Classicizing Shakespeare

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. * Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK *
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. * Dominique Goy-Blanquet, Université de Picardie, France *
Willems’s book fills a gap in our knowledge of Shakespeare adaptations. Its emphasis on the classical expectations that dominated the reception of Shakespeare’s plays in Europe from the Restoration to the nineteenth century makes it an important contribution to our understanding of the long and complex process that led to Shakespeare’s canonisation not only in England and France, but across Europe. * Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies *