This issue of TRO, about literature, is simultaneously about love—that tremendous, longed-for thing, that also ever-so-confusing thing. Aesthetic Realism is great on the subject: clear, critical, wide, kind. Aesthetic Realism, intellectually magnificent knowledge, is also, in my opinion, the most romantic knowledge that exists.

We publish here the final section of the 1973 lecture by Eli Siegel that we’ve been serializing: A French Critic Looks at Shakespeare, 1860. The purpose of this talk, he explained, was to have Shakespeare seen more deeply and truly through how a French critic wrote about and translated him. The critic is Alfred Mézières (1826-1915). There are Mézières’ French descriptions of characters and happenings, and his French translations of Shakespeare’s lines. Mr. Siegel, in turn, sight-translates those French versions into a purposely unpolished English. He does so in a way that has us feel the French. And through that and what he explains, we do indeed feel something large and new about not only Shakespeare but people and art.

In this final section of the lecture, Mr. Siegel quotes and comments on Mézières’ writing about Romeo and Juliet. Certainly, no two characters in world culture stand for love more than those two. Persons who never saw or read the play know the two names and know they represent love at its mightiest. So, looking at this drama of perhaps 1595, we have the subject of love. And also—because we’re looking at Shakespeare, who made those characters breathe, live, be immortal—we have that other subject: art, centrally poetry….more