Is it more difficult to translate Shakespeare into French than into other languages? Usually answered in the affirmative as by André Gide in 1946, this question is examined using a series of French translations of Hamlet's monologue on suicide, beginning with Voltaire and ending with Bonnefoy. It seems more probable that the specifically French tradition of the "belles infidèles", those rhetorically styled and elegant transatlions of the classical era, is the reason for the difficulties French translators have in rendering Shakespeare. The problem, however, is hardly greater in French than, for instance, in German, where the example of SchlegeTieck weighs as heavily on modern translators.