IT IS not often that a book on Shakespeare takes you unawares. After all, what is there possibly left to say that's new? John Pemble shatters such complacency. Not only does he tell a fascinating story, he tells it in crisp, coruscating prose. This isn't the latest academic fad, but a gripping tale of a struggle for cultural hegemony.

Shakespeare was virtually unknown in France until the 1720s, when Voltaire discovered him as part of his love affair with English science and philosophy. Soon the bard was an object of wonder. Quintessentially Anglo-Saxon, he was regarded as highly dangerous—an affront to French taste and the values of classical drama.

Racine and Corneille had dictated the norms under Louis XIV. They wrote in rhyming couplets, adhering to the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action, while avoiding subplots, bad language, violence and sex. There were no corpses in French tragedies, making Shakespeare seem vulgar in comparison. His plays had too many characters, too much variety of speech and action, were morally ambiguous, and (worst of all) were written in blank verse. They circulated in bowdlerised translations, but were meant solely for the page and not the stage.

The French Revolution had surprisingly little impact on the tastes of theatre audiences, which remained as conservative as before. It was, paradoxically, the rise of romantic opera with its love of gothic anguish and obsession with the Tudors that first nurtured ideas that “modern” adaptations could be extracted from Shakespeare's “barbarous” idioms.

Even then, the plays were gutted. “Hamlet”, “Romeo and Juliet” and “King Lear” were the first to be seen. But “Hamlet” had no ghost, no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, no players, no gravediggers, no fencing match and no dead hero at the end. In “Romeo and Juliet” the brawling, the ball, the nurse, Friar Laurence and the balcony were cut; after the first performance ended in a riot, the play was given a happy ending. In “King Lear”, likewise, there was neither a fool nor a catastrophe, since the protagonist regained his sanity and his throne.

In his most poignant and hilarious chapter, Mr Pemble shows how Desdemona's handkerchief triggered a battle for lexical political correctness. Mouchoir was a word that well-bred French people couldn't allow themselves to utter or hear in public. This one was “spotted with strawberries”, but fraises ranked even lower than mouchoir in the hierarchy of linguistic ill manners. It took a century for Desdemona's handkerchief to be called by its proper name, and as long again before any accurate rendering could be given of its decoration.

The breakthrough was André Gide's translation of “Hamlet”, which was staged in Paris in 1946. Despite the turmoil and lengthy interruptions that had afflicted Gide's own work, he ensured Shakespeare's elevation to cult status. Gide built on a sea-change in attitudes during the inter-war years that called for fully authentic versions of the plays, liberating Shakespeare from the romanticists and classicists alike.

Jean-Paul Sartre remarked how French writers had been “abruptly reintegrated into history” by the Nazi occupation. Their attitude to Shakespeare was transformed, since it could no longer be claimed that history had a clear moral purpose. Obsolete no longer, Shakespeare's “monstrous”, “chaotic”, “nihilist” style was the one that “modernity” demanded. This is not, Mr Pemble assures us, the whole explanation, but one thing is clear. By the late 1950s, Shakespeare had entered the French soul. No one who has seen the Comédie-Française perform his plays at the Salle Richelieu in Paris is likely to forget the special buzz in the audience, for the bard is the darling of France. This brilliant book tells us why tastes have so radically changed.