William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1864) is an experimental biography by Victor Hugo. Written while the poet was living in exile on the island of Guernsey, William Shakespeare was doomed to fail at its conception. Condemned by critics who expected Hugo to focus on the works of the Elizabethan playwright, William Shakespeare is in reality a sweeping biography of literature itself, a touching tribute to the spirit of creativity which defines humanity’s life on earth and beyond. “There are men, oceans in reality. These waves; this ebb and flow; this terrible go-and-come; this noise of every gust; these lights and shadows; these vegetations belonging to the gulf […] –all this can exist in one spirit; and then this spirit is called genius, and you have Aeschylus, you have Isaiah, you have Juvenal, you have Dante, you have Michael Angelo, you have Shakespeare; and looking at these minds is the same thing as to look at the ocean.” For a writer of Hugo’s stature, whose poems, plays, novels, and essays earned him a reputation on an international scale as one of the nineteenth century’s premier artists, there is always the chance that the myth will outlast the man, and that the work will fall victim to idolization. In William Shakespeare, he leans into this tendency to immortalize the artist while forgetting the art. Begun as a simple introduction to his son’s translation of Shakespeare’s works into French, the project ballooned into something much greater, allowing Hugo to meditate on the nature of creativity and to situate the contribution of one writer within the history of humanity itself.

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