Jean Aicard,‘Molière à Shakespeare’,1879: Introduction

I first came upon Jean Aicard's poem, which with its juxtaposition of the French and English national playwrights seems so apt both for the fiftieth birthday of this journal and for the four hundredth birthday of Molière, in the archive of the Comédie-Française in November 2018 (it is there catalogued as II Mol D, h 1879 Aic). I later discovered that I could have read what one pleased contemporary eyewitness called a ‘dedicatory ode that united Moliere and Shakespeare in a poem of compliment and praise’ ¹ just as easily without visiting Paris at all, indeed without even leaving my place of work, since there turns out to be another copy in the library of the Shakespeare Institute (here it is catalogued as PN2596.L7G2: it is this copy which is reproduced below). ² But quite apart from the innate desirability of visits to Paris, an understanding of what prompted Aicard's poem and what makes it significant depends on a knowledge of its context, a context vividly recalled by other items in the company's library. It is with outlining that context that this short introduction will mainly be concerned: that and briefly comparing the poem with its companion piece, a one-act play on another Shakespearean theme, produced by the same author for the last night of the season which this prologue introduced.

‘Molière à Shakspeare’ was recited on 2 June 1879 by the leading actor François Got as the prologue to a forty-performance season given by the Comédie-Française at the Gaiety Theatre in London. ³ Its text had been printed rapidly by the Jouaust company (Figure 1), with a facing-page literal translation into English (used here for all quotations), before the company left Paris, so that copies could be sold on the night to those London theatregoers inadequately fluent in French to follow Aicard's poetry without assistance (Figure 2). As this may suggest, the company were very keen to make their sentiments and their intentions understood to their English hosts, and those sentiments combined gratitude with patriotism. The Comédie-Française had first visited London from April to July 1871, performing at the Opéra Comique on the Strand while their headquarters on the rue de Richelieu, much damaged during the riots and civil warfare of the Commune, were undergoing repairs. During this sojourn, according to the chronicler of their trans-Manche adventures Georges d’Heilly, the company had ‘contracté une dette de cœur’, ⁴ and Aicard, looking back in thankfulness eight years later, makes much of their former status as helpless refugees comforted only by the support of English audiences: they were then ‘wandering, desolate children of wounded France’ but ‘you applauded, with your voices and your hearts…’ (p. 16). Now they had returned with more actors and more plays (having at last conceded that their native playhouse needed full-scale reconstruction), this time to the Gaiety (like the Opéra Comique, a popular venue for French operetta). Here they would set about ‘spreading abroad [their] country's soul’ (p. 16) once more.

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Figure 1.

Jean Aicard, ‘Molière à Shakspeare’ (1879), cover. Courtesy of the University of Birmingham Library.

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Figure 2.

Jean Aicard, ‘Molière à Shakspeare’ (1879), pp. 6–7. Courtesy of the University of Birmingham Library.

However warmly Aicard's poem salutes England's time-honoured liberal hospitality (‘free country, old soil, / To exiles kind’, p. 16), the Comédie-Française had come to London in 1879 not as immigrants seeking assimilation but as proud exemplars of their native theatrical tradition, representatives of an institution which had spoken for its nation all through the difficult transition from being known as ‘Comédiens Ordinaires du Roi’ to being often referred to simply as the ‘Théâtre-Français’. The season featured not only plays but a lecture about the company that was little short of a manifesto for its principles and its working practices: this was given by Francisque Sarcey, theatre critic of Le Temps, and like Aicard's poem it appeared promptly not just in French but in English. ⁵ In accordance with their status as dramatic plenipotentiaries, as Ignacio Ramos Gay has pointed out, the company were in effect granted diplomatic immunity when it came to British theatrical censorship, allowed to perform the controversial new social problem plays in their repertoire without undergoing any of the expurgations to which their scripts would certainly have been subjected had they been offered by a London company in English translation. ⁶ Their 1879 visit was marketed from the outset as a special lesson to English theatregoers: the first announcement that it would take place, printed in the Daily Telegraph on 22 November 1878, was addressed to ‘Students of the histrionic art’, calling on those suitably eager to savour ‘the talents of a company now for the first time visiting England in their collective strength’ to underwrite the venture through a subscription scheme.

The lesson was duly taken. As Gay goes on to show, the 1879 visit was crucial to the campaign for an English national theatre, convincing the likes of Matthew Arnold, George Bernard Shaw and Tom Taylor that when England did at last found such an institution it should be copied closely from the Comédie-Française. (Arnold's account of the season and the example for emulation which it represented, indeed, ‘The French Play in London’, appeared in the same journal as did Sarcey's lecture, The Nineteenth Century.) ⁷ Offering a utopian, uncensored glimpse of an ensemble company whose spear-carriers, rather than being mere hirelings employed from week to week as décor to ornament the favourite points of star actor-managers, were serious-minded apprentices who might in time rise through the ranks to become leading players, the French national theatre looked to some members of its English audiences like a vision of a better possible future. Even established national thespian treasures conceded that certain theatrical matters were ordered better in France: when the Comédie-Française returned for a third visit in 1893, Sir Henry Irving made a speech welcoming them and expressing the aspiration that London too might one day boast

some home of Dramatic Art which may be at once a help and an encouragement: so that the art may grow with the progress of the times, till in the end it becomes like that great institution which is honoured here to-day, and which honours you and us by their presence, a source not only of Civic but of National pride. ⁸

The claims made by Sarcey for the company's selfless and ego-free devotion to the collective service of dramatic art are perhaps qualified by the observations on the 1879 season made by one performer for whom they marked a London debut, namely Sarah Bernhardt, whose memoirs minutely recall exactly how much more money the Comédie-Française took at the Gaiety box office on the evenings when she was appearing than on those from which she was absent. ⁹ But although some English commentators did take predictable exception to the critical tone of the modern plays in their repertoire (‘the stage, according to English theory, is like society – a place for agreement, and not for argument’, wrote one comfort-loving John Bull when reviewing Alexandre Dumas’ coldly-received Le Demi-Monde), ¹⁰ the season firmly established the Comédie-Française in the English theatrical imagination as the model of how a future national theatre ought to be organised.

All this is to some extent already implicit in Aicard's poem and its mise-en-scene, which, personifying the two nations via equal, symmetrically placed likenesses of Molière and Shakespeare, construes the French theatre and the English from the outset as mirror images of one another. The earliest call for the establishment of a ‘Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre’, the pamphlet published by Effingham Wilson in 1848 which had urged the English to follow through from the preservation of Shakespeare's birthplace the previous year by setting up a subsidised national theatre to preserve the live performance of his plays, had already gestured towards an equation between this imagined English institution and its already realised French equivalent by its title, A House for Shakespeare, an allusion not just to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust but to la Maison de Molière. Aicard's presentation of a Comédie-Française sociétaire speaking to a Shakespeare presented as Molière's English equivalent seems to have made the same point in 1879 for those already convinced that England's national playwright needed a better home than the market forces of showbusiness were likely to provide without organised assistance. His prologue's iconography, furthermore, invokes and extends an existing English tradition of identifying the native dramatic tradition with Shakespeare through statuary: as I have shown elsewhere, any English theatre aspiring to present itself as the home of the legitimate native drama had felt obliged to display at very least a bust of Shakespeare since the time of David Garrick a century and more earlier, and such busts and statues had frequently been apostrophised in prologues designed to make the claim explicit. ¹¹ The most original feature of Aicard's prologue in this respect is that for once we meet the statues of two national playwrights during a prologue rather than only one. (It is worth pointing out, too, that it is unusual for its time as a Comédie-Française document willing to treat Molière and Shakespeare as equals: the company's official published annals down to the mid-twentieth century avoid mentioning the English playwright's name, listing the various versions of his plays which the company performed only under the names of their French translators.) ¹²

Aicard's poem is perhaps more interesting for the insights it thereby provides into a key moment in the cross-Channel development of theatre as an institution than it is as literary criticism. The actual Shakespeare plays it fleetingly evokes during the nine stanzas Got addresses to the English playwright's bust are exactly those one would expect a French romantic to mention – Hamlet, The Tempest, Othello (of which Aicard would publish his own translation in 1882), Macbeth, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet, with comedy and history represented only by a reference to Falstaff. (Shakespeare's dramatisations of Plutarch are cited without any reference to their titles, simply to establish his credentials as a proper classicist.) While Shakespeare is wild, insular and romantically Northern, Molière, addressed in a corresponding nine stanzas thereafter, is instead an exemplar of virtues which are at once of the classical period, of the Enlightenment, and of France:

LOVE, GRACE, LIGHT; Homer and Phidias received its lessons… ORDER, CALM, CLEARNESS, -- such is thy work, o MOLIÈRE, The image of a whole Race and a whole Art! (p. 12)

Despite the seniority of the English playwright, it is naturally the more perfect artist, the one for whom Got, speaking in French, can declaim with the most authority, who is in a position to confer his concluding approval on the other: to Shakspeare: Thou, SHAKSPEARE, England's immortal pride, MOLIÈRE hails thee! And FRANCE with him! (p. 14) Although the entire company were at the time guests in the ‘Land of Shakespeare’, it was the bust of Shakespeare which was the guest on the Gaiety's stage, surrounded by actors who were already clad in what the Saturday Review called ‘Moliere costumes’ just prior to their opening performance of Le Misanthrope. ¹³ Aicard's poem, however, seeks at its conclusion to redress any national bias by appealing to a transcendent artistic realm beyond nationalism itself: Above all the kingdoms of the earth, Above our Flags, extends one only Azure, One only Ether, one only ever pure Space, And this blue sky, which expands without frontiers, Is Ideal Art, – light, azure, and gay, – ART, the common land of freed minds, Where Love speaks best in sacred rhythms, Where the greatest are those whom Justice inspires, Where MOLIÈRE smiles – in glory – to SHAKSPEARE! (p. 18)

In the subsequent age of powered flight and aerial bombardment, this appeal to the sky above the fortified coasts of France and England (Whose high upreared and abutting fronts / The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder) as metaphor for a neutral common space of mutual artistic exchange would come to look touchingly inadequate. But for the moment it made a fitting conclusion to a prologue which might still be described, as it was by its first English reviewer, as ‘an address of great beauty’, or, as Sarcey put it, ‘ingénieuse et saissisante’. ¹⁴

Aicard's most distinctive contribution to the 1879 Gaiety Theatre season, however, another tribute of a sort to Shakespeare, was yet to come. On the last night of their London visit, 13 July 1879, the company performed a medley of what was mainly familiar, popular material – Théodore de Banville's one-act play Gringoire, the last act of Victor Hugo's Hernani, a recitation of François Coppée's poem ‘La Bénédiction’, and Edouard Pailleron's one-act comedy L’Etincelle. But the programme also included a new piece written especially for the occasion, Aicard's one-act play Davenant. If in ‘Molière à Shakspeare’ the Comédie-Française had greeted London by showing the English national playwright receiving the approval of Molière, in Davenant they bade London farewell by providing a vignette of a rather different aspect of Shakespeare's legacy to Molière's times.

Davenant probably owes something in its conception to Alexandre Duval's internationally successful Shakespeare Amoureux (1804), the first play to feature Shakespeare as its protagonist – and it remains, to the best of my knowledge, the only play to feature a teenaged William Davenant as its titular hero. It takes as its basis, as one English reviewer put it, ‘the story that Davenant was a natural son of Shakespeare's’ and, writing the eponymous role as a breeches part, Aicard apparently had two objects, ‘to pay a graceful tribute to Shakespeare, and to give a distinguished actress an opportunity for displaying the range of her powers in the various recitations from Shakespeare and the song put into young Davenant's mouth’. ¹⁵ The distinguished actress in question, however, Bernhardt, declined the part (preferring to display herself on this occasion only in Hernani), and it was instead played by Adéline Dudlay (who ‘declaimed with considerable energy, and was rewarded with no small share of applause’). ¹⁶ The play revolves around the realisation on the part of Davenant senior (played by Got) that young William's enthusiasm for the works of Shakespeare, and his concomitant desire to pursue a literary career of his own, is hereditary. In the end he excuses the boy from any further dutiful service to the family business at the Crown Tavern in Oxford and enables him to depart for London and thus for his future glory as Poet Laureate.

Aicard published the text of this play twenty years later, as William Davenant, when it formed part of a deliberately Shakespearean volume of dramatic materials which included ‘Molière à Shakspeare’ and his translation of Othello. ¹⁷ It was described so vividly after its sole known performance, however, by a slightly bemused and borderline sarcastic correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, that I will simply quote this contemporary eyewitness at length:

M. Jean Aicard lays his scene at the Crown Inn at Oxford, where young Davenant is discovered poring over a volume of Shakespeare and drinking in the music of his language. For him the precious volume on his knees is the idol of his dreams and his existence: he recites a soliloquy from Hamlet with impassioned fervour and, true to some instinct for which the lad cannot account, he longs to be in London in the world of theatres and literature. Old Davenant, the legal father of the boy, is anxious to discourage the ambitious longings of the stage-struck youth, and secretly sees with horror in this dramatic aspiration the confirmation of the sad secret buried with his dead wife. So matters might have gone on, the boy reciting, the old man grumbling, and a faithful servant Ketty endeavouring to pour oil upon the troubled waters, when a party of cavaliers come to the inn to break their fast and carouse. They have heard of the talent of young Davenant, and are no doubt primed with the details of the scandal, and, anxious to test the talent of the youth, they turn the conversation upon Shakespeare, and attempt to ridicule his pretensions as contrasted with Ben Jonson. Young William – whose name as pronounced in French caused so much amusement to the audience – only requires such a challenge as this to light his spirit, his ardour, and his enthusiasm. At once he picks up the gauntlet defiantly thrown down, and proceeds to persuade the company of Shakespeare's genius by means of the artful aid of illustration. With feverish impetuosity the generous boy throws himself heart and soul into his task, declaiming now the murder scene from ‘Macbeth’, and now the parting of passion from ‘Romeo and Juliet’, at one moment taking up a guitar and singing a love song, and at the next seizing a bottle and personating inebriety, to the delight of these gallant noblemen, from Lord Southampton to Lord Shaftesbury, who drink to Shakespeare's health and memory upstanding and with all the honours. But Lord Southampton desires to put his patronage to some practical proof, and accordingly offers to take young Davenant to the London of his dreams, in order to encourage the talent that is so strongly developed. Whereupon commences a curious process of introspection on the part of the old innkeeper, who cannot quite make up his mind as to his exact duty in the matter of the lad, who is legally his and mentally Shakespeare's. He is puzzled whether he ought to be very indignant at the burden or proud at the legacy: and he reflects that, if the boy is not his, he has never neglected his education nor denied him his volume of Shakespeare. After a somewhat humorous process of self-examination, old Davenant decides to send the ‘fils de Shakespeare’ to the great city, and to devote to literature the youth whose service he could legally command. ¹⁸

Only a French playwright of the time, surely, would be tactless enough to praise Shakespeare in front of a respectable audience of English Victorians by presenting the dramatist's alleged illegitimate son for their admiration. But Aicard's choice of subject-matter is wholly consonant with the sense of Shakespeare's literary characteristics expressed in ‘Molière à Shakspeare’: passionate, exceeding all rules, tempestuously overflowing all bounds, Aicard's Shakespeare exemplifies ‘the strong race’ of his country so powerfully that he is all England's unacknowledged father, not just William Davenant's (p. 6). Of course his love-child is naturally tragicomic (and to be played by a Cesario- or Cherubino-like cross-dresser for added emotional volatility to boot), someone whose muse modulates spontaneously in seconds from death to love to song to simulated drunkenness. If Aicard's prologue to the season had personified Shakespeare's genius via a bust, his parting one-act play personified that genius instead via a bastard. That English reviews were lukewarm was only to be expected. ‘It is curious as the only instance of a French play produced for the first time in England,’ observed one, ‘…but the play must rather be regarded as a little compliment on the occasion of departure than as a serious effort that can hope to occupy the stage of either country’: another, having complained about ‘the strange name of Ketty’, saw fit to quote Dr Johnson, ‘as to Davenant as a whole, it may be doubted whether it has “vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.”’ ¹⁹ A season that opened with ‘Molière à Shakspeare’ soaring high above the Manche seems to have concluded with Davenant falling into it with a muffled splash, never to be seen on stage again. But both remain rich and fascinating documents of Anglo-French cultural relations, and long may Cahiers Élisabéthains, amongst its other shining contributions to the study of Shakespeare's roles across Europe and the wider world, continue to do the same.