They
perceived the dramatist's colossal breaches of classical law. They
were shocked by his freedom of speech. When Louis the Fourteenth's
librarian placed on the shelves of the Royal Library in Paris a copy
of the Second Folio of his works which had been published in London in
1632, he noted in his catalogue that Shakespeare "has a rather fine
imagination; he thinks naturally; but these fine qualities are
obscured by the filth he introduces into his comedies." An increasing
mass of pedestrian literature was imported into France from England
through the middle and late years of the seventeenth century. Yet
Shakespeare had to wait for a fair hearing there till the eighteenth
century.
Then it was very gradually that Shakespeare's pre-eminence was
realised by French critics. It is to Voltaire that Frenchmen owe a
full knowledge of Shakespeare. Voltaire's method of teaching
Shakespeare to his countrymen was characteristically cynical. He
studied him closely when he visited England as a young man. At that
period of his career he not merely praised him with discerning
caution, but he paid him the flattery of imitation. Voltaire's tragedy
of _Brutus_ betrays an intimate acquaintance with Shakespeare's
_Julius Caesar_.
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