La Cohérence d'un texte: William Shakespeare de Victor Hugo

In the on-going debate between style and substance Hugo's William Shakespeare should take its proper place. In spite of the conventionality of the Romantic tenets and the oddity of the projected preface to the translations of Shakespeare's works, the text hides a philosophy of art and an ars poetica. In it Hugo promotes indirectly a textual ubiquity, in the manner of Shakespeare, but absorbed b a generative sense of the infinite, the powerful matrix that unifies, at the start, ideas, themes and forms and instructs a set of rational strategies. Consequently, the text presents itself as the willful reenactment of a man-made art and act of the Verb, i.e., of creativity itself. Hence the claim of truth inherent in all that bears the mark of genius, any great work of art being always, in Hugo's view, an "utopia" but a "true one." (In French) (EFJ)