William Shakespeare — Reading Notes

Hugo's Shakespeare: A Portrait by Exaggeration

Hugo's method is to magnify. He describes Shakespeare's language as having "the sharp perfume of honey made by the vagabond bee without a hive." The playwright's drama "proceeds with a kind of distracted rhythm" and "staggers" because it is so vast. Hugo insists that Shakespeare "shudders at his own depth" and that "there is no genius without waves." These are not observations drawn from the plays themselves; they are Hugo's own Romantic ideal of the artist as a force of nature. The excerpts contain no direct quotation from Shakespeare's works—only Hugo's rhapsodic paraphrases. The reader should note that Hugo's Shakespeare is a construct, a mirror for Hugo's own aesthetic.

The Structure: From Biography to Cosmic Taxonomy

The book's table of contents reveals a peculiar architecture. Part I, Book I is titled "Shakespeare.—His Life," but the excerpts show that even this section begins with a description of Hugo's own house on a winter evening, not with Shakespeare's birth. The subsequent books abandon biography entirely: "Men of Genius" lists Homer, Job, Æschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, St. John, St. Paul, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. Part II includes chapters on "Zoilus as Eternal as Homer" and "The Minds and the Masses." The catalog subject "letters-speeches" is apt: the book is a series of orations. Hugo's organizing principle is not chronological but hierarchical, placing Shakespeare at the summit of a pantheon of "supreme spirits."

The Translator's Role and the English Address

The title page credits A. Baillot as translator, and the book is dedicated "TO ENGLAND" with the line: "I TELL ENGLAND THE TRUTH; BUT, AS A LAND ILLUSTRIOUS AND FREE, I ADMIRE HER, AND AS AN ASYLUM. I LOVE HER." This dedication, dated Hauteville House, 1864, frames the work as a political as well as literary gesture. Hugo, then in exile from France, positions himself as a truth-teller to a nation he admires. The translation itself is ornate, preserving Hugo's long sentences and exclamatory tone. The reader should be aware that the English text is a rendering of Hugo's French, not a direct study of Shakespeare's English. The book's style—with its rhetorical questions, apostrophes, and sweeping claims—is characteristic of Hugo's polemical writing.

Readers approaching this book should set aside expectations of a conventional biography or critical study. Hugo's William Shakespeare is a work of Romantic self-projection, in which the playwright becomes a symbol for the power of art to advance civilization. The most useful approach is to read it alongside Hugo's own novels and poems, noting the parallels in style and theme. The catalog subjects are a starting point, but the book's true subject is Victor Hugo's vision of genius.

There are evenings when Hugo’s torrent on Shakespeare feels less like criticism and more like a storm one is glad to be indoors for. That hunger for a single, stubborn voice—it lingers. I found something of that same solitary pulse in Where There is Nothing Being Volume I of Plays for an Irish Theatre — Edition Insights, though the weather there is quieter, more a coastal mist than a tempest.