William Shakespeare

Written during Victor Hugo's political exile on the island of Jersey and published in 1864, William Shakespeare is a work of literary criticism and philosophy that uses the figure of William Shakespeare as a springboard for a meditation on the nature of genius, the function of art, and the duty of literature to civilization. Hugo's immediate occasion is to introduce a new French translation of Shakespeare's complete works, prepared by his son François-Victor Hugo, but the deeper purpose is to argue that great poets are humanity's true leaders and that art must serve progress.

Hugo opens with a dedication to England, calling the book "the glorification of her poet." In the preface, he declares that writing about Shakespeare compels him to confront every question touching art and civilization, a duty he cannot evade.

Part I begins with a scene from Hugo's own life. He describes Marine Terrace, the bleak house on Jersey where his family lived as political exiles. His youngest son asked how he intended to fill his exile. Hugo replied that he would look at the ocean; the son answered that he would translate Shakespeare. Hugo uses this exchange to launch the entire work, comparing the ocean to genius: Its storms, depths, and immensity mirror the minds of Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare.

Hugo sketches Shakespeare's biography. Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon to a Catholic family in decline. His father, once an alderman, fell to the trade of butcher. At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, and after a poaching arrest fled to London, where he held horses at theater doors. Hugo describes Elizabethan theatrical life: crude staging at theaters like the Globe and Blackfriars, where crossed swords signified a battle and a man with a lantern represented moonlight. He catalogues Shakespeare's plays chronologically, dating each against a major political event, and recounts the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet in 1597, his retirement around 1613, and his death on April 23, 1616, the same day Cervantes died. Hugo stresses Shakespeare's suffering: Queen Elizabeth ignored him entirely, the playwright Ben Jonson envied him, and the lord-chamberlain censored his plays. After Shakespeare's death, oblivion followed. The Puritans closed the theaters. William Davenant rewrote the plays under Charles II. The poet John Dryden dismissed Shakespeare as outdated. The writer Nahum Tate published his own King Lear, crediting the original to "some nameless author." Around 1728, Voltaire introduced Shakespeare to France with condescension, and throughout the eighteenth century the plays were freely rearranged by adapters who treated the originals as rough drafts.

From this biography, Hugo expands into his theory of supreme genius. He declares that human thought has a summit, the Ideal, and that certain figures attained it absolutely: Aeschylus, Job, Isaiah, Dante, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven, and others mark the maximum intensity of the human mind. Hugo devotes extended portraits to each. Homer is "the huge poet-child" who created the epic of war and travel. Job placed God and Satan in confrontation; his dunghill, Hugo argues, prefigured the Calvary of Jesus. Aeschylus completed Job's resignation with the revolt of Prometheus, introducing the concept of Right. Isaiah is the great censure, a mouthpiece of the desert addressing civilization. Lucretius represented totality and the universe itself. Tacitus was the historian who punished tyrants. Saint Paul represented conversion; Hugo calls the road to Damascus a permanent passage for progress. Dante conceived the abyss and made the epic poem of spectres. Rabelais revealed feudal institutions dying of their own excess. Cervantes inaugurated common sense through Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Shakespeare Hugo characterizes as "the earth," containing all of nature and life. He also identifies Beethoven as the representative genius of Germany, arguing that music is Germany's grand communication with the human race.

Hugo establishes a fundamental distinction between art and science. Science is perfectible; art is not. A masterpiece exists once for all. Scientific discoveries are continually superseded, but Shakespeare does not interfere with Sophocles, nor Molière with Plautus. Poets succeed one another without replacing one another.

Hugo devotes sustained attention to Aeschylus as "the Ancient Shakespeare," reconstructing an Aeschylean performance in Athens and recounting Aeschylus's persecution, exile, and posthumous glorification. He tells how Ptolemy Euergetes borrowed the unique official Athenian copy of Aeschylus's works, deposited 15 silver talents as security, then kept the manuscript and forfeited the money. Centuries later, the caliph Omar burned the library of Alexandria, destroying it. Hugo draws a parallel to Shakespeare, whose own works nearly perished in the London fire of 1666. He concludes: "Shakespeare is Aeschylus II."

Part I closes with a meditation on the mystery of great souls. Hugo notes coincidences: Galileo died and Newton was born in 1642; Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day. He traces a chain of civilizing geniuses across history, from Orpheus through Gutenberg and Luther to Shakespeare, each completing the work of the others.

Part II returns to Shakespeare. Hugo compiles hostile criticism spanning three centuries: Forbes and Johnson denied Shakespeare both tragic and comic talent; Rhymer reduced Othello to a moral about looking after linen; Voltaire called the plays "monstrous farces." Hugo argues that Shakespeare is fertility, force, and exuberance, the antithesis of the false "sobriety" recommended by doctrinal criticism. True simplicity, he contends, is not restraint but opulence governed by hidden equilibrium, the great simplicity of Nature itself. Hugo argues that each genius creates a type, a condensation of humanity rather than an abstraction: Plautus gives Amphitryon, Cervantes gives Don Quixote, Shakespeare gives Hamlet. He contrasts Prometheus and Hamlet as two "marvellous Adams": Prometheus is action with an exterior obstacle; Hamlet is hesitation with an interior obstacle. Hugo then analyzes the four culminating dramas. Hamlet is doubt counselled by a ghost. Macbeth traces the hunger of monsters from covetousness through crime to madness. Othello is night in love with day, with Iago as evil guiding blindness toward destruction. King Lear is the occasion for Cordelia, who nourishes the shattered king back to life before the catastrophe destroys them both.

Hugo addresses the eternal hostility toward genius and identifies a structural peculiarity in most of Shakespeare's plays: a double plot mirroring the main drama, as when Laertes avenges his father beside Hamlet avenging his. He insists this technique is uniquely Shakespearean and should not be imitated; the contemporary theater must find its own law. Hugo then argues that poets must serve the people, citing prison statistics from the bagne, or penal colony, of Toulon in 1862: Of 3,010 convicts, 1,779 could neither read nor write. He insists on liberty as the condition of progress, argues that beauty must serve truth, and repudiates the formula "art for art" as a universal principle. He attacks Goethe for recommending indifference to good and evil and endorsing contempt for liberty. The poet, Hugo concludes, belongs to the people.

Part III serves as the grand conclusion. Hugo characterizes Shakespeare as England's greatest glory, yet notes England's failure to honor him adequately: statues stand everywhere for generals and princes, but only a small figure occupies Poets' Corner at Westminster. He welcomes the formation in 1864 of a committee to celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth but insists a monument serves England's sake, not Shakespeare's. Hugo identifies the nineteenth century as the child of the French Revolution, arguing that its literary movement is revolution translated into ideas. He calls the reproach "literary '93," a reference to the radical revolutionary year 1793, a badge of honor, and insists the writers of his century have neither masters nor models: Their sole model is Man, their sole master is God.

In his final chapter, Hugo calls for a revolution in the writing of history. The old constellation of heroes, men of brutal force, is in decline. History must be rewritten from the point of view of principle rather than accomplished fact, registering the true sources of civilization: inventors, thinkers, poets. Hugo concludes with a vision of two groups in the sky: the constellation of conquerors and kings descending into the abyss, and the sacred group of true stars, from Orpheus through Shakespeare to Beethoven, rising in radiance.