Though the fact has often been deplored, it is perhaps a good thing for us, in France, that we have had no ‘classic’ translation of Shakespeare, comparable, for instance, with that by Schlegel and Tieck. Shakespeare in Germany, because of the lasting success of this remarkable version, tends to remain, as L. W. Forster puts it: ‘a member of the eighteenth-century classical tradition, an author of the “Goethezeit” on a par with Schiller and Goethe himself’. But no French translation has been good enough to naturalize the Elizabethan dramatist as a contemporary of Voltaire, or Victor Hugo, or Gide. Neither has the use of a kind of sixteenth-century idiom enabled learned translators like Derocquigny to turn him into the contemporary of Montaigne that he actually was. Shakespeare’s text does not belong to our past and we must therefore refer it to our present. With each new generation we have to conquer him anew, to render him in our own language for our own times.

At least we are challenged to do so. But we may wonder whether the task is not of special difficulty today, when French dramatic style is largely represented and influenced by writers who seem mostly intent on calling the bluff of language. Playwrights, who deal necessarily with the idiom of their day, cannot but reflect a situation in which an intemperate use of the written and the spoken word goes along with a growing sense of their untrustworthiness. Thus, in the plays of Beckett or Ionesco, language—having ceased to be of real use as a means of communication between people, or of people with themselves—proliferates like a senseless, and a threatening, object. Hence the impulse not only to denounce but also to destroy the menacing absurdity. In a way, it may seem the poet's first duty to shatter common speech—when it has hardened into lifeless phraseology—in order to make room for a new growth.