William Shakespeare
Copyright© 2025 by Victor Hugo
Chapter 3
A genius is an accused man. As long as Æschylus lived, his life was a strife. His genius was contested, then he was persecuted, —a natural progression. According to Athenian practice, his private life was unveiled; he was traduced, slandered. A woman whom he had loved, Planesia, sister of Chrysilla, mistress of Pericles, has dishonoured herself in the eyes of posterity by the outrages that she publicly inflicted on Æschylus. People ascribed to him unnatural loves; people gave him, as well as Shakespeare, a Lord Southampton. His popularity was knocked to pieces. Then everything was charged to him as a crime, even his kindness to young poets, who respectfully offered to him their first laurels. It is curious to see this reproach constantly re-appearing. Pezay and St. Lambert repeat it in the eighteenth century:—
“Pourquoi, Voltaire, à ces auteurs
Qui t’adressent des vers flatteurs,
Répondre, en toutes tes missives,
Par des louanges excessives?”
Æschylus, living, was a kind of public target for all haters. Young, the ancient poets, Thespis and Phrynichus, were preferred to him. Old, the new ones, Sophocles and Euripides, were placed above him. At last he was brought before the Areopagus, and, according to Suidas, because the theatre tumbled down during one of his pieces; according to Ælian, because he had blasphemed, or, which is the same thing, had related the mysteries of Eleusis, he was exiled. He died in exile.
Then Lycurgus the orator cried, “We must raise a statue of bronze to Æschylus.”
Athens had expelled the man, but raised the statue.
Thus Shakespeare, through death, entered into oblivion; Æschylus into glory.
This glory, which was to have in the course of ages its phases, its eclipses, its ebbing and rising tides, was then dazzling. Greece remembered Salamis, where Æschylus had fought. The Areopagus itself was ashamed. It felt that it had been ungrateful toward the man who, in the “Orestias,” had paid to that tribunal the supreme honour of bringing before it Minerva and Apollo. Æschylus became, sacred. All the phratries had his bust, wreathed at first with bandolets, later on crowned with laurels. Aristophanes made him say in the “Frogs”: “I am dead, but my poetry liveth.” In the great Eleusinian days, the herald of the Areopagus blew the Tyrrhenian trumpet in honour of Æschylus. An official copy of his ninety-seven dramas was made at the expense of the republic, and placed under the special care of the recorder of Athens. The actors who played his pieces were obliged to go and collate their parts by this perfect and unique copy. Æschylus was made a second Homer. Æschylus had, likewise, his rhapsodists, who sang his verses at the festivals, holding in their hands a branch of myrtle.
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