Between accuracy and acceptability : Pierre-Antoine de La Place's translation of Othello in his Théâtre Anglois (1745-1749)

(eng) Although he is the first French man of letters who made the effort to translate several Shakespearean plays in their entirety in his Théâtre Anglois (1745-1749), Pierre-Antoine de La Place remains relatively unknown or merely known by reputation. His reputation is that of an abridger and inaccurate translator who adapted Shakespeare’s plays to make them suit the eighteenth-century French taste. The present study aims to investigate the origin of this negative reputation, but also to determine to what extent it actually reflects La Place’s translation method. Through a close and systematic analysis of his translation of Othello, this research ultimately seeks to provide an accurate assessment of his role in the introduction of Shakespeare into France. The first part of this thesis provides a brief survey of the reception of Othello in France in the eighteenth century while the second part is devoted to a close and comparative reading of La Place’s Othello. As a preliminary step, I focus on the paratext, including the Discours sur le Théâtre Anglois. Then, I analyse La Place’s translation choices in terms of representation, style, characterisation and plot, modelling them with the theoretical conception of translation as a form of (interlingual) quotations, as developed by Theo Hermans (2007). This research shows that La Place’s reputation was, in fact, mainly forged by Voltaire who lashed out at him as part of his war against Shakespeare and that his method is actually more complex than has generally been claimed. He indeed gave a French structure to the play and used narrative reports for passages that would not have been acceptable for an eighteenth-century French readership, but he virtually rendered the entire play – either mimetically or diegetically, and he purposefully retained certain typical features of the English theatre that he thought could enrich and, thereby, revitalise the declining French tragedy.