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Shakespeare’s Art of the Dervish: Voltaire, Elizabeth Montagu, and National Sentiment

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Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850

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Abstract

One of the most enduring legacies of eighteenth-century theatrical culture is the creation of the cult of Bardolatry, which made Shakespeare a representative of British national identity. Yet, in Elizabeth Montagu’s An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769), Shakespeare is compared to a dervish “throwing his soul into the body of another man” in an Orientalized framing of Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy. Montagu theorizes Shakespearean tragedy as the definitive English tragic mode in opposition to classical French tragedy, embodied by the writings of Voltaire. Montagu attributes to Shakespeare a greater sympathetic capacity than the French tragedians, more interested in formal imitation than the expression of feeling. But even as Shakespeare’s sympathy makes him English, it also Orientalizes him; he has the powers described in Oriental tales of not just imagining himself in the situations of others, but of co-opting their passions. Sympathy makes Shakespeare both profoundly English and almost magically Oriental, a cosmopolitan figure who gives Britain artistic legitimacy without the need for French mediation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Christian Biet, “French Tragedy during the Seventeenth Century: From Cruelty on a Scaffold to Poetic Distance on Stage,” in Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy, eds. Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 294–316.

  2. 2.

    See John D. Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999).

  3. 3.

    “Il est constant qu’il y a des préceptes, puisqu’il y a un art, mais il n’est pas constant quels ils sont,” Pierre Corneille, Discours de l’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique, quoted in Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder, 2.

  4. 4.

    Seventeenth-century French tragedy is referred to as neoclassical in English and called classical in French; they refer to the same genre and movement.

  5. 5.

    Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. William Aubry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969), 152.

  6. 6.

    Felicity Nussbaum, “The Challenge of Tragedy,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, eds. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 368–72.

  7. 7.

    Kathryn Prince, “Shakespeare and English Nationalism,” in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), 282.

  8. 8.

    These adaptations are William Duncombe’s Junius Brutus (1734); Aaron Hill’s Zara (1735), Alzira (1736), Merope (1749) and The Roman Revenge (1753); James Miller and John Hoadley’s Mahomet the Imposter (1744); Arthur Murphy’s The Orphan of China (1759), No One’s Enemy but His Own (1764), and Alzuma (1772); Charles Macklin’s The Man of the World (1766); George Colman the Elder’s The English Merchant (1767); Thomas Francklin’s Orestes (1769) and Matilda (1775); Dorothea Celesia’s Almida (1771); Joseph Cradock’s Zobeide (1771); and George Ayscough’s Semiramis (1776). See Harold Lawton Bruce, “Voltaire on the English Stage,” Modern Philology 8, no. 1 (1918): 1–152.

  9. 9.

    These include Zara, Alzira, Mahomet, The Orphan of China, Almida, Alzuma, Zobeide, and Semiramis. Tragedies based on Voltaire with classical or European settings are Junius Brutus, Roman Revenge, Orestes, Merope, and Matilda. Almida is set in Sicily under Saracen control, so I count it with the Oriental tragedies.

  10. 10.

    Elizabeth Eger, “‘Out Rushed a Female to Protect the Bard’: The Bluestocking Defense of Shakespeare,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, no. 1/2, Reconsidering the Bluestockings (2002): 127–51 and Fiona Ritchie’s Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  11. 11.

    Ritchie, Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, 55.

  12. 12.

    Eger, “The Bluestocking Defense of Shakespeare,” 151.

  13. 13.

    Martin Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Century (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), 39–40.

  14. 14.

    Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre, 23.

  15. 15.

    Voltaire arrived the year after the first edition of Alexander Pope’s The Works of Shakespear (1725), the second edited edition of Shakespeare’s work after Nicholas Rowe’s The Works of William Shakespear (1709). That year also saw the publication of Lewis Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored (1726).

  16. 16.

    Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre, 25–26.

  17. 17.

    Eric Gidal, “‘A gross and barbarous composition’: Melancholy, National Character, and the Critical Reception of Hamlet in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 39 (2010): 243.

  18. 18.

    Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets. With Some Remarks Upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire (London: J. Dodsley, Baker and Leigh, J. Walter, T. Cadell, J. Wilkie), 8.

  19. 19.

    Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. B, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara K. Lewalski, George Logan, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., 2012), 31.

  20. 20.

    Shakespeare as a domestic genius was also politically gendered, and many female critics emphasized how Shakespeare’s limited formal education and travel associated this English genius with the experiences of women. See Eger, “The Bluestocking Defense of Shakespeare,” 141–42.

  21. 21.

    Montagu, Essay on Shakespear, 31–32.

  22. 22.

    Montagu, An Essay on Shakespear, 3.

  23. 23.

    Jean I. Marsden, The Re-imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 16–17.

  24. 24.

    Voltaire, Oedipe, tragedie. Par Monsieur de Voltaire, (A Paris: Chez Pierre Ribou, Quay des Augustins, vis-à-vis la descente du Pont-Neuf, à l’Image saint Louis. Au Palais: Chez Pierre Huet, sur le second Perron de la Ste. Chapelle, au Soleil Levant. Jean Mazuel, au Palais, et Antoine-Urbain Coustelier, Quay des Augustins, 1719).

  25. 25.

    Jack Lynch, “Criticism of Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012) 54.

  26. 26.

    The Whitehall Evening Post; or, London Intelligencer, 21 October 1766.

  27. 27.

    James Miller and James Hoadley, Mahomet the Imposter. A Tragedy as it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane, by his Majesty’s Servants. By Mr. Voltaire (Edinburgh: Printed by J. Baillie and Company, 1755), prologue.

  28. 28.

    Aaron Hill, The Tragedy of Zara, As it is acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane. By His Majesty’s Servants (London, 1735), prologue, http://find.galegroup.com/ecco.

  29. 29.

    Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 173.

  30. 30.

    See Angelina Del Balzo, “The Sultan’s Tears in Zara, an Oriental Tragedy,” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 55, no. 3 (2015): 685–704.

  31. 31.

    John Pemble, Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005), 35–36.

  32. 32.

    R.W. Babcock, “The English Reaction against Voltaire’s Criticism of Shakespeare,” Studies in Philology 27, no. 4 (1930): 612.

  33. 33.

    Samuel Foote satirized Voltaire’s problems with Shakespeare in The Englishman Returned from Paris (1756), through the foppish aristocrat Buck who hates the “Blood and blank Verse” of English tragedy; see Prince, “Shakespeare and English Nationalism,” 284.

  34. 34.

    John R. Iverson, “The First French Literary Centenary: National Sentiment and the Molière Celebration of 1773,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 31 (2002): 150–51.

  35. 35.

    Pemble, Shakespeare Goes to Paris, xv.

  36. 36.

    George Ayscough, Semiramis, a Tragedy: as it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, in Pall-Mall, 1776), III.vi, p. 46.

  37. 37.

    [Stop, and respect my ashes, / When it is time, I will get you down there. The specter returns, and the mausoleum closes.] Voltaire, La tragédie de Sémiramis (Dublin: Imprimé chez S. Powell, en Crane-Lane, 1750), III.vi, p. 63. My translation.

  38. 38.

    William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. A tragedy. By William Shakespear. Collated with the best editions (London: Printed for the Company of Stationers, 1743), I.iii, p. 16.

  39. 39.

    Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre, 104.

  40. 40.

    Voltaire to Jean Baptiste Nicolas Formont, 29 May 1732, in Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Century, 42.

  41. 41.

    See Bridget Orr, “Empire, Sentiment, and Theatre,” in The Oxford Handbook of The Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, ed. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014), 621–37.

  42. 42.

    There is no record of a public performance of Voltaire’s text in London. The character of Seïde in Le fanatisme is renamed Zaphna in Miller’s English translation. Smith uses the former rather than the latter, which suggests a literary reading rather than an interpretation of a specific performance. Smith did visit Voltaire at Ferney in 1765, after the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For more on Smith’s relationship to French theater, see Deidre Dawson, “Is Sympathy so Surprising? Adam Smith and French Fictions of Sympathy,” Eighteenth-Century Life 15, no. 1 (1991): 147–61.

  43. 43.

    Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 177.

  44. 44.

    Margaret Cavendish, Letter 123 “On Shakespeare,” in Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice (Peterborough, ON, Broadview Press, 2004), 176–178.

  45. 45.

    Montagu, Essay on Shakespear, 37.

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  1. Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

    Angelina Del Balzo

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Correspondence to Angelina Del Balzo .

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  1. Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Malina Stefanovska

  2. Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Yinghui Wu

  3. UFR Lettres et Langues, Université de Tours, Tours, France

    Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge

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Del Balzo, A. (2021). Shakespeare’s Art of the Dervish: Voltaire, Elizabeth Montagu, and National Sentiment. In: Stefanovska, M., Wu, Y., de Weerdt-Pilorge, MP. (eds) Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_5

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