Gurik and Garneau had cut Shakespeare's plays from their source literary system to a certain extent through tradaptation, which was the "norm" in Québec until the late 1980s (Beddows 2000: 11). Maillet, like those translators of the Shakespearean spring, would do the opposite. In terms of Toury's "initial norms", which involve the relationship between "at least two sets of norm-systems" (Toury 1995: 56–57), Gurik and Garneau had opted for "acceptable translations" that minimized the foreignness of Shakespeare's plots, settings and language. However their respective, and very different, translation projects went beyond contesting the authority of Québec’s traditional colonial masters by subverting their literary conventions and norms; these playwrights set out to create new literary and discursive norms for a culturally autonomous francophone Québec. For her part, Maillet opted for "adequate translation", deciding to put greater emphasis on the norms of the source literary tradition, or more precisely the norms that had been bequeathed to future generations by the canonized Elizabethan playwright whom she personally admires, in her words "l'un des plus grands auteurs de tous les temps" (Maillet 1991: 7). However, as we have already seen, the stage was already set for this translation strategy; in fact, Maillet would appear to be conforming, at least to some extent, to the dominant literary and translation trends of the period.

In addition to the initial norms that we just looked at, operational norms enter into the equation. Different British and French literary conventions call upon norms that govern decisions taken by the translator during the translation process. In fact Maillet's translation of Richard III was criticized for having distributed certain linguistic elements in conformity with target norms instead of source norms. This criticism marks a stark contrast to the enthusiastic reception of Garneau's Macbeth, which cut scenes deemed unnecessary and which, more often than not, changed Scots cultural references to Québec ones. Theatre translation norms, at least when it comes to translating Shakespeare, would then appear to have evolved by the end of the 1980s. However, the questions to be considered here are (1) whether this evolution was a response to changes in the "general values or ideas shared by a community— as to what is right and wrong, adequate and inadequate" (Toury 1995: 54), and (2) how Antonine Maillet reacted to these "values and ideas".

During the late 1980s there would appear to have been growing institutional support for unadulterated Shakespeare. First, Shakespeare's literary status in France, and, by extension, in Québec was undoubtedly bolstered thanks to the interest shown in the bard's dramatic literature by, among others, the Sorbonne's Centre de recherches en traduction et stylistique comparée de l'anglais et du français. The Centre published one issue of Palimpsestes in 1987 (translating dialogue) and two issues in 1990 (one on retranslating and one on translation/adaptation) that included at least one article on translating Shakespeare. Second, Charlotte Melançon's translation Shakespeare et son théâtre [Northrop Frye on Shakespeare] was published by Montréal's Éditions du Boréal in 1988 and honored the same year by the Association of Literary Translators of Canada with the John Glassco Prize for Literary Translation. It seems probable that a confluence of institutional support for the "real" Shakespeare contributed to the transformation of norms "into performance instructions appropriate for and applicable to particular situations, specifying what is prescribed and forbidden as well as what is tolerated and permitted in a certain behavioural dimension" (Toury 1995: 54–55). Translators were put in the position where they could conform to or reject these new "performance instructions".

Antonine Maillet clearly admires Shakespeare. Furthermore, institutional support for source-oriented translation would have reassured a translator who apparently prefers to follow literary trends. These factors come into play when we consider Maillet's mental processes or her "habitus", that is, "the elaborate result of a personalized social and cultural history" (Simeoni 1998: 32). The Acadian translator also greatly admires Rabelais, a bawdy pre-classicist French writer who was more or less a contemporary of the bawdy bard. A variation of Rabelais's French could conceivably be used to render Shakespeare's English. Maillet's preparatory work on Rabelais's French was done when she earned a doctorate at Université Laval; the topic of her dissertation was Rabelais and the lineage of Acadian language and culture. Her linguistic mastery and scholarly bent had prepared her well to meet the challenges of reproducing

Shakespeare in French. Another factor to consider could be, specifically, the writer/translator's apparent inclination to conform to literary and translation trends, as her Bourgeois gentleman (1978) and Évangeline deusse (1975) appear to demonstrate when considered in their literary context.