Victor Hugo vs Shakespeare: Masters of World Literature

If you ask a French person who the greatest writer of all time is, they’ll probably say Victor Hugo. Ask an English person the same question, and they’ll say Shakespeare without hesitation. These two men dominate their respective literatures like colossi. But beyond borders and centuries, they share something deeper: the ability to touch the human soul with words.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Victor Hugo (1802-1885) could never have met - two and a half centuries separate them. Yet Hugo passionately admired Shakespeare. He dedicated an entire book to him, considering him the greatest genius of literature. This admiration wasn’t one-sided: in a sense, Hugo is the French Shakespeare, and Shakespeare the English Hugo.

What makes a great writer? How did two men, in different languages and eras, manage to create works that still resonate today? That’s what we’re going to explore.

Two Lives, Two Eras

Shakespeare: The Mystery of Stratford

Surprisingly little is known about Shakespeare. He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small town in central England. His father was a glove maker and wool merchant, his mother came from a family of small landowners. He probably attended the local grammar school, where he learned Latin and discovered the classics.

At 18, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, already pregnant. They would have three children. Then, for several years, Shakespeare disappears from the records. What did he do? No one knows. When he reappears, it’s in London, as an actor and playwright.

And that’s where the mystery thickens. How could a provincial glove maker’s son, with no university education, have written the most sophisticated works in the English language? This question has fueled centuries of speculation. Some think Shakespeare didn’t write his plays, that he served as a front man for an aristocrat. But most scholars reject these theories.

What we know is that in about twenty years, Shakespeare wrote 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and a few long poems. He became wealthy, bought the finest house in Stratford, and retired to his hometown to die peacefully in 1616.

Hugo: The Romantic Titan

Victor Hugo, on the other hand, is no mystery. His life is a novel - several novels, even. He was born in 1802 in Besançon, son of one of Napoleon’s generals. His childhood was marked by travels, conflicts between his parents (his mother was a royalist, his father a Bonapartist), and astonishing literary precocity.

At 14, he wrote in his diary: “I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing.” At 17, he founded a literary magazine. At 20, he published his first collection of poetry and received a pension from the king. At 25, he was the leader of the Romantic movement. At 29, he published The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which made him famous throughout Europe.

But Hugo was not just a writer. He was a politician, elected to the National Assembly, then the Senate. When Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte staged his coup in 1851, Hugo went into exile. He would spend 19 years outside France, mainly in Jersey and Guernsey, from where he continued to write and thunder against “Napoleon the Little.”

It was in exile that he wrote his greatest works: Les Contemplations (after the tragic death of his daughter Léopoldine), Les Misérables, Toilers of the Sea. When he returned to France in 1870, it was in triumph. At his death in 1885, two million people followed his funeral procession. He is buried in the Panthéon.

Their Works: Two Universes

Shakespeare: Total Theatre

Shakespeare wrote for the stage. His plays were not meant to be read, but performed. And he explored every genre: comedy (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing), tragedy (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth), history play (Richard III, Henry V), late romance (The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale).

What strikes you about Shakespeare is the extraordinary diversity of his characters. Hamlet, the melancholy prince who cannot act. Lady Macbeth, the ambitious woman devoured by guilt. Falstaff, the fat knight, liar and lovable. Shylock, the humiliated Jewish merchant. Prospero, the magician who renounces his power. Each is an enigma, each is universal.

Shakespeare invented words. More than 1,700 neologisms are attributed to him: “assassination,” “bedroom,” “lonely,” “generous,” “gloomy”… He created expressions we still use today without knowing they came from him: “break the ice,” “wild goose chase,” “heart of gold,” “in a pickle.”

But above all, Shakespeare understood something fundamental about human beings. His characters are not types, allegories. They are complex, contradictory beings who doubt, who change, who resemble us. That’s why his plays continue to be performed, 400 years later.

Hugo: The Literary Ocean

Hugo wrote everything. Poems - thousands of poems, from the most intimate to the most epic. Novels - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Les Misérables, The Man Who Laughs, Ninety-Three. Plays - Hernani, Ruy Blas, Les Burgraves. Political essays, travel narratives, speeches, letters. His output is oceanic.

What characterizes Hugo is scope. Everything is grand about him: sentences, metaphors, emotions, ambitions. Les Misérables is 1,500 pages. It tells the life of Jean Valjean, but also the history of France, the Battle of Waterloo, the Paris sewers, the 1848 revolution. It’s a world-novel, a universe-novel.

Hugo is also the master of antithesis. He thinks in contrasts: good and evil, light and shadow, the sublime and the grotesque. In The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Quasimodo the ugly hunchback has a beautiful soul, while Frollo the handsome priest has a tortured soul. This technique, which he theorized in his preface to Cromwell, became his signature.

But Hugo is not just a stylist. He’s a visionary. He defended the abolition of the death penalty when it was unpopular. He advocated for universal education, women’s rights, the United States of Europe. Many of his battles have become realities.

Their Themes: The Human, Always the Human

Shakespeare: The Passions of the Soul

Shakespeare’s plays explore the great human passions: love (Romeo and Juliet), jealousy (Othello), ambition (Macbeth), revenge (Hamlet), madness (King Lear). But what makes these plays timeless is that they don’t give simple answers.

Take Hamlet. Is he mad or pretending? Is he right to want to avenge his father, or should he forgive? Why doesn’t he act? Shakespeare doesn’t tell us. He shows us a torn man, asking himself the same questions we do: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.”

Shakespeare doesn’t judge his characters. Even the villains have their logic, their humanity. Richard III is a tyrant, but his opening monologue makes us understand his suffering. Shylock is cruel, but his speech “Hath not a Jew eyes?” reminds us that he is also a victim.

This moral ambiguity is Shakespeare’s hallmark. He doesn’t preach, he shows. And by showing, he forces us to think, to question, to look at ourselves.

Hugo: Redemption and Justice

Hugo has a message. He believes in progress, redemption, justice. His novels are disguised pleas.

Les Misérables tells the transformation of Jean Valjean, a former convict who becomes a good man through the charity of a bishop. It’s a story of redemption, but also a denunciation of social injustice. Fantine, the mother who prostitutes herself to feed her daughter. Gavroche, the street kid who dies on the barricades. Cosette, the abused child who finally finds love. Each character embodies a misery, and Hugo wants us to see it.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is a meditation on beauty and ugliness, on threatened Gothic architecture, on the power of the Church. The Man Who Laughs denounces the English aristocracy. Ninety-Three explores the contradictions of the French Revolution.

Hugo doesn’t shy away from grand phrases, grand ideas, grand emotions. “Those who live are those who struggle.” “Form is the substance that rises to the surface.” “The future has several names. For the weak, it’s called the impossible. For the timid, the unknown. For thinkers and the brave, the ideal.”

Their Styles: Two Musics

Shakespeare: The Poetry of Blank Verse

Shakespeare writes mainly in blank verse - unrhymed iambic pentameters. This particular rhythm (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM) gives his dialogues a natural musicality, close to speech but more intense.

“To be, or not to be, that is the question” - five perfect iambic feet. This regularity creates an expectation that Shakespeare can then break for dramatic effects. When a character is troubled, the verse breaks. When he is calm, the verse flows.

Shakespeare also mixes registers. In the same play, you find high poetry and bawdy jokes, philosophical meditations and trivial insults. This variety reflects life itself, where the sublime meets the ridiculous.

His metaphors are often surprising, even violent. “Scotland bleeds under each new morning” (Macbeth). “Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care” (Macbeth again). “All the world’s a stage” (As You Like It). These images strike, stay, become proverbs.

Hugo: Epic Eloquence

Hugo writes in French, a very different language from English. Where Shakespeare plays on tonal accents, Hugo plays on alexandrines, rhymes, sonorities. His poetry is musical in another way - more solemn, more orchestral.

In his novels, Hugo deploys ample prose, with sometimes endless sentences, dizzying digressions. Les Misérables contains an entire chapter on Parisian slang, another on convents, another on sewers. These digressions can annoy, but they also create a feeling of totality, of exhaustiveness.

Hugo loves accumulations, enumerations, repetitions. “Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Dismal plain!” This technique, almost incantatory, gives his texts a hypnotic force. You don’t read Hugo like you read a detective novel - you let yourself be carried away by the flow.

His vocabulary is immense. He uses rare words, archaisms, neologisms. He doesn’t hesitate to mix registers, to go from the sublime to the trivial. But always with absolute mastery of rhythm and sound.

Their Legacies: Two Monuments

Shakespeare: The Western Canon

Shakespeare is probably the most performed author in the world. His plays are staged every day, somewhere on the planet, in every imaginable language. Hamlet has been translated into Klingon. King Lear was adapted into Japanese by Kurosawa (Ran). West Side Story is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet.

His influence on the English language is incalculable. Dozens of common expressions come from his plays. His vocabulary has permanently enriched the language. For an English speaker, not knowing Shakespeare is not knowing your own culture.

But Shakespeare is also universal. His themes - love, death, power, betrayal - touch all human beings. His characters live outside their historical context. You can stage Hamlet in Nazi Germany or in a modern office, and it still works.

Hugo: The Conscience of France

Hugo is the conscience of France. His battles - against the death penalty, for education, for the republic - have become national values. His phrases are quoted in political speeches, in textbooks, on monuments.

Les Misérables is one of the most adapted novels in history. The musical based on the book has been seen by over 70 million people. The character of Jean Valjean has entered the world’s collective imagination. When protesters sing “Do You Hear the People Sing?” in Hong Kong or Lebanon, they’re invoking Hugo without knowing it.

But Hugo is also controversial. His grandiloquence annoys some. His digressions tire. André Gide, when asked who was the greatest French poet, replied: “Victor Hugo, alas.” This ambivalence is part of his legacy.

What They Teach Us

The Art of Telling Stories

Shakespeare and Hugo are first and foremost storytellers. They know how to captivate an audience, create suspense, make people laugh and cry. Their techniques are different, but their goal is the same: to carry us away to another world.

With Shakespeare, it’s density. Every line counts, every word is weighed. The plays are short (two to three hours), but incredibly rich. You have to reread them, rewatch them, to grasp all their nuances.

With Hugo, it’s abundance. The novels are long, the descriptions luxuriant, the digressions numerous. But this profusion creates a feeling of total immersion. You don’t read Les Misérables, you live in it.

The Power of Words

Both authors believed in the power of words. Shakespeare shaped the English language. Hugo shaped French thought. Their phrases have become proverbs, mottos, slogans.

This power comes from their technical mastery. They knew the resources of their respective languages - the rhythms, the sounds, the ambiguities. But it also comes from their sincerity. They believed in what they wrote. Hamlet truly doubts, Jean Valjean truly suffers.

Humanity in All Its Complexity

What ultimately unites Shakespeare and Hugo is their humanism. They are interested in human beings in all their complexity - their greatness and their misery, their hopes and their despairs.

Shakespeare shows this complexity without judging. Hugo shows it while hoping. One is darker, the other brighter. But both remind us that literature, at bottom, has only one subject: us.

Conclusion: Two Stars, One Sky

Victor Hugo and William Shakespeare belong to that rarest category of writers who transcend their era and their language. Their works are not just national monuments - they are common goods of humanity.

Shakespeare gives us the most faithful mirror of the human soul. Hugo gives us the most powerful voice of social conscience. One dissects, the other proclaims. One doubts, the other hopes. Together, they cover the entire spectrum of human experience.

Must we choose between them? The English will say Shakespeare, the French will say Hugo, and all will be right. Because the real answer is that we need both. We need Shakespearean subtlety to understand our contradictions, and Hugolian eloquence to believe in our possibilities.

Four centuries after Shakespeare, two centuries after Hugo, their words continue to resonate. “To be or not to be.” “Les Misérables.” “All the world’s a stage.” “Those who live are those who struggle.” These phrases have entered our cultural DNA, and they won’t leave.

This is literary genius: creating words that outlive their author, stories that are passed down from generation to generation, characters that become more real than real people. Shakespeare and Hugo did it, each in their own way. And for that, humanity will be eternally grateful.