Shakespeare and the French.(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)

Aimee Boutin discusses the beginnings of French culture's embrace of Shakespeare in the early nineteenth century. Beginning with Hector Berlioz, she argues, French Romantics found in Shakespeare a powerful means of repudiating the aesthetic values of neoclassicism that had reigned in France since the Enlightenment. Most original in Boutin's essay is her argument that the French construed Shakespeare not only as powerfully evocative of sublime emotions but as feminine (though not female), and thus "helped construct the gendered aesthetics of French Romanticism." Discussing comments about Shakespeare in the writings of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Amable Tastu, and Louise Colet, …