Hamlet: Oui, mes lenteurs sans nombre Vous irritent le temps passe, l'émotion S'éteint! je remets trop la sinistre action Que vous m'avez prescrite. Est-ce cela, mon père ? What is wrong? It conveys the meaning, missing a point or two. But it conveys it too precisely; even as, to pick again almost at random Rentrons. Toujours le doigt sur les lèvres, amis. turns the Hamlet of "And still your fingers on your lips I pray. The time is out of joint-O cursed spite from a perplexed and passionate creature whose words are apt to be a bare, though beautiful, expression of all the turmoil within him, into a figure of selfconscious rectitude protesting with orotund dignity against the irregularities of fate-and of the plot. Throughout the translators seem to feel that above all things Shakespeare's meaning, when they have fathomed it, must be made crystalline, that a logically-minded French audience will have no patience with a Hamlet who cannot go mad in a succinct and rational way. No need ever to suspect their Hamlet's sanity. He is rather an explanatory essay upon Hamlet than Hamlet himself. And other translations of Shakespeare's other plays are confounded by the same error. Whatever is not clear, it has been said, is not French. But the emotional strength of expression by which this Englishman gives. intense and individual life to his characters will often involve him-legitimately, it could be argued-in obscurity, in allusive vagueness, in the thing half said, or said but as a symbol of the greater force of things left unsaid, and of things unsayable. Try to bring a method such as this to terms of exactitude and clarity, and whatever else may result, the emotion will be dissipated, the strength lost and character will be fatally flattened out. Dumas and his collaborator, however-and they had ample precedent-went very much further in adjusting Hamlet to what they felt to be French requirements. Those were the days of the romantic revival, and an off-hand treatment of Ophelia really would not do. So we find a scene added in which, plump upon the news that his father's spirit is in arms, Hamlet is able to greet her with Quelle nouvelle aux cieux, dites moi, mon bel ange?" Throughout the play, at every crisis his first thought is for his Ophelia. And the ending, as Shakespeare had left it, was evidently accounted hopelessly crude and confused. For after the general catastrophe the ghost reappears, and, upon appeal, condemns the Queen, Laertes and Claudius to various degrees of purgatory and damnation. Then Hamlet in turn asks what is to be his punishment for having been the death of four people when he was only commanded to kill one (oddly enough, for the first time he forgets Ophelia, who certainly makes five). This, of course, would be an entirely reasonable commentary on his proceedings, and it is of a piece with the translators' whole attitude towards the play. The Ghost then informs him that his punishment isto live! It may all seem very absurd, and nowadays, no doubt, French criticism would condemn it. But we can imagine Dumas, Meurice and the theatre manager in consultation. Hamlet was to be produced. Soand-so would play it excellently. The Ducis version? Quite out-moded. One wanted, besides, something nearer to Shakespeare than that. Simple translation? Then, if they ever considered such a possibility, would come the unanswerable arguments that it was quite impracticable. Could you ask a French actor to say this and do this, or expect him to feel at home on the stage and make his effect there if you robbed him of his alexandrines and tripped him at every moment in his accustomed deportment? Could you expect a French audience to listen to such things? Certainly it is an English play; they will look for something strange, a little barbaric. But Hamlet must command their sympathy. So must Ophelia. So, to the degree of mere understanding, must Laertes, Gertrude and the rest. It is true enough that if you cannot create in the theatre this atmosphere of sympathetic understanding, nothing can be done there. How can you create it in favour of characters, whose eccentricities of speech and behaviour must pass all comprehension? Carry this argument far enough and, as we have seen, it may oust Hamlet in favour of an amorphous creature that but for the familiarity of a few quotations—we should hardly recognize. But carry it some little way we must if what we want is to provide for a French audience played to by French actors as nearly as may be an ww equivalent effect to that produced by English actors upon an English audience. I said just now that the French critic of to-day would probably condemn such cavalier treatment of the very plot and characters as Dumas and his collaborator indulge in. But at this very moment the repertory of a famous French theatre contains a "Merchant of Venice" which has suffered strange violence. Its Prince of Morocco might be modelled upon that admirable black-face comedian Mr. Frank Tinney; unluckily he is not so funny. Portia would be in place in a Pears' Soap beauty show; the reading of the character seems to stray between Helen of Troy and Nell Gwynne. While Shylock!-Shylock moves and speaks to the accompaniment of a sympathetic chorus of Jews and an imprecatory chorus of Christians. The end of the trial scene is an elaborate exhibition of his woe and his signing of the deed of gift ("Signez, signez, signez," sing out the Christians). And he makes a final appearance at Belmont to strike Jessica in the face with it and to call her I was really so thunderstruck at the apparition that I did not quite catch what he called her. Probably, however, I could not have repeated it to this academic audience. The curtain descended. The curtain, incidentally, had shown us a large reproduction of the frontispiece to the First Folio, and it had seemed to my disordered vision that at each descent the familiar wooden countenance expressed deeper and deeper alarm. And one could hear all around such praise of le grand Shakespeare-though uttered mostly in that tone of dutiful puzzled enthusiasm properly belonging to those who have submitted themselves to be bored for conscience' sake—that I might really have been moved to protest, but for the chastening reflection that in England itself, and with no shadow of excuse, I had seen comparable outrages. But in no country and no language, of course-has Shakespeare to be translated into Choctaw ?-is there excuse for such foolery as this; nor would any good director permit it, nor should any conscientious critic tolerate it. Let us come back to genuine difficulties. In 1914 the Comédie Française produced Richepin's translation of "Macbeth." Macbeth." I do not know how long it had been in existence, whether the management accepted or commissioned it after Maeterlinck's version was made about 1909, I think. This is in prose: Richepin preferred verse. One imagines the old argument proceeding—if it ever came to argumentthat the trained tragic actor could not be asked to bely his training, nor betray the expectation of his audience. Maeterlinck, on the other hand, had done his version for a private performance in his own Normandy house and garden. But the traditions of the Théâtre Français allowed for, Richepin does set out to give us Shakespeare intact, even as Maeterlinck does, so that a comparison of the two versions and the two methods is instructive. Note first that Richepin seizes readily enough upon the prose of the sleep-walking scene. He does not feel compelled to turn this into alexandrines. In the English the dramatic effect is gained, of course, by the extreme simplicity of the language, which translates, therefore, directly and easily enough into French, and seems to lose little or nothing by the process. Maeterlinck's version and Richepin's differ |