The romanticist Victor Hugo recognised only three men as
memorable in the history of humanity, and Shakespeare was one of the
three; Moses and Homer were the other two. Alfred de Musset became a
dramatist under Shakespeare's spell. To George Sand everything in
literature seemed tame by the side of Shakespeare's poetry. The prince
of romancers, the elder Dumas, set the English dramatist next to God
in the cosmic system; "after God," wrote Dumas, "Shakespeare has
created most."
III
It would be easy to multiply eulogies of Shakespeare from French lips
in the vein of Victor Hugo and Dumas--eulogies besides which the
enthusiasm of many English critics appears cold and constrained. So
unfaltering a note of admiration sounds gratefully in the ears of
Shakespeare's countrymen. Yet on closer investigation there seems a
rift within the lute. When one turns to the French versions of
Shakespeare, for which the chief of Shakespeare's French encomiasts
have made themselves responsible, an Englishman is inclined to
moderate his exultation in the French panegyrics.
No one did more as an admiring critic and translator of Shakespeare
than Jean Francois Ducis, who prepared six of Shakespeare's greatest
plays for the French stage at the end of the eighteenth century.
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