Part I · Video essay

This is the spoken text of the video essay. Read it aloud, or listen while following on the screen. Keep Carole’s voice: gratitude, precision, humility.

Everything I know, I owe to voices. The voices of my teachers, in classe prépa, and in the lecture halls of Bordeaux III, first and foremost among them, Professor Pierre Spriet. I can still see him opening bilingual editions with that quiet reverence for the text, teaching us to listen to the music of both English and French. It was in those classrooms that we encountered great minds like Northrop Frye, who spoke of « the educated imagination », the idea that literature does not lock us in an ivory tower, but opens our minds. As you prepare to enter hypokhâgne or take your first steps at university, remember this: those tireless torchbearers didn’t merely teach Elizabethan drama to pass exams. They passed on intellectual rigor, an unquenchable curiosity, and a profound love for humanity.

And then, there was Shakespeare. He finished teaching me everything. Through Othello, I saw how theatre itself is a trap, a mirror of a world where we believe what we are shown, just as Othello believes everything Iago stages before his eyes. As René Girard later revealed in A Theater of Envy (Shakespeare, les feux de l’envie), Shakespeare had laid bare the mechanics of mimetic desire, rivalry, and jealousy centuries before modern psychology. I understood every word on the page… even if, in real life, I didn’t always manage to heed its lessons. Because human beings remain fallible, and that is precisely why great literature matters: it holds up a mirror to our own fragility, centuries later.

You don’t study these texts just to stay locked in a library. I watched this magic breathe in 1984-85, in Stratford-upon-Avon. Stepping off the stage and into the Dirty Duck pub by the river Avon, there were no pedestals, no guarded turfs. There was Kenneth Branagh, burning up the stage as Henry V, alongside Alan Rickman, Frances Tomelty, Paul Marcus, then a young director… And among them, Ben Kingsley, a recent Academy Award winner, performing Othello within the ensemble, at Stratford and then at the Barbican in London, like a humble craftsman among his peers. I went to both RADA and the RSC in 1984-85. At the Royal Shakespeare Company, just as at RADA, only the love of the text ruled. Anything but stars. Being around those artists proved to me that true mastery doesn’t inflate the ego: it makes people better.

This heritage is alive because it is visceral. If theatre is a web of appearances, how does an actor avoid becoming a mere deceiver? By seeking inner truth. Without Shakespeare’s psychological depth, without that plunge into the abyss of the soul, Constantin Stanislavski would never have theorized the art of living a role. And without Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg would never have founded the Actors Studio. From the wooden stage of the Globe to the cinema you love today, it is the very same golden thread unwinding.

The magic still works, intact, burning bright. Shakespeare paved the way for all of it. Without him, where would literature be? Where would theatre be? Where would cinema be? He gave us everything. I am no one special, just someone whose entire life has been guided by a quiet, stubborn love for words, for texts, for both the English and the French languages. A love that led to no grand title, yet gave me everything. As you begin this demanding, thrilling journey, whether in prépa or in an English degree, remember: you are not just learning to analyze texts. You are learning to understand life. And thanks to those who taught me how to read him, that flame still beats within me, and now, it is yours to carry.