Letter XVIII

On Tragedy

The English already had a theater, as did the Spanish, when the French still had nothing but makeshift stages. Shakespeare, whom the English regard as a Sophocles, flourished at about the time of Lope de Vega: he created their theater. His genius was full of power and abundance, of nature and sublimity, without the least spark of good taste or the least knowledge of the rules. I shall tell you something rash but true: this author's merit has ruined the English theater. Such beautiful scenes, such grand and terrible passages, are scattered through his monstrous farces, called tragedies, that his plays have always enjoyed great success. Time, which alone establishes men's reputations, eventually makes even their faults respectable. After two hundred years, most of this author's strange and gigantic notions have acquired the right to pass for sublime. Modern authors have almost all copied him; but what succeeded in Shakespeare is hissed off the stage in them, and you may be sure that reverence for their predecessor grows as the moderns are despised. People fail to reflect that he should not be imitated; the failure of his imitators merely persuades them that he cannot be imitated.

You know that in the tragedy of the Moor of Venice, a very moving play, a husband strangles his wife onstage, and that, once the poor woman has been strangled, she cries out that she dies most unjustly. Nor are you unaware that in Hamlet gravediggers dig a grave while drinking, singing popular songs, and making jokes about the skulls they find, jokes suited to men of their trade. But what will surprise you is that such follies have been imitated. Under Charles II, in the reign of refinement and the age of the fine arts, Otway, in his Venice Preserved, introduces the senator Antonio and his courtesan Naki amid the horrors of the Marquis of Bedmar's conspiracy. Old Senator Antonio performs for his courtesan all the antics of a senile libertine, impotent and out of his mind: he imitates a bull and a dog, bites his mistress's legs, and receives kicks and lashes from her. These clownish scenes, fit for the lowest rabble, have been cut from Otway's play; but the jokes of the Roman shoemakers and cobblers, brought onstage with Brutus and Cassius, have been left in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

You will doubtless complain that those who have spoken to you so far of the English theater, and especially of the celebrated Shakespeare, have shown you only his errors, and that no one has translated any of those striking passages that plead for the pardon of all his faults. I shall reply that it is very easy to relate a poet's absurdities in prose, but very hard to translate his fine verse. Everyone who sets himself up as a critic of famous writers compiles volumes. I would rather have two pages that showed us a few beauties: for I shall always maintain, with all people of good taste, that there is more to gain from twelve lines of Homer and Virgil than from all the criticism written about those two great men.

I have ventured to translate a few passages from the best English poets: here is one by Shakespeare. Forgive the copy for the sake of the original, and always remember, when you look at a translation, that you see only a faint engraving of a beautiful painting.

I have chosen the soliloquy from the tragedy of Hamlet, which everybody knows, and which begins with these lines:

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

It is Hamlet, prince of Denmark, who speaks:

Stay; I must choose, and pass at once

From life to death, from being into nothingness.

Just gods! If gods there are, give light to my courage.

Must I grow old bent beneath the hand that wrongs me,

Endure my misery and fate, or end them both?

Who am I? What restrains me? And what is death?

It ends our ills; it is my sole refuge;

After long convulsions, it is a peaceful sleep;

We fall asleep, and all things die. But a dreadful waking

May perhaps succeed the sweetness of that sleep.

We are threatened; we are told this brief life

Is followed at once by everlasting torments.

O death! Fatal moment! Terrible eternity!

At your very name every heart freezes in fear.

Ah, without you who could endure this life,

Bless the hypocrisy of our powerful cheats,

Praise an unworthy mistress for her faults,

Crawl before a minister, worship his lofty station,

And bare the anguish of a beaten spirit

To thankless friends who turn their eyes away?

In such straits death would be too sweet;

But scruple speaks, and cries to us: “Stop.”

It forbids our hands this blessed killing of ourselves,

And turns a warrior hero into a timid Christian, etc.

After this piece of poetry, readers are asked to cast their eyes upon the literal translation:

To be or not to be, that is the question:

Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer

The stings and arrows of dreadful fortune,

Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles,

And, by opposing them, end them? To die, to sleep,

Nothing more; and by that sleep to say: We end

The heart's sorrows, and ten thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to; this is a consummation

Ardently to be desired. To die, to sleep:

To sleep, perhaps to dream? Ah, there lies the harm!

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,

When we have shed this mortal covering?

That is what gives us pause; that is the reason

That gives calamity so long a life:

For who would bear the blows and insults of time,

The wrongs of the oppressor, the proud man's scorn,

The anguish of rejected love, the delays of justice,

The insolence of high office, and the slights

That patient merit suffers from the unworthy man,

When he could settle his account

With a simple pin? Who would carry these burdens,

Sob and sweat beneath a wearying life?

But this fear of something after death,

That unknown country, from whose borders

No traveler returns, perplexes the will,

And makes us bear the ills we have

Rather than rush toward others we do not know.

Thus conscience makes cowards of us all;

Thus the natural color of resolve

Is dimmed by the pale shades of thought;

And enterprises of the greatest moment,

By this regard, turn their course awry

And lose the name of action…

Do not imagine that I have rendered the English here word for word. Woe to the makers of literal translations, who, by translating every word, drain the meaning of its strength! Here indeed one may say that the letter kills, and the spirit gives life.

Here is another passage from a famous English tragedian: Dryden, a poet of the time of Charles II, more prolific than judicious, whose reputation would be unblemished if he had written only a tenth of his works.

The passage begins this way:

When I consider life, it's all a cheat,

Yet fooled by hope men favor the deceit.

From schemes to regrets, from errors to desires,

Foolish mortals carry their folly everywhere.

Amid present sorrows and hoped-for pleasures,

We never live; we wait for life.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, we say, will fulfill our every wish;

Tomorrow comes and leaves us still more wretched.

What an illusion, alas, this care that consumes us!

Not one of us would wish to run his course again:

We curse the dawn of our first moments,

And still expect from the coming night

What the fairest of our days have promised us in vain, etc.

It is in such detached passages that the English tragedians have so far excelled. Their plays, almost all barbarous, devoid of decorum, order, and plausibility, show astonishing flashes amid that darkness. The style is too bombastic, too far from nature, too closely copied from the Hebrew writers, so full of Asiatic extravagance; yet the stilts of figurative language, on which English is raised so high, also lift the mind to great heights, though by an uneven path.

At times it seems that nature is not made in England as it is elsewhere. This same Dryden, in his farce Don Sebastian, King of Portugal, which he calls a tragedy, has an officer speak to the monarch as follows:

KING SEBASTIAN.

Do you not know me, insolent traitor?

ALONZO.

I know you very well, but not as—Who, me?

I know you very well, but not as my king.

You are no longer in Lisbon, where your contemptible court

Fed your heart's insufferable pride.

A heap of illustrious fools and titled rogues,

Fashionable beggars and gilded slaves,

Tickled your ear and bewitched your sight;

They stood around you in a circle, as around a statue;

Whenever you said a word, each craned his neck,

Hastening to applaud before he had heard you;

And that servile flock admired in silence

Your royal folly and your noble arrogance.

But now you are reduced to your true worth…

That speech is rather English; the play, moreover, is farcical. How can so much absurdity and sense, so much baseness and sublimity, be reconciled, our critics ask? Nothing is easier to understand: we must remember that men wrote these works. The Spanish stage has all the faults of the English, and perhaps none of its beauties. And honestly, what were the Greeks? What was Euripides, who in the same play paints so moving and noble a picture of Alcestis sacrificing herself for her husband, yet puts in the mouths of Admetus and his father childish inanities so crude that even the commentators are at a loss? Must one not be very bold to admit that Homer's sleep sometimes lasts a little long, and the dreams that fill it are rather insipid? It takes many centuries for good taste to be refined. Virgil among the Romans and Racine among the French were the first whose taste was always pure in their major works.

Mr. Addison was the first Englishman to write a sensible tragedy. I should pity him if he had put nothing into it but sense. His tragedy Cato is written from beginning to end with that vigorous, forceful elegance of which Corneille first offered us such fine examples in his uneven style. The play seems to me intended for an audience somewhat philosophical and thoroughly republican. I doubt our young ladies and dandies would have liked Cato in his dressing gown, reading Plato's dialogues and reflecting on the immortality of the soul. But those who rise above their nation's customs, prejudices, and weaknesses, who belong to all times and all countries, who prefer philosophical grandeur to declarations of love, will be glad to find here a copy, however imperfect, of this sublime passage: in this beautiful soliloquy of Cato's, Addison seems to have wanted to vie with Shakespeare. I shall translate one as I did the other, that is, with the freedom without which an effort to resemble the original would carry us too far from it. The substance is very faithful; I add few details. I have had to surpass him, since I could not equal him.

Yes, Plato, you speak truly; our soul is immortal;

A god speaks to it, a god lives within it.

Ah, without him, what would give rise to this great presentiment,

This distaste for false goods, this horror of nothingness?

I feel you draw me toward unending ages.

I shall break the chains of the world and of my senses,

And open, far from a body bound in mire,

The gates of life and eternity.

Eternity! What a comforting and terrible word!

O light! O cloud! O fearful depth!

What am I? Where am I? Where am I going? Where did I come from?

Into what new regions, what unknown world,

Will the moment of death plunge my being?

Where will this spirit be, which cannot know itself?

What do you prepare for me, dark abysses?

Come, if there is a god, Cato must be happy.

There is one, surely, and I am his work.

He himself impresses his image on the just man's heart.

He must vindicate his cause and punish the wicked.

But how? At what time? And in what universe?

Here virtue weeps, and audacity oppresses her;

Innocence on her knees offers her throat to crime:

Fortune rules here, and all follow her chariot.

This unhappy globe was formed for Caesar:

Let us hasten to leave this fatal prison:

I shall see you without shadow, O heavenly truth!

You hide from us in our days of sleep:

This life is a dream, and death an awakening.

In this tragedy of a patriot and a philosopher, the role of Cato seems to me above all one of the finest characters on any stage. Addison's Cato, I believe, stands far above Pierre Corneille's Cornelia: he is great throughout without bombast, while Cornelia's part, which is not even necessary to the play, smacks too much of declamation in places. She always wants to be a heroine; Cato never notices that he is a hero.

It is very sad that something so beautiful should not be a beautiful tragedy. Disjointed scenes that often leave the stage empty, overlong and artless asides, cold and insipid love affairs, a conspiracy that serves no purpose in the play, a certain Sempronius disguised and killed onstage: all this makes the celebrated tragedy of Cato a play our actors would never dare perform, even if we thought like Romans or Englishmen. The barbarism and irregularity of the London stage have penetrated even Addison's wisdom. I seem to see Czar Peter, who, as he reformed the Russians, still retained something of his upbringing and the customs of his country.

The custom of thrusting love into dramatic works at every opportunity traveled from Paris to London around the year 1660, along with our ribbons and wigs. Women, who adorn the performances there as they do here, will no longer tolerate being told of anything but love. Wise Addison had the soft-hearted complaisance to bend the severity of his character to the habits of his time, and spoiled a masterpiece by trying to please.

Since his day, plays have grown more regular, the public more demanding, and authors more correct and less daring. I have seen new plays that were very judicious, but cold. It seems that the English have thus far been made only to produce irregular beauties. Shakespeare's brilliant monsters please a thousand times more than modern good sense. The poetic genius of the English still resembles a thickly foliaged tree planted by nature, throwing out a thousand branches at random and growing unevenly but vigorously; it dies if you try to force its nature and trim it into one of the garden trees at Marly.

On Tragedy

The English already had a theater, as the Spanish did, when the French still had nothing but makeshift stages. Shakespeare, whom the English regard as a Sophocles, flourished around the time of Lope de Vega. He created their theater. He had a powerful and fertile imagination, a natural touch, and a gift for the sublime, but not a spark of good taste or the slightest knowledge of the rules. I will say something bold but true: this writer's talent ruined the English theater. His monstrous farces, which people call tragedies, contain scenes of such beauty and passages so grand and terrifying that his plays have always been staged to great success. Time alone establishes people's reputations, and in the end it makes their faults respectable. After two hundred years, most of this writer's strange, enormous ideas have gained the right to be called sublime. Nearly all modern writers have copied him. But what worked in Shakespeare gets booed in their plays. You can imagine how much more the public reveres this old writer as it comes to despise the modern ones. People do not stop to think that he should not be imitated. His imitators' failures merely persuade them that he cannot be imitated.

You know that in the very moving tragedy The Moor of Venice, a husband strangles his wife onstage. Once the poor woman has been strangled, she cries out that she is dying very unjustly. You also know that in Hamlet, gravediggers dig a grave while drinking, singing popular songs, and making jokes about the heads of dead people they come across, the sort of jokes suited to their trade. But what will surprise you is that people have imitated these absurdities. Under Charles II, whose reign was an age of refinement and fine art, Otway puts the senator Antonio and his courtesan Naki into Venice Preserved amid the horrors of the Marquis of Bedmar's conspiracy. The old senator Antonio plays every silly trick of a senile, impotent libertine with his courtesan. He pretends to be a bull and a dog. He bites his mistress's legs, and she kicks and whips him. These clownish scenes, made for the lowest rabble, have been cut from Otway's play. But Shakespeare's Julius Caesar still includes the jokes of Roman shoemakers and cobblers brought onstage with Brutus and Cassius.

You will surely complain that the people who have talked to you so far about the English theater, especially about the famous Shakespeare, have shown you only his mistakes. No one has translated any of the striking passages that make up for all his faults. I would answer that it is very easy to recount a poet's nonsense in prose, but very hard to translate his fine verse. All those who set themselves up as critics of famous writers compile volumes. I would rather have two pages that showed us a few beautiful passages. I will always insist, along with everyone of good taste, that we have more to gain from twelve lines of Homer and Virgil than from every critique ever written about those two great men.

I have ventured to translate a few passages from the best English poets. Here is one from Shakespeare. Forgive the copy for the sake of the original. Whenever you look at a translation, remember that you are looking at a faint print of a beautiful painting.

I have chosen the monologue from the tragedy Hamlet, which everyone knows and which begins with these lines:

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Hamlet, prince of Denmark, is speaking:

Wait; I must choose, and in a moment pass

From life to death, from being into nothing.

Just gods, if there are any, give me courage.

Must I grow old beneath the hand that wrongs me,

Endure my wretched fate, or end it now?

Who am I? What holds me back? And what is death?

The end of all our troubles, my one refuge;

After such long distress, a peaceful sleep.

We fall asleep, and everything dies. But perhaps

A terrible awakening follows that sweet sleep.

We are warned that this brief life is followed

At once by everlasting pain.

O death! Fatal moment! Frightening eternity!

Your very name freezes every heart with fear.

And without you, who could bear this life,

Praise the hypocrisy of powerful cheats,

Flatter the faults of an unworthy lover,

Grovel before a minister, worship his rank,

And show the pain of a crushed spirit

To ungrateful friends who look away?

Death would be too sweet amid these trials.

But our scruples speak and shout, “Stop.”

They forbid our hands that welcome act of self-killing

And turn a warrior hero into a timid Christian, etc.

After this passage of poetry, readers are asked to look at the literal translation:

To be or not to be: that is the question:

Is it nobler in the mind to suffer

The stings and arrows of dreadful fortune,

Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles

And, by resisting them, end them? To die, to sleep,

Nothing more, and by that sleep to say: We end

The pains of the heart and ten thousand natural shocks

That flesh inherits. This is an ending

We should long for. To die, to sleep:

To sleep, perhaps to dream? Ah, there is the problem!

For what dreams will come in that sleep of death

When we have cast off this mortal covering?

That gives us pause; that is the reason

Why misery lasts so long:

For who would bear the blows and insults of time,

The wrongs of an oppressor, the scorn of the proud,

The anguish of rejected love, the delays of justice,

The insolence of people in high office, and the insults

That patient merit takes from the unworthy,

When a person could settle the account

With a simple pin? Who would carry these burdens,

Sobbing and sweating through a weary life?

But the fear of something after death,

That unknown country from whose borders

No traveler returns, confuses our will

And makes us bear the troubles we have

Rather than run toward others we do not know.

Thus conscience makes cowards of us all;

Thus the natural color of resolve

Is dulled by the pale shades of thought;

And the most important enterprises,

Through this hesitation, are diverted from their course

And lose the name of action…

Do not think I have translated the English word for word here. Pity those who make literal translations: they translate each word and drain the meaning of its strength! Here, if anywhere, we can say that the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

Here is another passage from a famous English tragedian. It is by Dryden, a poet of Charles II's time, more prolific than discerning. His reputation would be spotless if he had written only a tenth of his works.

The passage begins like this:

When I consider life, it's all a cheat,

Yet fooled by hope men favor the deceit.

From plans to regrets, from mistakes to desires,

Foolish mortals carry their folly around.

Amid present troubles, hoping for pleasure,

We never live; we wait for life to begin.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, we say, will grant our every wish;

Tomorrow comes and leaves us unhappier still.

What a mistake, alas, to let care consume us!

None of us would want to start our course again:

We curse the dawn of our earliest days,

Yet we still expect from the coming night

What the best of our days promised us in vain, etc.

So far, English tragedians have excelled in these isolated passages. Nearly all their plays are barbaric, lacking propriety, order, and plausibility. Yet surprising flashes of light break through the darkness. Their style is too inflated, too far from nature, too closely copied from Hebrew writers, who are so full of Asian extravagance. But the stilts of figurative language that lift English so unnaturally also raise the mind very high, even if its steps are uneven.

At times nature itself seems to work differently in England than elsewhere. In his farce Don Sebastian, King of Portugal, which he calls a tragedy, Dryden has an officer speak to that monarch like this:

KING SEBASTIAN.

Don't you know me, insolent traitor?

ALONZE.

Me? I know you very well, but not as my king.

You are no longer in Lisbon, where your contemptible court

Fed your heart's unbearable pride.

A mob of celebrated fools and titled crooks,

Fashionable beggars and slaves dressed in gold,

Flattered your ears and dazzled your eyes.

They stood around you in a circle, as around a statue.

When you said a word, everyone strained to applaud

Before even hearing what you said.

And that servile flock silently admired

Your royal stupidity and noble arrogance.

But now you are reduced to what you're really worth…

That speech is a little English, and the play as a whole is ridiculous. How, our critics ask, can so much absurdity coexist with so much good sense, so much vulgarity with such greatness? Nothing is easier to understand: remember that human beings wrote these plays. The Spanish stage has all the faults of the English one, and perhaps none of its beauties. And honestly, what about the Greeks? What about Euripides? In the same play, he paints so moving and noble a picture of Alcestis sacrificing herself for her husband, yet puts such crude childish talk into the mouths of Admetus and his father that even the commentators are at a loss. You have to be very bold not to find that Homer sometimes sleeps a little too long, and that the dreams he has while sleeping are rather dull. It takes many centuries for good taste to become refined. Among the Romans, Virgil was the first, and among the French, Racine, whose taste remained pure throughout their great works.

Mr. Addison is the first Englishman to have written a sensible tragedy. I would feel sorry for him if he had put nothing but sense into it. His tragedy Cato is written from beginning to end with the strong, vigorous elegance of which Corneille first gave us such fine examples in his uneven style. This play seems to me made for a somewhat philosophical and deeply republican audience. I doubt our young ladies and fashionable young men would have liked Cato in his dressing gown, reading Plato's dialogues and reflecting on the immortality of the soul. But people who rise above the customs, prejudices, and weaknesses of their nation, who belong to all ages and all countries, and who prefer philosophical greatness to declarations of love, will be glad to find here a copy, imperfect though it is, of this sublime passage. In this fine monologue of Cato's, Addison seems to have wanted to rival Shakespeare. I will translate one as I translated the other: freely. Trying too hard to resemble the original would take me too far from it. The basic meaning is very faithful; I add few details. I had to go further than he did because I could not equal him.

Yes, Plato, you speak the truth; our soul is immortal.

A god speaks to it, a god living within it.

Without him, where would this great feeling come from,

This dislike of false goods, this fear of nothingness?

I feel you drawing me toward endless ages.

I will break the chains of the world and of my senses

And, far from a body stuck in the mud, open

The gates of life and eternity.

Eternity! What a comforting and frightening word!

O light! O cloud! O dreadful depth!

What am I? Where am I? Where am I going? Where did I come from?

Into what new lands, what unknown world,

Will the moment of death plunge my being?

Where will this spirit be, which cannot know itself?

What do you hold for me, dark abysses?

Come, if there is a god, Cato must find happiness.

There certainly is one, and I am his creation.

He himself stamps his image on the heart of the just.

He must defend his cause and punish the wicked.

But how? When? And in what universe?

Here virtue weeps, and the bold oppress it;

Innocence kneels and offers its throat to crime.

Fortune rules here, and everything follows her chariot.

This unhappy world was made for Caesar.

Let us hurry out of this deadly prison:

I shall see you without shadows, heavenly truth!

You hide from us during our days of sleep.

This life is a dream, and death an awakening.

In this tragedy about a patriot and philosopher, Cato's role seems to me one of the finest characters on any stage. I think Addison's Cato is far superior to Pierre Corneille's Cornelia. He is great at every moment without being pompous. Cornelia's role, besides being unnecessary to the play, sounds too much like grandstanding in places. She always wants to be a heroine, but Cato never realizes he is a hero.

It is very sad that something so beautiful is not a beautiful tragedy. Disconnected scenes that often leave the stage empty, long and clumsy asides, cold and dull love affairs, a conspiracy that adds nothing to the play, and a certain Sempronius who is disguised and killed onstage: all these make the famous tragedy Cato a play our actors would never dare perform, even if we thought like the Romans or the English. The barbarity and irregularity of the London stage have found their way into Addison's good sense. I seem to see Tsar Peter, who still kept something of his upbringing and his country's customs even as he reformed the Russians.

The custom of putting love into dramatic works whether it belongs there or not traveled from Paris to London around the year 1660, along with our ribbons and wigs. Women, who adorn the theater there as they do here, no longer want to hear about anything but love. The wise Addison weakly gave in to the tastes of his time, bending his stern nature and spoiling a masterpiece because he wanted to please.

Since then, plays have become more orderly, audiences more demanding, and writers more correct but less daring. I have seen new plays that are very sensible but cold. So far the English seem fit only to produce irregular beauties. Shakespeare's brilliant monsters please people a thousand times more than modern restraint. Up to now the English poetic genius has been like a dense tree planted by nature. It throws out a thousand branches at random and grows strongly but unevenly. It dies if you try to change its nature and prune it into one of the garden trees at Marly.