''William Shakespeare'' is an 1864 work by
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms. He is considered to be one of the great ...
, written in his 13th year of exile. The title is misleading; the true subject of the work is the writers that Hugo considered "the greatest geniuses of all time."
Background
When Hugo began writing it, he intended for it to be an introduction to a collection of French translations of
Shakespeare's plays written by his son,
François-Victor Hugo
François-Victor Hugo (21 October 1828 – 26 December 1873) was the fourth of five children of French novelist Victor Hugo and his wife Adèle Foucher. François-Victor is best known for his translations of the works of William Shakespeare into ...
. However, it grew to be approximately 300 pages in length, and Hugo had to write a separate introduction to the plays.
Content
The work begins with an approximately twenty page biography, filled with inaccuracies,
and then becomes a work of literary criticism focusing on the literary geniuses of history. Shakespeare, but also
Homer,
Job,
Aeschylus,
Isaiah,
Ezekiel
Ezekiel (; he, יְחֶזְקֵאל ''Yəḥezqēʾl'' ; in the Septuagint written in grc-koi, Ἰεζεκιήλ ) is the central protagonist of the Book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible.
In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Ezekiel is acknow ...
,
Lucretius,
Juvenal,
St. John,
St. Paul,
Tacitus,
Dante,
Rabelais, and
Cervantes. It was a critical failure. Deciding there was more of Hugo in the work than Shakespeare, some French critics suggested he should have entitled it, "''Myself''".
Book V of Part II, ''The Mind and the Masses'', and Book II of Part III, ''The Nineteenth Century'', have often been combined and published as ''The Mind and the Masses''. In it he argues for a "vast
public literary domain."
Literature is the secretion of civilisation, poetry of the ideal. That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first instructors of the people. That is why Shakespeare must be translated in France. That is why Molière must be translated in England. That is why comments must be made on them. That is why there must be a vast public literary domain. That is why all poets, all philosophers, all thinkers, all the producers of the greatness of the mind must be translated, commented on, published, printed, reprinted, stereotyped, distributed, explained, recited, spread abroad, given to all, given cheaply, given at cost price, given for nothing.[Translation: The Nottingham Society, 1907]
References
External links
Full text of the book online, in French''idem''
Full text of the book online, in English
– ''Westralian Worker'', 20 December 1918
''The Minds and the Masses''
(translation)
''William Shakespeare''
(partial translation)
{{Victor Hugo
1864 essays
Works by Victor Hugo
Works about William Shakespeare
French literary criticism