Shakespeare or " man-ocean "

In his William Shakespeare, published in 1864 as a huge preface to the 18-volume translation by his son François-Victor, Victor Hugo wrote : " on April 23, 1616, on the same day, at almost the same time, Shakespeare and Cervantes died. Why were these two flames blown out at the same moment ? No apparent logic. A whirlwind in the night ". This April 2016 therefore marks the four-hundredth anniversary of the contemporary deaths, " almost at the same time " says Hugo, of the two giants of Western literature. But, it should be noted, Cervantes actually died on April 22, and if Shakespeare did die on April 23, he lived and died in the Julian calendar retained by England, which had refused the Gregorian reform - which, for astronomical reasons, had cut ten days off the year 1582. His April 23rd was therefore May 3rd in Cervantes' calendar. But no matter. April 23rd is International Book Day, in memory of both authors. Today, we'll be focusing on Shakespeare's memory. The occasion is provided by the publication of a book by François Laroque, entitled, as befits the Plon collection in which it is published, Dictionnaire amoureux de Shakespeare. Several hundred articles, ranging from the very brief to the very substantial, from the expected to the surprising, guide the reader on multiple journeys through the world of Shakespeare, one of the rare " men-oceans " named by Hugo : Aeschylus, Isaiah, Dante, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. François Laroque is one of the world's leading Shakespeare specialists. Professor emeritus at the University of Paris III, he is the author of the classic Shakespeare et la fête, and the best-selling Shakespeare comme il vous plaira, published in Gallimard's "Découvertes" collection (reprinted many times and published in twelve languages). He has translated Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest for the Livre de poche classique, and was one of the editors of the two volumes of Elizabethan Theatre published in Gallimard's Bibliothèque de La Pléiade. With François Laroque, we'll sail the Shakespearean ocean along four themes. The first is to recall the scarcity of documents concerning Shakespeare, which can only be found in the parish registers of Stratford-Upon-Avon, in notarial deeds or court proceedings, but without any literary or personal archives. This absence has posed a challenge to all his biographers, who must mobilize the mentions of the playwright encountered in the writings of his contemporaries, and who often have to deduce the life of the works in order to place them in an existence about which little is known. Since the ^19th century, this absence has also fuelled the imagination of Anti-Stratfordians, who claim that Shakespeare the author could not be the Shakespeare encountered in these meagre archives, but either an aristocrat or a scholar concealed behind a nom de plume. Next, we need to reconstruct the conditions under which plays and poems were composed and published at a time when collaborative writing was the rule, when stories, commonplaces - sublime because universal - and formulas (e.g. " to be or not to be ") were available to anyone, and when the notion of literary property did not exist. Hence the mobility of play attributions and the delimitation of the Shakespearean corpus. Hence, too, the plurality of texts for the same work, printed from manuscripts used for performances, copies made for patrons or memorial reconstructions. The analysis of performance conditions must complement that of editions, and focus attention on the various venues where plays were performed : public theaters like the Globe, " private " theaters like that of the Blackfriars, the sovereign's palaces, law schools, or the halls that hosted touring troupes. Finally, as an example, the reception of Shakespeare in France  must be presented: it is late and begins with Voltaire's Lettres anglaises, it is ambivalent and unfaithful (as Ducis' translations show), but it is also enthusiastic and romantic with Victor Hugo and his son. The French case and the successive translations of the ^18th and ^19th centuries help us to understand why it is so difficult to translate Shakespeare's words and verse.