French-fried Shakespeare

Voltaire praised him, but later came to see Shakespeare's popularity in France as the "end of the age of reason."

Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France by John Pemble looks at French attitudes towards Shakespeare from the 18th Century to the present. Reviewer Jonathan Bate, writing in the Telegraph says:

The French have always cared more for the authority of tradition than have the empirical English. That is one reason why they undergo revolutions – political and cultural – while we muddle happily through with evolution, surprising ourselves with our social mobility and cultural fluidity.

There is no better case in point than the drama. It may be argued with perfect seriousness that one of the reasons France had revolutions in 1789 and 1848 and Britain did not, is that they had Racine and we had Shakespeare

Shakespeare's vocabulary and his use of everyday language presented a major stumbling block to French translators.

The first complete translation was undertaken by Pierre Le Tourneur in the 18th century. He struggled not only with Desdemona's handkerchief, but also with Shakespeare's menagerie of metaphors. "How now, a rat?" asks Hamlet as Polonius stirs behind the arras. Rats were not allowed in French poetry, so Le Tourneur translates "Comment, un voleur?" ("What, a thief?").

...

Even in the 20th century problems of this sort persisted in more moderate form. "Distilled/Almost to a jelly with the act of fear" says Horatio in response to the ghost of old Hamlet. "Jelly is a French word (gelée) and it has the same sense in both languages," notes Pemble, but for the distinguished poet and translator Yves Bonnefoy "it seemed inappropriate for a French text because it had been lifted straight from life – as a Frenchman, he required language that was called 'noble' or 'literary'."