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  • French Reflections in the Shakespearean Tragic: Three Case Studies by Richard Hillman
  • Deanne Williams (bio)
French Reflections in the Shakespearean Tragic: Three Case Studies. By Richard Hillman. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012. Pp. viii + 236. $95.00 cloth, $24.95 paper (forthcoming).

How much French did Shakespeare know? Was his French rudimentary? Competent? Proficient? Was it good enough to handle his literary sources? Or was it just good enough to get him into trouble? Did Shakespeare’s audiences actually understand the French in his plays, as in the famous language lesson in Henry V? And what do we make of his connections to the French community in London? These questions have long troubled Shakespeare scholars and the answers to them have produced compelling arguments for Shakespeare’s status as cosmopolitan author, drawing inspiration from his continental counterparts.

French Reflections in the Shakespearean Tragic affirms Shakespeare’s proficiency in French and brings to light a set of cultural networks and fields of knowledge to which Shakespeare may have had access and on which he may have drawn. Seeking to move beyond the burden of proof required by claims that a text actually served as a Shakespeare source, Hillman instead examines a set of French texts that were in circulation during Shakespeare’s lifetime. He asserts that Shakespeare’s dependence on these texts range from the “virtually certain” (117) to “points of contact” whose connection to his plays cannot be proven and may be mere “coincidence” (122). In three chapters on Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, and All’s Well That Ends Well, Hillman explores the alternative meanings and perspectives that French texts produce in Shakespeare’s plays, comparing them to looking at an anamorphic painting.

The first chapter opens with a detailed account of Montaigne’s impact on the interpretation of Hamlet as a character of reflection. It proceeds to locate the play within a set of French sources dealing with the French wars of religion, reading Hamlet through the character and history of Antoine de Bourbon, Count of Vendôme and King of Navarre, who sought to acquire the throne of Denmark and [End Page 358] who was, like Hamlet, considered ineffectual and unstable. A discussion of the play’s relationship to François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques and other historical writings produces a similar reading of Gaston III, Count of Foix (also known as Gaston Phoebus) in connection to the murderous uncle Claudius.

Chapter 2 explores French treatments of Cleopatra by Robert Garnier, Étienne Jodelle, and Nicolas de Montreux, locating “two French Antonies” in French versions of this story—one steadfast and the other pleasure loving. It explains how English treatments of this material by Samuel Daniel; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; and Shakespeare claim and deploy this French heritage, which also includes Jacques Amyot’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives.

The third chapter justifies the inclusion of All’s Well That End’s Well for having set Shakespeare’s “tragic clock ticking” in 1603–4 (151). Moving beyond the play’s source material in Boccaccio and critical controversy concerning Shakespeare’s use of Antoine le Maçon’s translation of the Decameron, it produces a set of intertexts that include Symphorien Champier’s chivalric narrative, La vie de Bayard, Belleforest’s romance, La pastorale amovrevse, and the autobiographical Mémoires of Marguerite of Valois, with its tale of Hélène de Tournon. This chapter proposes that Roussillon refers not just to “the Catalan Roussillon” (171) but also to a village in Dauphiné, south of Lyon, and to the history of its local aristocracy: “In so far as Shakespeare and his audiences were concerned, then, the title of Count of Roussillon was a real one, pertaining to the perfectly material Roussillon of Dauphiné” (171). Thus, the Count of Roussillon becomes a source for Shakespeare’s Bertram, while Marguerite’s Hélène de Tournon provides a model for Helena (and perhaps even Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). And the name Lavatch is associated with the French expression, “Ah, la vache,” for which the author offers a possible translation: “All’s well that ends well.”

Arguing that “material referentiality” of these...

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