To a Frenchman a tragedy of classical rank connotes "correctness," an
absence of tumult, some observance of the classical law of unity of
time, place, and action. The perpetration of crime in face of the
audience outraged all classical conventions. Ducis and Dumas
recognised involuntarily that certain characteristics of the
Shakespearean drama could not live in the classical atmosphere of
their own theatre. Excision, expansion, reduction was inevitable
before Shakespeare could breathe the air of the French stage. The
grotesque perversions of Ducis and Dumas were thus not the fruit of
mere waywardness, or carelessness, or dishonesty; they admit of
philosophical explanation.
By Englishmen they may be viewed with equanimity, if not with
satisfaction. They offer strong proof of the irrepressible strength or
catholicity of the appeal that Shakespeare's genius makes to the mind
and heart of humanity. His spirit survived the French efforts at
mutilation. The Gallicised or classicised contortions of his mighty
work did not destroy its saving virtue. There is ground for
congratulation that Ducis's and Dumas's perversions of Shakespeare
excited among Frenchmen almost as devoted an homage as the dramatist's
work in its native purity and perfection claims of men whose souls are
free of the fetters of classical tradition.
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