Location: ESRA 2013, Université de Montpellier

On 12th January 1784, Jean-François Ducis succeeded in bringing his version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the stage of the Comédie Française. This paper will analyse his ‘tradaptation’ of the original play, arguing that both its roots and subsequent evolution are predicated as much on the myth of the Shakespearean actor as on that of Shakespeare himself.

Since Ducis himself was unable to read the original English text of Macbeth, his early versions of the play rely on two principal sources: the Théâtre Anglois of Pierre-Antoine de la Place, and Ducis’ correspondence with David Garrick. My paper will show that the mixture of verse translation and prose summary that make up La Place’s partial version of Macbeth left Ducis with a collection of elliptical ‘beauties’ from the original work. It is these fragments that Ducis would then go on to weld into a new plot structure, one both responding to the same pressures of taste that brought La Place to summarise the English original as well as creating the conditions for a particularly Garrick-like Macbeth. Early manuscript drafts and amendments support this thesis, containing many precise stage directions, making the actors’ bodies and stage properties set the tone as much as what remains of Shakespeare’s original.

In response to audience shock and revulsion, Ducis continued to rewrite his Macbeth up to his death in 1816. As he did so, the tendencies of the 1780s are writ large: sections taken from La Place’s verse translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth are cut for, in David Golder’s words, “more action”; and  François-Joseph Talma takes the now famous role of Macbeth. The lure of Shakespeare is, of course, still present, but, even more clearly now, the Bard remains part of a distant mythical backdrop, whilst Ducis’ tradaptation brings the actors forward to electrify their public.