MEDIAPART

François Hollande seems to have gone a bit mad North-North-West. Casting about in that direction for inspiration (that way madness lies), he ascribed a ‘motivational’ soundbyte to Shakespeare: “They failed because they did not begin with a dream”. British newspapers fell over themselves to snigger at the gaffe. Obviously, this was not the work of controversial Elizabethan midlander, William Shakespeare, (or the Earl of Oxford, or Marlowe, or whoever), but the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, Nicholas Shakespeare. The platitude appears in his first novel, The Vision of Elena Silves (1989): a little-read book that might just up its sales as a result.

It was Hollande’s party colleague Arnaud Montebourg who first googled a hawk and hit a handsaw, we’re told, but the fact that the presidential candidate was also taken in is damning. There’s no way an Elizabethan dramatist would pen a line like that. I suppose we can’t expect a French speaker to realise that this use of ‘dream’ (to mean a grand aspiration) is an American innovation. If you’d asked an English speaker for an illustration a week ago, most would have quoted Martin Luther King. Others would have offered “The American Dream”. It’s not just the geography that’s off though, it’s the history. The sentiment is so post-romantic that nobody with a basic grounding in the European history of ideas should have been duped by the anachronism.

Let’s put that to one side. There’s something even more worrying at work. Hollande referred to this bit of vapid rhetoric as “(nevertheless) a universal law” and said that Shakespeare was “reminding” us of it. Besides the bombast, this is also a force-fed example of postmodern (gratuitous, self-referential) quotation within quotation. The French phrase ‘mise en abîme’ fits perfectly. The putative meta-quote recedes, abysmally, towards an impossible platonic idea. And it deconstructs itself as a speech act in the process. It reminds me of the declaration of love Richard Curtis puts in the quaintly tongue-tied mouth of Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, “In the words of David Cassidy, in fact, while he was still with the Partridge Family, ‘I think I love you’.” You’ve got to love that ‘in fact’. Hollande’s ‘pourtant’ (“la loi pourtant universelle”) isn’t quite so dreamy.

It’s the use of ‘Shakespeare’ that’s really tragic, though. Which is to say it really gets my goat. Hollande is by no means the worst of the offenders. The word has become a transcendental signifier in the mainstream Western media, used to render universal anything attributed to it. This only works because Shakespeare has been reified by anglophone culture. The fact that the British press so gleefully pounced on Hollande’s error is testament to that. What they failed to point out was the pleonastic nature of calling a Shakespeare quote a “universal law”. We all know that ‘Shakespeare’, in a political speech, is shorthand for ‘here comes a universal dictum’, and not (for example) ‘here comes a random scrap of popular drama first performed in early sixteenth century Southwark’ (South-South-East of the City of London), and certainly never ‘here comes a bit of a forgotten English novel about South America’. Hence all the schadenfreude.

And it’s the schadenfreude that should be analysed. It’s we (English commentators) who should be asking ourselves hard questions about the megalomania we’re maintaining by propping up the myth of Shakespearean universality. It’s all very well pricking a politician’s pretentious rhetoric with a bit of reference checking, but when we do so by reinforcing the transcendentalism of our own literary totem (and factotum), we reveal ourselves to be even more self-deluding. The man supposed to have considered himself “the onely Shake-scene in a countrey”, would not (pourtant) have missed the irony.