Barbarous Shakespeare

A couple of weeks ago, I quoted Frederick the Great’s judgment that Shakespeare’s plays were fit only for “savages of Canada,” what with their “jumble of lowliness and grandeur, of buffoonery and tragedy,” their sins “against all the rules of the theatre, rules which are not at all arbitrary.” Frederick was gentle with the Bard’s “bizarre errors,” since “the beginning of the arts is never the point of maturity.”

Frederick’s opinions were widely shared, both among the French-inspired courtly classes of Germany and among the French who inspired them. Norbert Elias, from whom these quotations come, points out that this was “the standard opinion of the French-speaking upper class of Europe.” Voltaire complained about the “barbarous irregularities” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but also gave a bit of backhanded praise: “It is only surprising that they are not more in a work composed in an age of ignorance by a man who did not even know Latin and had no teacher except his own genius.”