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. This edition of Victor Hugo’s William Shakespeare is a classic work of French literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a French poet and novelist. Born in Besançon, Hugo was the son of a general who served in the Napoleonic army. Raised on the move, Hugo was taken with his family from one outpost to the next, eventually setting with his mother in Paris in 1803. In 1823, he published his first novel, launching a career that would earn him a reputation as a leading figure of French Romanticism. His Gothic novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) was a bestseller throughout Europe, inspiring the French government to restore the legendary cathedral to its former glory. During the reign of King Louis-Philippe, Hugo was elected to the National Assembly of the French Second Republic, where he spoke out against the death penalty and poverty while calling for public education and universal suffrage. Exiled during the rise of Napoleon III, Hugo lived in Guernsey from 1855 to 1870. During this time, he published his literary masterpiece Les Misérables (1862), a historical novel which has been adapted countless times for theater, film, and television. Towards the end of his life, he advocated for republicanism around Europe and across the globe, cementing his reputation as a defender of the people and earning a place at Paris’ Panthéon, where his remains were interred following his death from pneumonia. His final words, written on a note only days before his death, capture the depth of his belief in humanity: “To love is to act.”
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