MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly

Boutin, Aimeé, 1970-
Shakespeare, Women, and French Romanticism
MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly - Volume 65, Number 4, December 2004, pp. 505-529

Duke University Press

Aimee Boutin - Shakespeare, Women, and French Romanticism - MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 65:4 MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 65.4 (2004) 505-529 Shakespeare, Women, and French Romanticism Aimée Boutin Shakespeare, coming upon me unawares, struck me like a thunderbolt. The lightning flash of that sublime discovery opened before me at a stroke the whole heaven of art, illuminating it to its remotest depths. I recognized the meaning of dramatic grandeur, beauty and truth. At the same time I saw the utter absurdity of the French view of Shakespeare" (Shakespeare, en tombant ainsi sur moi à l'improviste, me foudroya. Son éclair, en m'ouvrant le ciel de l'art avec un fracas sublime, m'en illumina les plus lointaines profondeurs. Je reconnus la vraie grandeur, la vraie beauté, la vraie vérité dramatiques. Je mesurai en même temps l'immense ridicule des idées répandues en France sur Shakespeare). So wrote Hector Berlioz after witnessing his first Shakespearean performance in 1827. The love-struck composer filtered his admiration for the English playwright through an infatuation with Ophelia, performed by Harriet Smithson. For an entire generation of Romantics, from François Guizot to George Sand to Eugène Delacroix, Shakespeare's women provided the pretext for confronting the tenets of French neoclassicism. As part of the terrain on which neoclassical and Romantic aesthetics vied for supremacy, adaptations and writings about the heroines by men and women...