Location: NEASECS 2012, Wesleyan University, Middletown

Michael Dobson, Jonathan Bate and many others rightly argue that a resistance to French cultural dominance in a period marked by the Seven Years’ War contributed to Shakespeare’s status of “national poet”. This paper contends, however, that French culture and criticism played more than a purely adversarial role in the process. To show this, I will reread writings by two figures prominent in the establishment of Shakespeare as an English national icon: Elizabeth Montagu and David Garrick.

Although clearly a rejection of the writings of Voltaire, Montagu’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769) also displays, through extensive cross-reference and translation, its author’s mastery of French critical theory and culture, harnessing them to meet Voltaire on his own ground. Similarly, although Garrick hired a Voltaire-clown for the Stratford Jubilee, he too was no stranger to French stagecraft, and this paper will trace in his correspondence and adaptations of Shakespeare, an attitude to the future national poet that echoes the work and ideas of Garrick’s many French acquaintances: Diderot, Ducis, Patu, Noverre and others.

With its analysis of the cross-Channel roots of an English phenomenon, I will also shed light on a larger problem, revealing some of the foundations upon which the later ‘romantic Shakespeare‘ could become both an icon of Englishness and a European figurehead by the early decades of the nineteenth century.”