This is for Nick, since he's taking a course in Shakespeare this spring. The Sunday Times has a review of a new book on the French reaction to Shakespeare's plays, over the centuries. Apprently, he greatly offended delicate sensibilities. For example, the reviewer says of Voltaire that "he went to his grave believing Shakespeare had offered 'a few pearls in an enormous dungheap'." Here is the Pricenoia link for the book. Here's a citation and some extracts:
Here'a a pointer to Thomas Bowdler and his Family Shakespeare, if you're interested.
The Sunday Times - Books
February 20, 2005
Literature: Shakespeare Goes to Paris by John Pemble REVIEWED BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS
SHAKESPEARE GOES TO PARIS: How the Bard Conquered France
by John Pemble
Hambledon and London £19.99 pp240
Extracts:
The French classical theatre ... [was] well adapted, in Racine’s hands, to the expression of noble sentiments, but prone to tinkly repetition and inhospitable to rough passion.
Then came this Englishman — a Caliban from the island of fog and bad food, whose pious and practical people enjoyed violent entertainments and bouts of introspection punctuated by sea voyages to plunder other countries.... Voltaire, who did so much to bring England to the French, is the key figure in this story, and he went to his grave believing Shakespeare had offered “a few pearls in an enormous dungheap”. He hated the pantomime that accompanied performance, the blank verse with emotion surging through the enjambement, the common characters, and the language where metaphor and association seem to breed without control. ...
Shakespeare was dragooned into the classical alexandrine... As late as 1904, when King Lear was staged for the first time in Paris, Kent’s lines at the height of the storm, “The tyranny of the open night’s too rough / For nature to endure” became “Il n’est pas possible de rester plus longtemps dehors.” ...
The French language was admirably suited to philosophy and logic, but not really to poetry, as Shakespeare was starting to demonstrate. His English verse, by contrast, had not only reached the rabble; it had helped define their sense of nationality. He had invented Englishness. Such an idea was incomprehensible in France, where a writer was not an “inventor”, but the sum or epitome of what had gone before....
Successive 19th-century translators not only gentrified the diction, they rewrote the plots. The ghost of Hamlet’s father returned in the final scene and told him to survive; Malcolm took republican vows; Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after.
Cycling news: I did some hill climbing Sunday and, since I hadn't been doing much climbing lately, suffered from stiff muscles this week. No big problem there, except the weather turned both cold and windy, with big gusts out of the Northwest -- the direction I ride to get home. The homebound route is more up than down and headwinds make it feel like mountain climbing. In the circumstances, my muscular aches and pains took on a new dimension as they say. So Wednesday, suffering the while, I happened to notice that it took me 48 minutes to make the trip, a good thirteen minutes and something like 40% more time than my quickest time. The wind continued today leading me to think of the sufferings of cycling's greatest racers. The image shows Laurent Fignon, the last Frenchman to win the Tour de France. It was taken in 1983 on one of the high climbs of the tour, as you can see. The month is July, of course, not February, but, in my wintry misery, I still can empathize with his agony. I have other reasons to identify with Fignon: He was one of the few professionals to wear clear-lens glasses (as I do); his mates called him "The Professor" because he had been to university and was known to read the occasional book, not just comics; and he had an appealing eccentricity for a professional athlete (he hated the intrusiveness of the press). Why do I ride when conditions cause me to suffer? Well, I don't usually know whether I'm to suffer or not on any day. When I expect to suffer, at least some of the time I don't get what I expect: setting off I can feel like a wet dishrag and, as I get into stride, find that the ride turns out to be a glorious one. Also, when things get bad, I console myself with what my favoite 
I've been reading David Crystal's book The Stories of English (see my reading list in the panel at right). Though I once tried to work my way through Chaucer in all it's original glory, I've generally been content to read modern versions of the very oldest English literature and have rarely had the patience to decode more than little bits Old and Middle English. Still, the history of the language is interesting and Crystal does it full justice. In a section I just finished reading he uses the 
The local press is happily reporting intense interest in a rare bird sighting. Apprarently before now the northern lapwing has never been seen in Maryland. Here's what they say on the web site of 
Famed for its baroque architechure and cultural riches, Dresden, before World War II, was one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. 
I'm pretty sure the set came down to us from the estate of Louis Windmuller (about whom I've written separately). It has been a long time since I thought about this 19th-c. version of a rococo flight of fancy. I expect I've always been embarassed at it's unembarassed extravagance and, if asked, probably would have said it suffered fatally from a total absence of artistic good taste. If you're interested, there's a good description of Dresden porcelain 
My more recent indirect contact was via Victor Klemperer's Diaries. Here is the 
The mother of my high-shool friend Jon McNamara died recently. Because she was a famous actress, all the papers noticed. I remember her as striking - really quite beautiful - in makeup and very strange without it; otherwise she seemed to me a mom like other moms. This photo shows her in 1970, a half a decade after I last saw her. I recall that she drove a car having a device that automatically dimmed the high beams wen cars approached. Quite cool. They lived in a big frame house near the train station and belonged to a golf club that you could walk to if you wished (though we didn't much that I can recall). In the basement of their house there were big cartons of products given her by sponsors of the soap opera in which she starred. Later on Jon changed his name to take his birth father's. His sister Karen played bassoon well and, strange to remember, was a Baptist.
This photo shows here in 1999.
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