Roméo et Juliette

Long perceived as being in contradiction with the French theatrical tradition, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, like the whole of the foreign repertoire, reached us through the filter of its adaptations and translations. The authors who adapted his plays sought to reconcile the richness of the story with codes acceptable to an audience that, since Voltaire, had oscillated between fascination and repulsion towards Shakespeare.

The case of Romeo and Juliet at the Comédie-Française is particularly edifying in this respect; while the play has been very rarely performed there, with no new production between 1954 and 2015, the archives of the reading committee show that it was very frequently proposed by authors-adapters who wished to take on with the myth. Since the end of the eighteenth century, there have been numerous rewrites and adaptations, each author re-appropriating history and presenting his version to the reading committee of the Comédie-Française with mixed success. Jean-François Ducis began writing his tragedy “imitated from the English”. The play was first performed on the stage of the Comédie-Française on 27 July 1772: Montaigu was the true hero of this totally revised version of the tragedy, inspired both by Shakespeare and Dante.

A new production in 1827 closed after three performances. Not long after, the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet was at the centre of a quarrel between rival schools and played a prominent role in the lead-up to the “battle of Hernani”. Victor Hugo believed in the 1828 version of the play jointly written by Émile Deschamps and Alfred de Vigny, hoping that it would spark the Romantic revolution. The actors supported it overwhelmingly it but in the end it was the staunchly classicist version by Frédéric Soulié that entered the Repertoire in 1832. It was not performed beyond the premiere. While the story of Romeo and Juliet was immensely popular in the field of iconography, the actors did not dare to stage the play again. However, there were many requests from authors: no fewer than eight adaptations were proposed from 1852 to 1916. The comments of the manuscript readers speak volumes: the subject has been sufficiently “exploited”, “there is no reason to come back to it”. It was not until 1920 that the administrator Albert Carré commissioned a play by André Rivoire,Juliette et Roméo, staged the same year. Apart from the duels and bravura pieces, the play came across as very bland, no more than a literary exercise. In 1938, the version by Jean Sarment definitively took us away from free adaptation. He simplified the play while remaining faithful to the text and could boast that he finally brought the play into the Comédie-Française Repertoire in 1952. It was performed 68 times from 1952 to 1954 but not revived thereafter until 2015.