted only the connecting and transition scenes. One day I happened to speak of my translation to Dumas, who was an enthusiastic champion of the Shakespearean movement.

“ ‘ Ah ! ’ said Dumas. ‘ You must show me that! ’

“ I brought my manuscript. Dumas read it.

“ ‘ The translation is very good, very good,’ was the verdict; ‘ the verses are well turned. I will get it played for you at the Théâtre Français. Ligier [a celebrated actor of the time] is tired of playing the insipid Hamlet of Ducis, and I am sure he will jump at the opportunity of at last playing Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But I am afraid of the dénoûment for the French stage, you know; it is perhaps a little too audacious — the public is hardly accustomed to that sort of thing.’

“ I of course protested, in the name of Shakespeare and on the ground of the respect due to genius.

“ ‘ Yes, yes,’ continued Dumas, ‘ I know, — you are quite right; but the French public will never put up with that slaughtering at the end. We shall have to tone that down and make it less violent.’

“ Although my conscience continued to protest, still Alexandre Dumas was a master in matters concerning the drama. I was only a boy, and so I yielded. But wishing to respect Shakespeare, even in changing his sacred text, I suggested the adaptation to Hamlet of the apparition of the ghosts of Clarence, Rivers, Hastings, Queen Anne, and the other victims of Richard in the last act of Richard III.

“ Dumas was enchanted.

“ ‘ The idea is splendid. Go and write the scene, and then we will see what the committee of the Français has to say about the pieced.'

“ So I wrote the final scene as it was afterwards played. Meanwhile, Dumas arranged the scenario, intercalated a few verses here and there to connect the scenes, and altered the beginning. But, with the exception of these few verses, I was really the author of the whole translation, including the dénoûment.

“Thus arranged, the piece was read at the Théâtre Français, and accepted by the actors, who were then the sole judges in such matters; but it was accepted, or, to use the French term, received à correction, that is to say, on condition that certain alterations should be made in it by the authors in concert with the actors.

“ Dumas was furious when he heard the verdict.

“ ‘ Quoi ? Mais on ne reçoit pas Shakespeare à correction ! Ou on le reçoit ou on ne le reçoit pas du tout! Tas d’imbeciles ! ’

“ And he took up the manuscript, and stalked out of the theatre.”

Dumas’s version differs considerably from that of M. Meurice, and in it Dumas claims for himself the glory of having first conceived the idea of the translation and the dénoûment. Dumas furthermore relates the incident of the Théâtre Français differently, and without the fine mot which M. Meurice attributes to him. However this may be, the piece was first played at Saint-Germain, in September, 1846.

“ I was then living at Saint-Germain,” writes Dumas (Etude sur Hamlet). “ I hired the little theatre of that town for my own private pleasure. This was that epoch of luxury with which I have been so much reproached, and for which I have had to pay so dearly. Rouvière and Madame Person received the principal rôles, those of Hamlet and Ophelia. The others were distributed amongst the artists who happened to be there, and who were obliging enough to accept them. Then, one night, after dinner, I took my guests to the play. I had Hamlet performed. I gave a supper to them and to the artists, and I sent them all away by special train at three o’clock in the morning. Hamlet had great success. It was played fifteen times at Saint-Germain, and left me out of pocket only 3000 francs for my supper, the cost of the seats at the theatre, of the scenery, and of the special train.”

In 1847 Hamlet was produced at the new Théâtre Historique, with Rouvière in the title rôle. The piece proved a popular as well as a literary success, and for the nest twenty years Rouvière and Hamlet were one. From time to time Rouvière laid aside his suit of sable to play other parts ; but it was always to resume at the first opportunity the cap and black feathers that set off so strikingly the swarthy paleness of his face. The career of this Rouvière is worthy of a chapter by itself, thankless as is the task of evoking the shadowy memories left by a vanished actor. Of Rouvière’s Hamlet, Théophile Gautier wrote in the Moniteur, —

“ In an epoch of stupid fairy pieces, of idiotic vaudevilles, and of operettas that have no music in them, Rouvière, with unshakable faith, constituted himself the priest of the great William Shakespeare.” By this time, it must be remembered, the golden days of French Shakespeareanism had passed ; the fine enthusiasm of the Romanticists had vanished, to take its place in the limbo of the legends of the past; Offenbach had appeared, and the desecration of Olympus had begun. Amidst this spreading abomination of desolation, continues Gautier, Rouvière “ penetrated the mysterious depths of that gigantic creation of Hamlet, which seemed untranslatable on the French stage. Sagacious as the criticism of Goethe in Wilhelm Meister, picturesque as the illustrations of Eugene Delacroix, fantastic as Kean or Kemble, he made the Prince of Denmark live, breathe, walk, and dream. . . . No one ever rendered as Rouvière did that hesitation of thought before action ; that mixture of feigned madness and involuntary madness; that visionary eye, in which are reflected phantoms invisible to the rest of the world ; that profound reverie, interrupted by convulsive awakenings through contact with reality ; that sacred horror in presence of the bloody task imposed by the Ghost; that philosophical uneasiness interrogating the other life, one foot on the brink of the grave, and a skull in one hand, — all the delicate and diversified shades of that immense rôle, which one would think it impossible to act. . . . What distinguished Rouvière from other actors, besides his passionate and romantic comprehension of Shakespeare, was the extreme care which he displayed in the outward composition of the character that he was representing. He drew Hamlet with his person as Delacroix drew him with his pencil. In Othello, his postures, his costumes, his gestures, and his style reminded you of the magnificent etchings of Théodore Chasserian. He not only acted his poet; he illustrated him, and made of each scene a picture.”

The alterations which Alexandre Dumas introduced into Hamlet were guided both by his experience of the stage and by his instincts as a Frenchman. The problem which presented itself to Dumas, as to all French translators of Shakespeare, was to acclimatize an Anglo-Saxon poet in a Latin country; to transplant works that grew in a land of reverie, of fantasy, of vague and profound imagination, into a land of reason, of logic, of regular elegance. However strange these attempts may appear from our point of view, they are worthy of respectful attention; and in this case it is the duty of the literary historian to record and explain rather than to criticise.

These changes bore upon three main points : First, Dumas suppressed the scene between the Ghost and the two sentinels, on the ground that the first appearance of the Ghost should be made in the presence of Hamlet, who is called upon to avenge its death, rather than before two foreign mercenaries. Secondly, Dumas thought that Hamlet left the spectators, and above all French spectators, who desire the explanation of everything, a little too uncertain as to his madness. In his version, therefore, Hamlet indicates distinctly to Marcellus and Horatio the object and limit of his madness, and makes them swear to keep the secret, and to appear to believe in the reality of his feigning. Thirdly, Dumas changed the dénoûment. “ The ending of Hamlet,” he says, “has always appeared to me unjust; it is in vain that people maintain that it is the antique fatality, which demands an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Antique fatality punished deliberate action, not error ; premeditation, not accident. Now Hamlet is not guilty of a crime, but of an accident. Gertrude and the king wished to kill, the one her husband, the other his brother. Laertes wished to kill Hamlet. Hamlet, on the contrary, did not wish to kill Polonius ; he meant to kill the usurper of his kingdom and the murderer of his father. In so doing he was obeying the orders of the Ghost. It was by mistake that he slew Polonius. Besides,” continues Dumas, “it is unpleasant to see these four persons on the stage, dying, so to speak, in one common agony. Shakespeare, if it was not from a falling off after the long and fatiguing execution of a work like Hamlet, must have had some reason for making his piece end by an assault of arms, fatal not only to the actors, but also to the spectators. Perhaps he had, to represent Hamlet, an actor who was a very exceptional fencer, whose talent he wished to bring into relief, or an excellent mimic, who was to crown the work by a succès d'agonie. However that may be, I persist in saying that the conclusion of Hamlet is defective: defective from the philosophical point of view, because Hamlet, not being guilty in the same way as the rest, ought not to die by the same death ; defective from the stand - point of dramatic mise en scène, inasmuch as these four corpses produce a most disagreeable effect on the stage ; defective, finally, in scenic construction, inasmuch as the Ghost, that is the mainspring of the drama, the Ghost, who, when he sees the drama languishing in the third act, reappears in order to revive it, ought fatally to enter once more, so as to be present at the dénoûment. The Ghost is Providence visible ; or, if you insist on bringing the piece under the category of the antique and fatalistic compositions of Æschylus and Sophocles, it is the Deus ex machina, which, in this case, does not come down from heaven, but issues out of the earth, in order to bring about an ending in accordance with morality and justice.”

In the dénoûment conceived by Alexandre Dumas,—or rather, as we have seen above, by Paul Meurice, malgré lui, — Hamlet does not die ; the ghost of the old king, which the avenger had hitherto alone perceived, becomes visible to the guilty also, and the scales fall from their eyes in the supreme moment. A literal translation runs thus : —

Hamlet. The ghost, the ghost!

Come, sombre phantom, see thy murderers die!

The King. [Under Hamlet’s hand.] Help!

Hamlet. [To the courtiers, at a sign from the king.] Leave us.

[The courtiers hesitate.

If one of you takes one step He will not take two! I am king, am I not ? King of your existence and of your agony ?

This piece must end between us five.

Begone, all! [All intimidated. Exeunt, slowly. Now, you three, do you see him ?

Laertes. Mighty God! The dead king!

The King. My brother!

Gertrude. My husband!

Laertes. Pardon!

The Ghost. Yes, thy too prompt blood

dragged thee toward the abyss,

Laertes, and the Lord hath punished thee for thy crime;

But thou shalt find him, for he fathoms all hearts, Less severe above. Laertes, pray and die!

[Laertes dies.

Gertrude. Pity! Pity!

The Ghost. Thy crime was thy love itself, Poor woman! Jesus loves those who love.

Go; thy heart hath washed thy shame with thy tears;

Woman here, queen in heaven. Gertrude, hope and die! [Gertrude dies.

The King. Pardon !

The Ghost. No pardon! Go, infamous

murderer,

Go; for thy horrible crime, in their circles of flame,

Satan and hell have not too many torments.

Go, incestuous traitor, go, despair and die.

[The King dies.

Hamlet. And I, am I to remain, sad orphan on the earth,

And breathe this air, impregnated with misery ? Tragedian, chosen by the wrath of God,

If I have chosen ill my part, and ill understood my play;

If, trembling at my work, aud wearied without fighting,

For one that thou didst wish, I have killed four, Oh speak! will God not pardon,

Father ? And what chastisement awaits me ?

The Ghost. Thou shalt live!

By this arrangement, Dumas, according to French ideas, at least, made the piece “ logical ” in its beginning and in its end ; the fate of each person is fixed and the punishment proportioned to the crime with sublime justice. Only Shakespeare’s Hamlet could not live. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet vengeance devours the avenger. “ The rest is silence.”

Subsequently, and partly with a view to having it played at the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1864, M. Paul Meurice made a new version of Hamlet, in which he religiously respected the text and restored the dénoûment of Shakespeare. But the proposed Shakespearean performance, together with the Jubilee banquet, were prohibited by order of the emperor, owing to the fact of Victor Hugo having been nominated honorary president of the committee. In 1867, however, this new and faithful version was played at the Gaîté with great success, and Madame Judith fulfilled the role of Hamlet with singular talent. It was on the occasion of these performances that Dumas wrote his Etude sur Hamlet, a pamphlet now become somewhat rare, in order to defend his conception of the piece against Shakespeare’s !

Since 1867 Hamlet has not appeared on the French stage, and so far as scenic representation is concerned the genius of Shakespeare is almost completely ignored in Paris. It is indeed a curious fact that, with the exception of the Comédie Française, there is no important literary theatre in Europe where the works of Shakespeare do not form part of the current repertory ; and there is no European capital, with the exception of Paris, that is contented with the pale reflection of Hamlet which flickers dimly and dolefully in the opera of Ambroise Thomas.

Theodore Child.