14 July 2016
Born on a Fourteenth of July: Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau
On 14 July 1816, the 17th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, a son was born to Anne-Louise Madeleine de Gercy, the wife of Count Louis de Gobineau, an officer of the Royal Guard who had followed Louis XVIII into exile during the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return the previous year. When young Arthur was 11, his mother decamped with her three children and a lover to Germany and then to Switzerland, which gave the boy the advantage of 18 months at the Collège de Bienne. His prospects were compromised by the family’s Legitimist sympathies and the lack of mathematical knowledge which barred him from a military career, but his Germanic education was to lay the foundations for a life’s work based on orientalism and organicism.
Portrait of Gobineau from his The Golden Flower (New York and London, 1924) 10633.d.36.
In October 1835, having failed the entrance examination for Saint-Cyr, Gobineau landed with 50 francs in his pocket on the Paris doorstep of his wealthy and eccentric uncle Thibault-Joseph, who was obsessed with the restoration of the legitimate kings of France. After three weeks of complete neglect, his nephew threatened to commit suicide on the spot, at which the elderly adventurer deigned to pay him some attention. However, he provided little practical help, and Gobineau had to rely on letters of introduction to Sainte-Beuve and other literati while he rented a garret and attempted to launch his literary career. By 1846 he had succeeded enough to marry, but it was not until 1849 that he secured a post as first secretary of the French Legation in Berne through the good offices of his mentor Alexis de Tocqueville, now minister of foreign affairs.
Although Gobineau’s 30-year diplomatic career took him all over the world, with postings to Greece, Switzerland, Germany, Newfoundland, Sweden and Brazil, he was temperamentally unsuited to the profession. It did, however, allow him to travel twice to Persia, where he camped among Bedouins and enjoyed the splendours of life as the head of the French Legation in Teheran in 1855-58. A second appointment as plenipotentiary (1862-63) enabled him to develop his knowledge of Persian and Arabic, peruse rare manuscripts, and compose his Traité des écritures cuneiforms (Paris, 1864; 7702.f.13) as well as Les Religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale (Paris, 1865; 2217.d.3). Aghast at the prospect of being posted to the United States, which he abhorred because of its cruel treatment of Native Americans and black people, and its uniform mass culture based on the uncritical worship of technology and democracy, he was relieved to be appointed to Athens instead in 1865. After bitter disillusionment at the conduct of Germany in 1870-71, he was delighted to become plenipotentiary in Stockholm in 1872, feeling a profound affinity with the lands from which he believed his Norman forebears had originated.
Title-page of Histoire d’Ottar Jarl, pirate norvégien (Paris, 1879; 10761.e.27), in which Gobineau describes a (fanciful) Viking-Norman descent for his family.
Not surprisingly, his nomadic existence took its toll on family life, and by 1876 resulted in a complete break with his wife and two daughters. His declining years, in which his health suffered as a result of recurrent fevers contracted in Brazil, were mitigated by his relationship with Mathilde de La Tour, an Italian diplomat’s wife, and literary and intellectual friendships such as that with Richard Wagner, whom he first met in Rome in 1876 and who invited him to stay at Bayreuth.
Had Gobineau confined himself to writing fiction, travel memoirs and works of scholarship, he would probably be remembered nowadays as little more than a minor literary figure. However, a book which he published in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (‘Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races’), secured him a far more notorious reputation.
Title-page of the first volume of Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Paris, 1853). 10006.dd.14 (and available online)
Although the Essai caused Gobineau’s contemporaries to prevent his election to the Académie française, this was not on the grounds of racism but of scientifically unconvincing theories and anti-Christian determinism. Ironically, in view of the author’s detestation of the United States, it was first published in English in Philadelphia in 1856 (10006.d.30). A German translation (12901.cc.9) appeared in the same year, and Wagner was sufficiently interested in Gobineau’s ideas to collaborate with him on an article which appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter (P.P.1943.b.) for May-June 1881.
Gobineau’s division of the human species into three major groupings, white, yellow and black, claiming to demonstrate that ‘history springs only from contact with the white races’ and distinguishing the ‘Aryan’ race as the pinnacle of human development and the basis of all European aristocracies, certainly exerted a sinister influence on the pernicious racial ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet a close reading suggests that the Nazi thinkers who espoused his theories had not read them in depth: Gobineau had a high regard for the cultural and intellectual achievements of Judaism, and nothing but condemnation for discrimination and inhumanity proceeding from racism. Indeed, Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a far more direct precursor of National Socialist theories, was dismissive of Gobineau as a paranoid unrealistic dreamer, whose writings were irrelevant to Chamberlain’s own vision of the future. Moreover, the unwieldy treatise was little read in Germany until the 1890s, when Gobineau, who had died in Turin in 1882, was unable to defend his ‘divination’ of the distant future against those who seized upon and distorted his ideas. He emphasized the dangers of expansionism which could only lead to its own destruction, and in this, at least, he was a true prophet of the disasters to come.
It is a final irony that a man with a lifelong distrust of bourgeois monarchy, indiscriminate democracy and the forces of revolution should have been born on the day still celebrated as that on which the French Revolution and the cause of national democracy in France burst upon the world.
Susan Halstead Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement
06 July 2016
From Darwinian epic to Christian martyrology: the mystical art of Odilon Redon (1840-1916)
For an artist to attract the attention of a contemporary novelist may not always be an advantage. When, for example, Paul Cézanne opened his friend Emile Zola’s new novel L’Oeuvre and found himself portrayed as the unsuccessful painter Claude Lantier, he politely returned the package to its author and never spoke to him again.
Odilon Redon in 1914, from André Mellerio, Odilon Redon: peintre dessinateur et graveur (Paris, 1923) 7860.c.22
Odilon Redon was more fortunate. In a sense, he began his artistic career as a failure; despite the early promise which he showed in drawing, his father decreed that he should train as an architect at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He showed little enthusiasm for this and, having failed the entrance examination, turned to sculpture, lithography and etching until, in the summer of 1870, he joined up on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. As with Goya, the horrors which he witnessed made a lasting impact on his work, and over the next few years he produced a series of visionary charcoal drawings and lithographs in unrelieved black, which he described as his noirs. Not surprisingly, he was slow to win critical acclaim, and might have remained as obscure as his works until, in 1884, a novel appeared which brought them to a wider public.
‘Hommage à Goya’, images by Redon, from André Mellerio, Odilon Redon (Paris, 1913) Ac.4554/3
In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, the decadent aristocrat Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes possesses a collection of Redon’s works, ‘covering nearly every panel in the vestibule’, framed in unpainted pearwood rimmed with gold and featuring ‘the most fantastic of visions…studies of bleak and arid landscapes…creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium’. In the midst of these horrors, suggesting the ‘terrifying or hallucinating effects’ of Edgar Allan Poe, there hangs an image of Melancholy before which he meditates for hours to dissipate his gloom as he admires the contrast between its ‘liquid green and pale gold’ and ‘the unbroken black of all these charcoal drawings and etchings’ (translation by Robert Baldick; Harmondsworth, 1959; W.P.513/86a).
The grotesque figures with their wild eyes and distorted bodies recall the ‘feverish nights and frightful nightmares’ which he had experienced during a childhood attack of typhoid fever, and would be readily identifiable to anyone who had seen Redon’s noirs. The spread of his reputation in literary circles as a result of Huysmans’s novel led to commissions and collaborations with other authors, including the Belgian Symbolist poet Iwan Gilkin. The British Library possesses a copy of the limited first edition of La Damnation de l’artiste, with a frontispiece featuring just such a skeletal creature, and also one of his Ténèbres, also published in a limited edition of 150 copies. Here, the frontispiece shows a mysterious winged being carrying a vessel in her hands; despite her beauty, the leathery bat-like nature of her wings has a devilish rather than an angelic quality.
Frontispiece from the first edition of Iwan Gilkin La Damnation de l’artiste (Brussels, 1890) 11482.1.25
Frontispiece from Iwan Gilkin, Ténèbres (Brussels, 1893) 11482.k.22.
Redon also provided seven illustrations for Edmond Picard’s monodrama Le juré and an equally sinister frontispiece for André Mellerio’s study Le Mouvement idéaliste en peinture, which contains a section on Redon himself as well as others on Gauguin, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec and lesser-known figures such as Louis Anquetin and Paul Sérusier. Mellerio was an author and art critic who became a close friend of Redon after their meeting in 1889, as well as an advocate of Symbolism, and wrote a biography of him as well as the preface to the catalogue to an exhibition of his work in 1894 at the Galeries Durand-Ruel.
Frontispiece from Edmond Picard, Le juré (Brussels, 1887) 1871.c.9.
Frontispiece from André Mellerio’ Le Mouvement idéaliste en peinture (Paris, 1896) 7585.n.3.
As he moved towards pastels and oils, abandoning noirs at the turn of the century, Redon’s interest in Hinduism and Buddhism and his absorption of Japanese influences eased his transition to abstract painting and led to growing acclaim and popularity, including the Légion d’Honneur (1903) and commissions from Baron Robert de Domecy for portraits of his wife and daughter and 17 panels for the family’s Château de Domecy-sur-Vault in Burgundy. By the time of the artist’s death in 1916 his international reputation was secure, as was proved by the New York Armory Show of 1913, where he was accorded the largest single representation.
Cover of Mellerio’s Odilon Redon: peintre dessinateur et graveur
Mellerio’s final tribute to his friend was Odilon Redon: peintre dessinateur et graveur, a masterly survey of his entire work which pays special tribute to his revival of the technique of lithography at a time when it had fallen into a state of stagnation, and notes the psychological complexity which he achieves through the interplay of black and white, arrangements of lines and the play of light. Suffering and sublimity, the uncanny and the luminous, all blended to create what Mellerio termed the ‘suggestive art’ of a man who, at the start of his career, described himself as a ‘peintre symphoniste’, subtly exploring the deepest layers of the subconscious. It is tempting to see, in his darkest visions of the human condition, a presentiment of the carnage which was unleashed just a few days before his death on 6 July 1916.
Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement
29 June 2016
‘As a novel there is nothing like it ever again…’: Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816)
‘Her subject was Adolphe, a short novel about failure’. These words occur in Providence (London, 1982; British Library H.84/692), a novel which might possibly be described in the same terms, by the British novelist Anita Brookner, who died in March 2016, shortly before the bicentenary of the publication of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe in June 1816.
One of our recent posts noted the Russian dramatist Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s struggle to convince the censor that the figure of a tyrannical mother-in-law in his play The Storm did not represent Nicholas I. When Adolphe first appeared, Constant found himself embroiled in similar efforts to persuade his readers that he had not written a roman à clef based on his own turbulent affair with Germaine de Staël. The parallels were so close that his protestations in the press went largely disregarded.
Constant’s letter about the interpretation of Adolphe, sent to various newspapers (here as printed in the London Courier of 25 June 1816)
The figure of Adolphe himself – the cultured, privileged and melancholy son of a government minister – resembles Constant both in personality and in his troubled relationship with his father, also a government minister. His mother had died within days of his birth, and at the age of four the young Benjamin was removed from his grandmother’s care and placed in that of a hated governess, whom his father secretly married, and a succession of singularly unpleasant tutors. His studies continued at the universities of Erlangen and Edinburgh, and were followed by an appointment in 1788 as Kammerjunker (Gentleman of the Chamber) to the Duke of Brunswick.
Infuriated by the stultifying pettiness of court life and his wife Minna’s equally unsympathetic attitude to his intellectual pursuits, Constant separated from her in 1793 and left Brunswick the following year, when he also met Madame de Staël. By 1795, having overcome her initial resistance, he established one of Paris’s most brilliant salons with her. Its members sought to establish a government based on the moderate and rational principles which represented the approach of the Revolution’s most able thinkers, but with Napoleon’s coup d’état of November 1799 and Constant’s election to the Tribunal he had little emotional energy left to deal with Germaine’s increasingly possessive and unbalanced behaviour and the melodramatic scenes which ensued when he hinted that the relationship had run its course. After a visit with her to Germany in 1803 where they met Goethe, Schiller and Wieland, he renewed his relationship with Charlotte von Hardenberg, whom he later married after some years of tacking back and forth between ‘l’homme-femme’ Germaine and the calm and gentle Charlotte.
Portrait of Constant, reproduced in Goethe und seine Welt ... herausgegeben von Hans Wahl und Anton Kippenberg (Leipzig, 1932) X.981/11934.
It was in 1806, the year when he and Charlotte began their affair, that Constant started work on Adolphe. His marriage in 1809 was followed by a final break with Madame de Staël in 1811, and in 1815, during Napoleon’s ‘hundred days’ before the final defeat at Waterloo, Constant accepted a post as his adviser. Following the fall of the Emperor, Constant spent several months in England (January to July 1816), where he gave readings of Adolphe at London salons. He was probably impelled by his lack of funds to publish the novel, which came out in London and Paris in June, with a framing correspondence between the ‘finder’ of the manuscript and its publisher to diminish the danger of readers identifying the author with Adolphe and Madame de Staël with the heroine, Ellénore. On his return to Paris, he was elected to the French parliament in 1819 and, until his death in 1830, enjoyed a brilliant political career supporting liberal causes such as Greek independence and the abolition of slavery.
Title-page of the first edition of Adolphe (London; Paris, 1816) C.57.a.47.]
For a comparatively short text (228 pages in the first edition ), the novel has inspired considerable critical discussion. Adolphe, aged 22 and having recently graduated from Göttingen, joins the court of an enlightened German prince and becomes involved with the Polish refugee Ellénore, ten years his senior and the mistress of the Comte de P***. Originally begun as an exercise in seduction, the relationship becomes a folie à deux which isolates them from society and threatens to ruin Adolphe’s career. Even after her break with the Comte and abandonment of her two children, the emotional pressure is only increased by Adolphe’s awareness of the sacrifices which Ellénore has made for him and the intransigence of his father, who drives her from his home town. Although they find a refuge on Ellénore’s restored Polish estate, a friend of Adolphe’s father coerces him into abandoning her in the interests of his career, and the shock of discovering Adolphe’s letter promising to do so causes a shock which leads to her fatal illness. In the aftermath of Ellénore’s death Adolphe remains in a state of almost Existentialist despair: ‘j’étais libre en effet; je n’étais plus aimé: j’étais étranger pour tout le monde’, an ‘outsider ‘ as isolated and alienated as Camus’s Meursault. Having longed for his lost freedom, he now regrets the claims and ties (liens) which had previously seemed so irksome to him.
The critic Dennis Wood in his study of Adolphe (Cambridge, 1987; YC.1988.a.7619) describes the novel as ‘the paradox of a German Novelle written in French’, with strong links to the 17th-century French moraliste tradition of La Rochefoucauld and the roman d’analyse represented by Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. Poised on the shift of consciousness between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it recalls the perceptive comment which Anita Brookner, herself an expert on Romantic art, offers in her character Kitty Maule’s tutorial on Adolphe: ‘for the Romantic, the power of reason no longer operates. Or rather, it operates, but it cannot bring about change’.
Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities & Social Sciences), Research Engagement
27 June 2016
All the World’s a Stage: Shakespeare in Europe and the Americas
On Friday 10 June, the British Library welcomed a host of expert speakers to discuss the global understanding of our ‘national’ poet. And it turns out Shakespeare is the poet of many nations. It would be impossible to do justice to the richness of the presentations in a blog post, yet all of our panels shared the fundamental idea that Shakespeare’s writing is at the heart of every culture. Adaptations and translations are not so much secondary to the original but offer a radically different entry into, and a potentially much more direct access to, a Shakespeare play that will always signify something particular to different nations in different social and temporal contexts.
Prof. Jerzy Limon (photo below) opened proceedings with a view into the establishment of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, designed by Renato Rizzi, at once a huge black modernist edifice in stark contrast to the red brick Northern European architecture (its 90 tonne retractable roof opens fully in 3 minutes), and a gothic castle-like structure, alluding to the city’s mediaeval Bazylika Mariacka. We saw videos of the theatre’s opening ceremony and of varied productions, showing how the space can be adapted to both traditional Elizabethan stage design and experimental avant-garde interpretations.
Stuart Gillespie and Graham Holderness offered us insights into the sources and settings of Shakespeare’s plays. Dr Gillespie explained how French and Italian were the languages of culture and how European (mainly Italian) sources – epics, essays (Montaigne’s predominantly), romances and novellas – were in the atmosphere around Shakespeare’s time and were inevitably absorbed and adapted in his works. Professor Holderness spoke of the ‘reciprocal relationship’ between Shakespeare and Venice and how the playwright had already created much of the myth around the city before it was (re-)created in 19th and 20th century literature.
The British Library’s Julian Harrison gave us a glimpse of the ‘Our Shakespeare’ exhibition currently at the Library of Birmingham, home to the second largest Shakespeare collection in the world. The collection was resurrected after a fire destroyed the old library building in 1879 and the collection was soon expanded thanks to donations from around the world. Julian highlighted the beautifully produced photo album of German Shakespeare scholars (1878), the photo album donated by Laurence Olivier, and a Russian edition of Romeo and Juliet presented by a Soviet delegation at the height of the Cold War. Julian also managed to show the importance of Warwickshire to the bard, just before the study day moved to more tropical climes.
Philip Crispin opened the afternoon’s proceedings with a rousing presentation on Une tempête (‘A Tempest’). In this ‘adaptation for a black theatre’, Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of négritude, recasts Ariel as a mulatto slave and Caliban as an articulate black slave in revolt, reflecting the racial politics of his native Martinique. Michael Walling, Artistic Director of intercultural, multimedia theatre company Border Crossings, presented an insider perspective of staging Shakespeare in India, and translating and staging Dev Virahsawmy’s Toufann, a Mauritian adaptation of The Tempest, in London. The linguistic choices made by both writer and translator in the case of Toufann were fascinating: the play is written in Mauritian creole, but the title is in Hindi – Prospero is from the dominant Indian diaspora community in Mauritius, and seeks to impose this new word into the play. Philip and Michael showed how these two postcolonial adaptations of The Tempest epitomise translation as creative interpretation.
Charles Forsdick introducing Philip Crispin and Michael Walling (Photo by Ben Schofield)
From considering just three performances, Paul Prescott encouraged us to look at hundreds in his whirlwind road trip presentation across the United States. The phenomenon of the Shakespeare festival was plain to see in the sheer spread and eclectic formats of these festivals. The bard’s work is not just made for the Globe Theatre but is at home anywhere and perhaps more at home in the small and distant communities of the American West. The day’s underlying theme again: Shakespeare is accessible universally. The idea was explored further by Mark Burnett, who showed how a constant industry of Shakespeare adaptation in film across Europe and South America sees in the plays stories that apply to a vast array of national settings, from gypsy versions of Hamlet (Aleksandar Rajkovic, Serbia, 2007) and King Lear (Romani Kris – Cigánytörvény, Bence Gyöngyössy, Hungary, 1997), to a Brazilian Romeo and Juliet set in the favelas of Rio (Maré, Nosse Historia de Amor, Lucia Murat, Brazil, 1997).
The day concluded with a round table on the ‘cultural politics of European Shakespeare’. Aleksandra Sakowska talked about the long history of interaction between Poland and Shakespeare, a presentation which touched on the first black actor to play Othello in Britain, Ira Aldridge. Nicole Fayard drew our attention to Shakespeare’s relevance in modern French society from the Vichy regime to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, showing how even in the latter situation Shakespeare managed to force his way into public consciousness. Keith Gregor described how Shakespeare productions in Spain still far outnumber those of the Spanish Golden Age playwrights, and how, after Franco’s reign, Shakespeare began to be appropriated by Spain’s autonomous communities in overtly political avant-garde productions. Emily Oliver presented a view of Shakespeare around the time of German reunification, particularly through the challenging production of Hamlet/Machine in 1990, directed by Heiner Müller (photo above by Ben Schofield). Hamlet could be seen building and jumping over a wall on stage in a not-so-subtle allegory of the political context. Erica Sheen chaired the discussion that followed which situated Shakespeare as the most significant figure of international cultural exchange and at the heart of every nation’s self-expression. Shakespeare gives voice to political counter-currents and his work is continually adapted to inhabit alternative, minority, and simply ‘foreign’ positions.
Final panel of the seminar. Photo by Ben Schofield
‘All the world is a stage’ begins Jacques’s monologue in As You Like It, and this study day left no doubt that will always be true for Shakespeare’s work.
This study day, organised by the European and Americas Collections department of the British Library, was supported by the AHRC ‘Translating Cultures’ Theme, the Polish Cultural Institute and the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.
Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student, British Library/University of Bristol
25 May 2016
All the World’s a Stage: Shakespeare in Europe and the Americas
No writer’s work has been translated, performed and transformed by as many cultures across the world as Shakespeare's. As part of the programme of events accompanying the current British Library exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts, the British Library is holding a seminar ‘All the World’s a stage: Shakespeare in Europe and the Americas’ on Friday 10 June from 10.15-17.15 in the Conference Centre.
A troupe of travelling players in 17th-century Germany. From the Album Amicorum of Franz Hartmann, MS Egerton 1222.
This study day brings together leading specialists to explore Shakespeare’s global cultural presence from Europe to the Americas via the Indian Ocean. Themes include Shakespeare's source material; postcolonial adaptations; performance on stage and film; and the cultural politics of European Shakespeare.
The programme for the study day is:
10.15-10.45 Registration; Tea/Coffee
10.45-10.55 Welcome: Janet Zmroczek (Head of European and Americas Collections, British Library)
10.55-11.40 Keynote: Presentation and Interview (Chair: Aleksandra Sakowska, Worcester)
Jerzy Limon (Gdańsk), ‘“The actors are come hither” - 400 years of English theatrical presence in Gdańsk’
The Gdánsk Shakespeare Theatre
11.40-11.45: Break
11.45-12.35 Panel 1: European Sources and Settings (Chair: Line Cottegnies, Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Stuart Gillespie (Glasgow), ‘Shakespeare’s European Sources: Epics, Essays, Romances, Novellas'
Graham Holderness (Hertfordshire), ‘Shakespeare and Venice’
Giovanni Battista Giraldi, De gli Hecatommithi (Mondovì, 1565), G.9875-6, a collection of stories including sources of Othello and Measure for Measure, from our Discovering Literature Shakespeare site
12.35-13.00 Julian Harrison (British Library) ‘“Our Shakespeare” exhibition at the Library of Birmingham’ (Chair: Janet Zmroczek, British Library)
13.00-14.00: Lunch. A sandwich lunch will be provided.
14.00-14.50 Panel 2: Translating The Tempest: Postcolonial Adaptations (Chair: Charles Forsdick, Liverpool/AHRC)
Philip Crispin (Hull), ‘Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête’
Michael Walling (Border Crossings), ‘Storm-tossed in the Indian Ocean - from Indian Tempest to Mauritian Toufann’
14.50 – 15.40 Panel 3: Shakespeare in Performance (Chair: Ben Schofield, King’s College London)
Paul Prescott (Warwick), ‘Bard in the USA: the Shakespeare Festival Phenomenon in North America’
Mark Burnett (Queen’s University Belfast), ‘Shakespeare on Film: Europe and Latin America’
15.40-16.00 Tea/Coffee
16.00-17.15 Roundtable: The Cultural Politics of European Shakespeare (Chair: Erica Sheen, York)
Short presentations followed by a roundtable discussion with Keith Gregor (Murcia), ‘Shakespeare in post-Francoist Spain’; Nicole Fayard (Leicester), ‘Je suis Shakespeare: The Making of Shared Identities on the French Stage’; Emily Oliver (King’s College London), ‘Shakespeare Performance and German Reunification’; Aleksandra Sakowska (Worcester), ‘Shakespearean Journeys to and from Poland’
17.15- 18.00 Wine reception sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies
The study day has been organised by the European and Americas Collections department of the British Library in partnership with the AHRC ‘Translating Cultures’ Theme, The Polish Cultural Institute, and the Eccles Centre for Americas Studies at the British Library.
You can book by following the link to our What’s On pages or by contacting the British Library Box Office ( +44 (0)1937 546546; [email protected]). Full price is £25 (concessions available: see ‘What’s On’ for full details).
18 April 2016
Shakespeare in Paris in the 1820s
During the early years of the 19th century Shakespeare was largely known in in France through the immensely successful versions of some of his plays by Jean François Ducis (1733-1816), which began with Hamlet in 1769 , followed by Romeo and Juliet (1772), King Lear (1783), Macbeth (1784), and Othello (1792). Ducis, astonishingly, knew no English and had to rely on translations of Pierre Letourneur (1736-1788) and Pierre de la Place (1707-1793). They were all heavily cut, and their plots adapted to contemporary French tastes and sensibilities. Ducis’ version of Hamlet, for example, omitted the scenes with the ghost and the gravediggers. Their popularity is attested by the many editions published during Ducis’ long life, either singly or in collected editions of his works. They remained in repertory at the Théâtre français until the mid-1850s.
The opening – very different from Shakespeare’s original! – of Ducis’ Hamlet, tragédie imitée de l'anglais... (Paris, 1770) C.117.b.72.
By then other translations of Shakespeare plays, also taking liberties with the original plots, had appeared. They included those of Alfred de Vigny whose Le More de Venise, a verse translation of Othello, was performed during the 1829-30 season (De Vigny also translated The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet), and Alexandre Dumas and Paul Meurice’s version of Hamlet, first performed in 1846. François-Victor Hugo’s translations of the complete works of Shakespeare were published between 1859 and 1866 (11765.f.).
Parisian audiences were also familiar with Rossini’s Otello, an opera with a libretto based on Ducis’ adaptation; like many operas at the time, it also had an alternative happy ending! Premiered in Naples in 1816, it quickly became one of Rossini’s most popular works, until it was virtually eclipsed by Verdi’s Otello in 1887. It was first performed to great acclaim in Paris on 5 June 1821 at the Théâtre Italien, with Manuel García as Otello and Giuditta Pasta as Desdemona.
Title-page of an early vocal score of Rossini’s Otello, ossia l’Africano di Venezia (Mainz, 1820) Hirsch IV.1265.
But it was Maria Malibran, García’s daughter, who became the great Desdemona of the Romantic era. Her performances of the melancholy Willow Song (sung by Desdemona shortly before Othello kills her), accompanying herself on the harp, became legendary. After triumphing as Desdemona, in 1831 Malibran also started to sing the role of Otello, sometimes alternating between the two roles. Alfred de Musset celebrated Malibran in various poems, especially in Le Saule and A la Malibran, the long poem he wrote a few days after her tragically early death in 1836, at the age of 28.
Maria Malibran as Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello. Portrait by Henri Decaisne (ca 1831) Paris, Musée Carnavalet. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
In 1822, a few months after the triumph of Rossini’s Otello in Paris, there was a first attempt by an English company, led by Samson Penley, to perform Shakespeare’s plays in English to a French audience. After a disastrous performance of Othello in the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Martin which ended up in fighting, the company had to move to a smaller hall, where they performed Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard II before an audience of subscribers.
This débâcle prompted Stendhal to write Racine et Shakspeare [sic] two pamphlets published in 1823 and 1825 (1343.m.17) that questioned the precepts of French classical theatre, especially the unities of time and place, and called for a theatre that would appeal to a contemporary audience. Two years later, Victor Hugo’s preface to his play Cromwell (Paris, 1828; 11740.c.35), advocated a drama that would combine tragic and comic elements, and be free of the formal rules of classical tragedy. These qualities, he felt, were to be found in the plays of Shakespeare, whose name had by then become synonymous with Romanticism.
The Théâtre de l’Odéon, Paris, ca. 1829
Like Stendhal, Hugo was prompted to write his preface by the visit of another company of English actors performing in their native tongue. In September 1827 Charles Kemble’s company gave a series of performances of Shakespeare plays at the Odéon theatre in Paris. After performances of Sheridan and Goldsmith, the stage was set for one of the great dates in the annals of French Romanticism, a performance of Hamlet with Charles Kemble in the title role and Harriet Smithson as Ophelia. In the audience was the crême de la crême of literary and artistic Paris – Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, Eugène Delacroix, Eugène and Achille Devéria, Louis Boulanger, and Hector Berlioz. Although the performance was in a language very few in the audience understood, the ability of the players to cross language barriers was clearly electrifying.
The performance was a triumph. The most popular scenes were the play-within-the-play, Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost, Ophelia’s madness, and Hamlet and Horatio in the graveyard.
Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2, the play within the play. Illustration by Eugène Devéria and Achille Boulanger from M. Moreau, Souvenirs du théâtre anglais à Paris (Paris, 1827). Available via Gallica
Hector Berlioz was left thunderstruck and in his Memoirs vividly described the effect of these performances:
…at the time I did not know a word of English … the splendour of the poetry which gives a whole new glowing dimension to his glorious works was lost on me. ... But the power of the acting, especially that of Juliet herself, the rapid flow of the scenes, the play of expression and voice and gesture, told me more and gave me a far richer awareness of the ideas and passions of the original than the words of my pale and garbled translation could do.
He also fell in love with Harriet Smithson, and his Symphonie fantastique (1830) was inspired by his infatuation with her. They were married in 1833 but their marriage proved to be unhappy. Berlioz composed his two great Shakespeare-inspired works much later, Roméo et Juliette in 1839, and Béatrice et Bénédict, an opéra comique, based on Much Ado About Nothing, in 1862.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Romance Collections
References
Edmond Estève, ‘De Shakespeare à Musset: variations sur la “Romance du Saule”’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 1922. 288-315. PP.4331.abb
Peter Raby, ‘Fair Ophelia’: a life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz. (Cambridge, 1982 ) X.800/34510.
Hector Berlioz, The memoirs of Hector Berlioz ... translated and edited by David Cairns (London, 1977). X.431/10397
April Fitzlyon, Maria Malibran, diva of the Romantic Age (London, 1987) YC.1988.b.226
John Golder, Shakespeare for the age of reason: the earliest stage adaptations of Jean-François Ducis, 1769-1792. (Oxford, 1992) Ac.8949.b.(295).
The British Library's current exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts is a landmark exhibition on the performances that made an icon, charting Shakespeare’s constant reinvention across the centuries and is open until Tuesday 6th September 2016. You can discover more about Shakespeare and his works on our Discovering Literature website.
16 March 2016
I would rather till the soil with my bare hands: a letter from Balzac
Mon cher Thomassy – j’étais sorti pour aller chercher mon manuscript de Wann-Chlore dont on m’offre devinez quoi! 600 Fr!... j’aimerais mieux aller labourer la terre avec mes ongles que de consentir à une pareille infamie…
(My dear Thomassy – I went out to search for my manuscript of Wann-Chlore, for which someone has offered me – guess what! – 600 Francs… I would rather till the soil with my bare hands than to agree to such an insult…)
Protective of his manuscripts, which would often involve more than ten stages of revision, Honoré de Balzac clearly did not want to let go of this manuscript even at this relatively early stage in his prolific career. This letter, to his friend Jean Thomassy (1795-1874), is part of the British Library’s Stefan Zweig Collection of Musical and Literary Manuscripts (Zweig MS 134) and complements the enormous bound corrected proofs of Une ténébreuse affaire (Zweig MS 133).
Two further items, both fragments of a draft to La Monographie de la Presse Parisienne (Zweig MS 135 [below], and Zweig MS 216) signal the importance of Balzac to Zweig in this prestigious collection.
A letter that shows a writer’s passion for manuscripts and the work in progress suited Zweig’s ideas behind the collection perfectly, so much so that he would acquire this item in 1940 during the time of his exile and periodic depression, when he frequently expressed a loss of interest towards collecting.
Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student, British Library/University of Bristol
With thanks to Pam Porter for bibliographic research into this item.
14 March 2016
French with Tears – of laughter
As we begin the Semaine de la Francophonie, we may reflect on how far language teaching has progressed in recent years with the introduction of Duolingo, the Michel Thomas method, and similar schemes. Back in the 1960s, as one of a group of 35 semi-hypnotized collégiennes, I endured the Tavor audio-visual course, gazing at a strip cartoon film while repeatedly chanting ‘Je suis le fantôme de la maison… Je suis mort en 1033…’, and we certainly sounded like it.
70 years earlier, in 1895, a classic textbook appeared whose title became legendary and provided Terence Rattigan for that of his play French without Tears. Written by ‘Mrs. Hugh Bell’ (Florence, later Lady, Bell), it was intended as ‘an elementary French reading book for the nursery and kindergarten’.
Florence Bell (Photograph from the National Portrait Gallery, CC-BY-NC-ND)
Mrs. Bell was certainly well equipped to understand how to engage their attention; as well as three children of her own, she had two stepchildren from her husband’s first marriage, one of whom grew up to be the writer and traveller Gertrude Bell. Florence herself was a prolific author whose works included a companion volume, German without Tears, and an English course for young French readers, L’Anglais sans peine (1917; 12984.df.20) , in addition to plays, conversation manuals and At the Works: study of a manufacturing town, Middlesborough (1907; 08276.a.18). In 1918 she was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Cover of volume 3 of French without Tears
The three volumes of French without Tears (1895-97; 012200.gg.1/5), carefully graded according to difficulty, begin with a preface in which the author explains that she aims at ‘the greatest simplicity both of expression and idea’ to give her pupils ‘that feeling of zest and encouragement’ which proceeds from being able to understand and respond at a comparatively early stage. She is also strongly convinced that at this point ‘it is not necessary, or even advisable, that French grammar should be taught’. Instead, she gradually introduces the young student to a growing range of vocabulary and ideas through lively stories such as those of Marguerite’s misadventures when she attempts to surprise her parents with a cake after scornfully rejecting the help of the long-suffering cook Suzon, or the seaside exploits of Jean and his Scottish cousin Jacques ‘aux pays de Galles’. Far from being model children, they get up to all kinds of misdeeds, illustrated with lively drawings, and although the language might seem quaintly stilted nowadays (‘Voyons, mon enfant, ne te chagrine pas pour cela,’ dit le père…), the books provide a far more entertaining introduction to the French language than those of another famous (or notorious) author.
Marguerite’s culinary disaster (above) and Jean and Jacques at the seaside (below), from French without Tears)
In her autobiography The King of the Barbareens (1966; 11769.h.1/59) Janet Hitchman recalls studying French at a Barnardo’s Home in Essex in the 1930s with a Belgian Mademoiselle who taught it using the books of M. Chardenal, one of which, she claimed, really did contain the phrase ‘the pen of my aunt is in the pocket of the gardener’. The British Library possesses several of these, including his Standard French Primer (1877; 12204.c.20/44) and First French Course (1869; 12954.aa.36), although I have so far been unable to locate that precise sentence. Like Mrs. (later Lady) Ford, M. Chardenal (described as ‘bachelier ès lettres de l’Université de France’ and ‘French master in the University of Glasgow’) proclaimed his intentions in a preface where he stated that, having ‘taught French during [sic] many years by Dr. Ahn’s method’ he had ‘resolved to compile a Grammar … with rules at the head of each chapter, to which pupils might refer when in doubt’, and claiming that it could be ‘understood even by young children’.
The more sober method of M. Chardenal, from his First French Course
By modern standards his expectations were far from modest. He confidently proclaims that ‘a good knowledge of the auxiliary verbs être and avoir, of the four regular conjugations, and the principal irregular verbs’ may easily be acquired ‘in two sessions by young ladies and boys at school, and in one by young men in business’ . Otherwise, he declares roundly, ‘if a pupil does not acquire a perfect knowledge of them, let him give up French at once, for he will lose his time and money’. This is far sterner stuff than the stories and playlets offered by Lady Bell; drill is the order of the day, with endless repetition of constructions and rules in sometimes bizarre sentences. The student is required to translate phrases such as ‘A lawyer is less useful than a doctor’ (sure to have the Law Society up in arms) and ‘Nous avons vendu nos maisons et nos jardins au fils du prince’ (does one detect a sinister note of compulsion?). And never mind la plume de ma tante; instead the nonplussed pupil is asked to translate the barked command ‘Bring me my pears and those of your aunt’.
The happier world of Lady Bell: Chantez, mes enfants (London, 1920) F.464, a collection of songs for children learning French
There is no smoke without fire, and one suspects that Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s Molesworth would never have come up with his excoriating exposé of French lessons at prep schools in the 1950s without such manuals and the tradition which they represented. Thinking back to How to be Topp (1954; 12315.p.34) and its sequels, featuring Armand,‘the weed in the fr book who sa the elephants are pigs’ and his adventures au bord de la mer (‘Houp-la, he sa, I see the sea. Is the sea wet? Non, armand, but you are’...) we may think ourselves lucky that for those embarking on the study of French nowadays, the road, though still winding, is not as stony as it might have been under M. Chardenal’s guidance.
Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences) Research Engagement
17 February 2016
Billiards is a noble game! Vignaux is the greatest player before God.
Maurice Vignaux (d. 17 February 1916) was twice world champion in the game of billiards, a man famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his prowess and his technical knowledge of the game. As the magazine Sporting Life described on the occasion of his death 100 years ago, ‘Vignaux was born in Frogonville [sic], in the South of France, in 1846. While a youth in Toulouse, where he was reared, he displayed talent for the game and attracted the attention of François Ubassy, one of the greatest players in France. With Ubassy as mentor, Vignaux made rapid progress, and in 1874 he came to the United States and in his introductory tournament became a champion, winning the first three ball tournament for the championship of America.’
Title-page and frontispiece portrait of Vignaux from Le Billiard (Paris, 1895) 7913.e.31.
Vignaux contributed to billiards in a further way. His hefty ‘traité du billiard’ entitled Le Billiard carries the enticing subtitle Théorie des effets – Coups de Série – Détermination du point du choc – Quantité de bille – Différence entre le point de choc et le pont visé – Angle de déviation – Visé special des coups de finesse. It is an illustrated manual for the game detailing the logic behind impact, angles of deviation, strike zones, as well as all possible shots in billiards as it was developed up until that point. The 200 pictorial representations of games scenarios make this 400-page book a not uninteresting read for the uninitiated. As a word of warning, H. Desnar, who wrote the preface, suggests that although ‘it does not contain transcendental mathematics […] a veritable attention is necessary to grasp all the demonstrations.’
Diagrams and explanations of game scenarios from Le Billiard
If anything, this curio, written by a ‘great player before God’ in the words of Desnar, serves to show the taste for such a work amongst a certain demographic at a particular time. The British Library’s copy has a handwritten note on the inside (right) putting it in the possession of a British captain stationed in the Persian Gulf in 1910. Perhaps it was still in his possession a few years later during wartime. If so, Charles Darwin’s alleged resort to billiards in order to ‘drive the horrid species out of his head’ might have been the same experience our captain found in Vignaux’s study.
Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student, British Library / University of Bristol
11 February 2016
Don Quixote as Napoleon: propaganda in Spain’s war of independence, II: the print.
The Mexico edition of Francisco Meseguer, El Don Quixote de ahora con el Sancho Panza de antaño, was published in 1809, after the Córdoba edition of the same year. It includes a the coloured fold-out cartoon apparently not present in the Spanish editions, which focuses on the situation in Spain in 1808 sometime after the ‘Dos de Mayo’ uprising in Madrid against the French.
Fold-out caricature from Francisco Meseguer, El Don Quixote de ahora con el Sancho Panza de antaño (Mexico, 1809) 9180.e.6.(30)
The main caption reads: ‘El Quijote de n[ues]tros t[iem]pos (Napoleon) caballero sobre su rocin (Godoy) y puestos los ojos en la encantada Dulcinea (America) Consuela á su buen escudero Sancho (Murat) de la perdida del Gobierno de la Insula Barataria (España)’ (‘The Quixote of our times (Napoleon) astride his nag (Godoy) and with his gaze fixed on the enchanted Dulcinea (America) consoles his good squire Sancho (Murat) for the loss of the Isle of Barataria (Spain)’.
During the confused period in Franco-Spanish relations, 1807-08, Spanish Prime Minister Godoy had in effect collaborated with Napoleon who, according to the historian Raymond Carr, despised him. Godoy, cast as Rocinante, the figure to the right on all fours, admits ‘Esto y mucho mas merezco‘ (‘All this and more I deserve’). In March 1808 Godoy’s ever increasing unpopularity in Spain prompted his dismissal by Carlos IV, who himself abdicated in favour of his son Fernando.
Manuel Godoy, portrait by Goya (image from Wikimedia Commons)
The ambitions of General Murat (as Sancho, in centre), Napoleon’s lieutenant in Spain, were frustrated after the brutal suppression of the Madrid uprising: ‘Todo se lo llevó el Diablo. Ya no soy gov[ernad]or’ (‘The Devil has taken everything. I am no longer governor’), he laments. ‘Insula Barataria’, depicted as a castle to the left of Murat, refers to the make-believe island of which Sancho Panza was made governor in one of the practical jokes devised by the Duke and Duchess in Part II of Don Quixote.
General Murat, ca. 1808, portrait by François Gérard (Image from Wikimedia Commons).
The consolation offered to Murat by Napoleon/Quixote is a possible role in the Spanish colonies: ‘q[u]e si logro desencantar a Dulcinea te hare Arzob[is]po u Adelantado’ (‘if I succeed in disenchanting Dulcinea, I shall make you Archbishop or Governor’). This is a further allusion to Part II of Cervantes’ novel in which Sancho Panza convinces his master that Dulcinea’s appearance as a peasant girl is the work of enchanters.
America is represented as Dulcinea (top, centre; detail above) but in the guise of a woman wearing a native American headdress. The text reads ‘La América será una Dulcinea encantada q[u]e jamas has de pose[e]r’ (‘America shall be an enchanted Dulcinea that you will never possess’). The focus on the colonies in the cartoon is consonant with the reprinting of the work in Mexico. Following the French invasion of Spain and the imposition of Napoleon’s brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne, Mexicans either affirmed their allegiance to Fernando VII or sought independence.
Bonaparte, represented as the ‘Quixote of our times’ (above), is depicted much as Don Quixote had been in the many editions of the novel hitherto. He wears ancient body armour and on his head the so-called helmet of Mambrino, in reality a barber’s basin. The basin-helmet is labelled the crown of Spain, with the caption ‘No tiene encaje este yelmo, no le biene á tu cabeza’ (‘This helmet does not fit; it is not right on your head’). His shield however has the emblem of the Gallic rooster and the motto ‘El caballero de los gallos’ (‘The Knight of the Roosters’). Napoleon is somewhat thin, but not short of stature, as the Emperor was usually depicted and is indeed described in Meseguer’s text.
The windmill (far left) references the most famous episode of Don Quixote (Part 1, ch. 8). The caption reads ‘Con un molino basta para asorarte’ (‘A single windmill is sufficient to put the wind up you’). Don Quixote was brave – and rash – enough to charge one of the group of windmills. The fearsome sight of just one would have been too much for Napoleon, ‘The Quixote of our times’? The ambiguity, bravery-rashness, takes us back to the ambivalence of Meseguer’s text.
Geoff West, former Head of Hispanic Collections
References/further reading
Raymond Carr, Spain 1808-1975. 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1982) 82/22993
Charles J. Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age. From Constitution to Civil War, 1808-1939. (Oxford, 2000) YC.2000.a.11398.
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