No, not the movie but a much older hit I’d never heard of, and you probably haven’t either. I’m reading Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power by Richard Stites (an always dependable writer), and on p. 146 I was taken aback by “Her [Alexandra Asenkova’s] debut in the popular Shakespeare in Love, alongside the famous Yakovlev as the bard, ushered this lower-class orphan not only into a career but into a state-owned apartment and into the high-toned society of the salons.” A little research showed that this must refer to Alexandre Duval’s 1804 Shakespeare amoureux, ou La pièce à l’étude, and the description I found in Paul Franssen’s Shakespeare in Love, 1804 ; or, Conquering the Continent with William (Cahiers Charles V 45 [2008]: 211-230) was so interesting (and funny) I thought it worth sharing. The abstract says:
In traditional accounts of Shakespeare’s reception on the European continent, Germany is usually seen as the great champion of authentic Shakespeare, whereas the French supposedly only wrote adverse criticism of his work, or otherwise butchered his texts in their neoclassical adaptations. In one respect, however, France did make a positive contribution to the international reception of Shakespeare : Alexandre Duval’s short comedy entitled Shakespeare Amoureux (1804), which was staged all over the Continent and translated into a dozen languages, introduced Europeans to the icon of Shakespeare as a man of flesh and blood. The article traces this play from its genesis to its reception, and investigates some of the various ways in which Duval’s portrayal of Shakespeare may have carried political overtones, from the original context in revolutionary France to its reception all over the Continent, sometimes many decades later.
Here’s the plot summary:
The play has three on-stage characters, and one off-stage. Shakespeare is in love with his star actress(!) currently appearing in his Richard III, called Clarence(!). But there is a rival: Lord Wilson, who remains off-stage. Wilson has enlisted Clarence’s chambermaid, called Anna, to persuade her mistress to choose him rather than the dramatist. Anna tries to drive a wedge between Shakespeare and her mistress. She keeps Shakespeare away from Clarence, and tells him that her mistress admires him, but cannot love him. To Clarence, who is in fact attracted to the dramatist, she extols the virtues of Lord Wilson, who will make a far better husband than a mere writer, she suggests. Shakespeare, at first ignorant of Anna’s double dealing, is bitterly disappointed; but then he becomes suspicious, and hides in a closet. In this way he overhears a conversation between Anna and her mistress, which reveals the chambermaid’s duplicity. When Anna has gone, he confronts Clarence directly, in the play’s climactic scene. He is consumed with jealousy of his rival, and even threatens to kill him. The play he is currently writing is Othello, so there is a moment of intertextual suspense, whether he might end up murdering Lord Wilson, or even Clarence herself, in his rage. Clarence, however, completely misunderstands the scene, believing his angry words to be a speech from Othello which he is acting out before her. Shakespeare manages to win the day by making Clarence jealous in turn. There is a new actress, he tells her, to whom he might give the leading roles in his future plays, and who might supplant Clarence in his affections. This makes Clarence aware of her own feelings for Shakespeare, and she accepts his proposal of marriage. Then, in the comic climax, Lord Wilson comes to the front door, also intending to propose to Clarence, and gives his name as Richard III. This is a password which had been arranged beforehand, for fear that the jealous dramatist might attack Lord Wilson; the latter has therefore been told to come to the house in disguise, and give a password. As Clarence is currently appearing in Richard III, that title has been chosen for the password. Shakespeare, now master of the situation, calls out of the window: “Richard III comes too late. William the Conqueror commands the fortress” (Penn Smith 1 14).
Franssen explains that this last jape is “the famous punch-line of an anecdote noted down in his diary by John Manningham, a law student, in an entry under 1602” and points out the anachronisms: “Duval seems ignorant of the phenomenon of boy actors, of the gender associated in English with the name Clarence, and in particular of the existence of Anne Hathaway, who has completely disappeared, leaving behind her only her first name in the person of the chambermaid Anna.” After discussion of the historical background, he says:
Although Duval’s little comedy is perhaps weak in the eyes of modem critics, not just in its anachronism, it was a great hit. Not so much in Paris, where it was booed on the first night; but afterwards, when the great actor Talma took it to the provinces, playing it in tandem with a French adaptation, probably by Ducis, of a Shakespeare play. Soon it travelled to the rest of Europe, first of all to those neighbouring countries that, in those years, were part of or allied with the French Empire. Thus far, it is only for Spain that the story of Duval’s reception has been described in any detail […].
It would be a mistake to see the Shakespeareomania that Duval’s play set off in Spain as an exception. In fact, the reception history of Duval’s play is far more extensive, reaching to the farthest-flung regions of Europe and even the United States. […]
Within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was apparently room for another translation in addition to Kurländer’s, into Czech, Zamilovany Shakespeare by Emanuel Chvátal, as late as 1887. Italy, too, fell for Duval’s comedy. […] Last but not least, there is an English translation, from the 1820s or 30s, by the American lawyer/playwright Richard Penn Smith, entitled Shakespeare in Love.
And we see that Russia too fell under Duval’s spell. I love finding out about these forgotten bits of history!
Typos are rare in the book, but I just discovered an unfortunate one in the epigraph to ch. 5 on p. 173:
“Ali Fafii” should be Ali Rafii (علی رفیعی); the error is an easy one to make and almost impossible to notice, but it’s too bad, because he’s a brave Iranian director who could use the attention, however minor. (The quote is presumably from this NY Times story, where it is a single sentence, but I’m not going to give Stites grief for that.)
The natural Shakespearean solution would have been to make Clarence a woman who disguises herself as a boy so she can play women on stage. Too bad Duval missed it.
(“Lord Wilson” is also kind of amusing. At least it’s not “Sir Wilson”.)
British PM Harold Wilson was a life peer, hence The Rt Hon The Lord Wilson (but not “Lord Wilson”).
Compare Dan Chaucer.
The relevant part of the John Manningham’s diary, dated 13 March, 1601 (not 1602, although 1602 actually appears to be the correct year), runs:
The new year didn’t start until March 25 then, so it was 1601 then but we’d call it 1602 now.
TR, but how could she put the coconuts in?
@Keith Ivey: Surprisingly, that does not appear to be the source of the discrepancy, since there are entries dated 1602 before that one.
Random diacritics are random! At least two of them are present…
Good catch — it was apparently an OCR error, and I’ve fixed it.
Incidentally, anyone who enjoys Shakespeare-based humor would do well to check out Upstart Crow — it regularly reduces my wife and me to helpless laughter.
Also zamilovaný – I finally looked it up to make sure it doesn’t have an í, with Czech you never know.
Upstart Crow sounds awesome, but I’d probably miss half the allusions…
I can’t do anything about zamilovany, it’s that way in the article. But if I ever mention it on my own hook, I’ll make sure it has the accent!
I saw David Mitchell and cast perform the live stage show of Upstart Crow in London this spring. It was excellent, even if the jokes about London commuting difficulties were lost on my Austrian son.
Lucky you!
it regularly reduces my wife and me to helpless laughter
Even this?
Ha! I must have been in a grumpy mood that day. Also, it’s different when you’re watching it and enjoying the flow of cod-Jacobethan minced forms than when you coldly consider it on its own as a specimen. But yes, we laugh at all that stuff.
My eye keeps wanting to make that title screen read “Vpstart Crow.”
I am a fan of David Mitchell, and I love the concept of Upstart Crow; however, after a few episodes I found it underwhelming. The laugh track was way too heavy, but mostly I just thought that a lot of the jokes were pretty weak.
Really? Huh, I guess people have different senses of humor — whodathunkit? I mean, sure, there are weak jokes, but I’m willing to go with the flow and trust that a better one will be along in a minute.
I can’t do anything about zamilovany, it’s that way in the article.
I’ve always considered your refusal to correct obvious literals in a quotation to be déformation professionelle. Whyever not fix them? In this case it’s probably not even a literal, it’s the lack of ý in the typesetting system.
The laugh track was way too heavy, but mostly I just thought that a lot of the jokes were pretty weak.
I think that’s a general principle: the more other people laugh, the less you want to.
John Cowan: I think that’s a general principle: the more other people laugh, the less you want to.
For people like you and I, I think you’re right. There seem to be plenty of extroverts for whom the opposite is true though. Otherwise, laugh tracks wouldn’t even work.
(On the topics of variability in humor and laughing when other people do, Martin Gardner wrote “The Horse on the Escalator.” The enigmatic joke the story refers to about a horse and a grapefruit is explained in The No-Sided Professor compilation.)
I’ve always considered your refusal to correct obvious literals in a quotation to be déformation professionelle.
Nobody understands the ethics of editing; it is our cross to bear. It is as wrong as wrong can be to alter something presented as a quote without an overt indication (and a [sic] would be absurd here); if you can’t see that, I can’t help you, but it’s true.
In fact, one of the tasks I imposed on myself as a book editor was to check quotes (when I had the time, of course) and make sure they were correct, which they rarely were. And by God I corrected them.
There seem to be plenty of extroverts for whom the opposite is true though. Otherwise, laugh tracks wouldn’t even work.
Laughter itself can be contagious. But just try prefixing your favorite joke with “I have to tell you the most amazing joke! ~~ laugh ~~ It’s so funny, you fall down on the floor laughing!!” I can pretty much guarantee your joke will fall flat.
It is as wrong as wrong can be to alter something presented as a quote without an overt indication
Well, Chicago says it’s fine to change misspellings, though MLA and APA disallow it. Here’s a summary of what can be silently altered and what can’t. All three allow you to change terminal periods and commas in the quoted material to be what the context demands, presumably because even though a comma or period is printed inside the closing quotation mark, it is logically outside (as computer folks[*] and non-Americans place it).
[*] My favorite example:
If you change this to:
the hapless reader will type dee-dee-dot, which deletes the current line and the following line, since “.” means “repeat the previous command”.
So don’t do that.
(See what I did there? Of course you do.)
“I am a fan of David Mitchell, and I love the concept of Upstart Crow; however, after a few episodes I found it underwhelming. The laugh track was way too heavy, but mostly I just thought that a lot of the jokes were pretty weak.”
+1
I don’t think extroversion is related. But then, it’s unusually easy to make me laugh in the first place, so maybe I’m an outlier…
+ 1
Great post — very interesting to learn about Duval’s Shakespeare amoureux !
Who are some other poets who had a second life as a character in folklore and literature? Offhand, I can think of Abu Nuwas, François Villon, Cyrano de Bergerac…
And Virgil, of course.
oscar wilde, george [gordon] byron, yehuda halevi…
I imagine some feature in jokes, as trios of bar patrons or residents of the afterworld.
@rozele: Yehuda Halevi? Where?
argh! the robots have eaten my post.
to try to reconstruct:
the locus classicus is heine’s 1851 “Jehuda ben Halevy”, but practically everything written about halevi’s life is pure folklore.
heine (and his many followers since) has halevi killed at the gates of jerusalem by a “saracen”. there are cairo geniza documents that show him on a performance tour in the eastern medterranean, and maybe show him dying while on the road. but that’s basically all that’s defensibly fact. the usual narrative of his repentant journey to the holy land is entirely based on reading the practically universal andalusi poetic trope of ‘renunciation of poetry’ as if it were biographical fact*, and then using that category mistake to impose an imaginary chronology on his poems (sometimes repeating the error by reading theological details of his anti-karaite polemic as somehow constituting biographical evidence). the idea that he died in palestine is unsupported, the idea that he died violently is pure fabrication, and if he happened to have been trying to, he’d’ve been hard-pressed to find an armed saracen in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.
i would bet that the martyrdom narrative is a later sanitizing substitution for the gossip and folklore that circulated during his life and immediately after. that most likely resembled the lore around byron or abu nuwas, given the actual contents of halevi’s diwan. the man wrote some fantastic piyyutim and kinot, but (like most rockstars) his fame was built on his much more numerous numbers about sex and drugs – given an added frisson by their use of religious language and themes (again, familiar from the likes of morrison, reed, and loaf, without even delving into heavy metal) – and on his riddle songs (compare fariña or zimmerman, if you want to keep on with maría menocal’s rock ‘n’ roll analogy (as you should)).
.
* ignoring, for instance, the geniza documents that place him in egypt, which include panegyrics to his hosts.
Antarah ibn Shaddad…
Significant cultural figures, including artists and writers, tend to inspire fan fiction about their lives. And having a flashy (Wilde, Hemingway) or enigmatic (Homer, Shakespeare, Dickinson) personal life tends to make someone more interesting and attractive to write about.
We actually know remarkably little about Virgil from a biographical standpoint.
But the basket story is true, right?
Ah, women and their uncanny power!
(Seems to be a widespread trope. I recall Alexandra Aikhenvald mentioning it as a common theme in Amazonian and Papuan cultures … that Phyllis woman turns up everywhere in men’s nightmares …)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_and_Aristotle
Pierre Gringore, Bob Dylan…
Huh, if I knew about him I’d forgotten: “A loosely fictionalized vision of Gringoire appears as an important character in Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame […]. He is probably best known from Hugo’s book, in which he was inspired by and bears some resemblance to the historical Gringoire.”
At first, I couldn’t find Virgil in the basket in the engraving. Seems to be a regular tease of that time, as in Breugel’s Fall of Icarus.
The “Where’s Waldo?” of the sixteenth century.
We actually know remarkably little about Virgil from a biographical standpoint.
Which is why (beyond the obvious) he is the chief secondary character in Le Guin’s last novel Lavinia. The Voiceless tells her story in counterpoint with her account of the semi-legendary character (though not yet a magus), on the ship that is taking him to Brindisi, dying of fever. When he tells her he is a poet, she doesn’t know the word, so he amends it to vates ‘foreteller, soothsayer’. She connected this at once with Vergil being Etruscan (“Mantua me genuit”). When he tells her the Fall of Troy as Aeneas (who has not yet appeared) told it to Dido, she thinks:
(Is this literary or genre fiction? I ask this question to annoy because I know it teases.)
From a 2008 email interview: Vergil was a mystery. People who could read him in Latin had been saying, for two thousand years, that Vergil is the best. But the translations didn’t amount to much. So what was it he was doing? The magic, the music, must be in his own words — his poetry. (It is.)