plays at the Porte-Saint-Martin in 1822 were mobbed.  “The hisses and cat-calls began before the performance, of which it was impossible to hear a single word.  As soon as the actors appeared they were pelted with apples and eggs, and from time to time the audience called out to them to talk French, and shouted, ’A bas Shakspere! c’est un aide de camp du duc de Wellington.’” It will be remembered that in our own day the first representations of Wagner’s operas at Paris were interrupted with similar cries:  “Pas de Wagner!,” “A bas les Allemands!,” etc.

In 1827 Kemble’s company visited Paris and gave, in English, “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Othello,” and “The Merchant of Venice.”  Dumas went to see them and described the impression made upon him by Shakspere, in language identical with that which Goethe used about himself.[36] He was like a man born blind and suddenly restored to sight.  Dumas’ “Henry III.” (1829), a drame in the manner of Shakspere’s historical plays, though in prose, was the immediate result of this new vision.  English actors were in Paris again in 1828 and 1829; and in 1835 Macready presented “Hamlet,” “Othello,” and “Henry IV.” with great success.  Previous to these performances, the only opportunities that the French public had to judge of Shakspere’s dramas as acting plays were afforded by the wretched adaptations of Ducis and other stage carpenters.  Ducis had read Shakspere only in Letourneur’s very inadequate translation (revised by Guizot in 1821).  His “Hamlet” was played in 1769; “Macbeth,” 1784, “King John,” 1791; “Othello” (turned into a comedy), 1792.  Mercier’s “Timon” was given in 1794; and Dejaure’s “Imogenes”—­an “arrangement” of “Cymbeline”—­in 1796.  The romanticists labored to put their countrymen in possession of better versions of Shakspere.  Alfred de Vigny rendered “Othello” (1827), and Emile Deschamps, “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth.”

Stendhal interviewed a director of one of the French theatres and tried to persuade him that there would be money in it for any house which would have the courage to give a season of romantic tragedy.  But the director, who seemed to be a liberal-minded man, assured him that until some stage manager could be found rich enough to buy up the dramatic criticism of the Constitutionnel and two or three other newspapers, the law students and medical students, who were under the influence of those journals, would never suffer the play to get as far as the third act.  “If it were otherwise,” he said, “don’t you suppose that we would have tried Schiller’s ‘William Tell’?  The police would have cut out a quarter of it; one of our adapters another quarter; and what was left would reach a hundred representations, provided it could once secure three.”

To this the author replied that the immense majority of young society people had been converted to romanticism by the eloquence of M. Cousin.