Shakespeare and the French Lens

Abstract

Academic studies of Shakespeare in Great Britain and France present the historian with startling contrasts. Beginning in the late 18th century, the English debated the extent of his knowledge and eventually turned the poet-playwright into a national hero and secular saint. When Thomas Carlyle published in 1840 On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, he actually stated that Shakespeare was “an unconscious intellect” whose dramas “grew up out of Nature.” Carlyle’s book was an incredible success, deifying the uneducated and untraveled man from Stratford, making him a religious Anglo-Saxon icon never to be questioned. Some had their doubts. In France in 1918, Professor Abel Lefranc, a renowned Renaissance scholar and member of the Académie française, published Sous le masque de William Shakespeare, a volume that tried to prove “to all those with an open mind” that the author William Shakespeare could not have been Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon. Among his reasons: William Shakespeare knew France, the French aristocracy and French history too well. Leaving aside the author’s missing paper trail, inconceivable for the “soul of the age,” Lefranc examined Shakespeare’s works in extraordinary detail and revealed just how political they were and how often they subtly commented on a much wider European culture and politics. Shakespeare’s oeuvre, he argued, was not limited to the Anglo-Saxon world but was actually multi-national and deeply influenced by France. English scholars did not handle this French questioning of Shakespeare so well. Indeed, with only a few exceptions, Lefranc’s work was ignored in the Anglo-Saxon world. Lefranc argued that the plays needed to be re-examined as creations for the Elizabethan court, making clear references to what was actually happening in France at the time. This essay argues that the significance of Shakespeare’s knowledge of French courtly politics and culture should not be underestimated because there are no records that the man from Stratford ever left England or knew French. That is, once the profound French influence is recognized in Shakespeare’s plays, the man from Stratford could not have been the author.