Pierre-Antoine of the Place

See also: Of the Place

Pierre-Antoine of the Place , born in 1707 with Calais and dead the May 14th 1793 with Paris, is a writer and Dramaturge French, first Traducteur of Shakespeare in French.

Raise with the college English Jesuit of Saint-Omer, Pierre-Antoine of the Place was obliged, while leaving the college, to recover to the study from the French, that it had désappris completely. Its first tests having been hardly noticed, it was warned to write in Paris which it had died: the news was inserted in the Feuilles of the Abbé Desfontaines, and if the stratagem, once discovered, lent to laughing at the expense of the author, it was used to him to draw it from its darkness. The English literature was then with the mode. The Place hastened to exploit this kind where it drew there most clearly of its income.

Having on the occasion to render a service to Madam de Pompadour, it obtained, thanks to her, the title of Secretary of the Académie of Arras and the privilege of the Mercure de France in 1760 but the subscriptions decreased so extremely, lasting its direction, which he had to withdraw towards 1767, by preserving, in consolation, a pension of 5.000 books.

After having resided several years at Brussels, it returned to put at the pledges booksellers. The Place first was also associated Beaumarchais in the creation of the Société of the dramatic authors.

But what returned it celebrates was its work, the English Theater , of which the first volume published in Paris in 1745.

In the first four volumes of its work, the Place wrote a speech on the English theater (as a foreword), an introduction to the life of Shakespeare, the translation of ten parts of Shakespeare ( Othello , Hamlet , Macbeth , Cymbeline , Jules César , Merry Gossips of Windsor , Timon of Athens , Antoine and Cléopâtre , Henri VI , and Richard III ), as well as the summaries twenty-six other parts of Shakespeare.

In four following volumes, the Place translated parts of Ben Jonson, Thomas Otway, Hughes, Edward Young, John Dryden, William Congreve, Nicholas Rowe, Thomas Southerne, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

If its work of translation were largely appreciated, it also attracted some enmities to him, in particular that of Voltaire, which appreciated neither Shakespeare (as testify its philosophical Lettres to it to 1734), nor the fact of seeing itself losing its place of single expert shakespearien on its side of the Manche.

According to the Toothing-stone, which wrote its life, he was “large hablor, but kind, flexible, active, and moreover man of pleasure and good expensive”; he says itself in his epitaph that:

Without fortune, in spite of the fate,

It enjoyed until death.

Pierre-Antoine of the Place wrote itself some parts, which however hardly had success. One did not need anything less than the strict order duke of Richelieu to force the actors to represent Adèle de Ponthieu . He wrote under various pen names, of which Skunk and Skupk.

Works

the English Theater (1746-1749)

Others

Pierre-Antoine of the Place was the back-back-back-small-wire of Pierre of the Place, philosopher and first president of the Cour of the assistances of Paris, assassinated with the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Sources

Ferdinand Hoefer, New universal biography , T. 40, Paris, Didot, 1862, p. 1862.

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