French Renaissance and Baroque Drama

Text, Performance, Theory

Michael Meere

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781611497243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

The fifteen articles in this volume highlight the richness, diversity, and experimental nature of French and Francophone drama before the advent of what would become known as neoclassical French theater of the seventeenth century. In essays ranging from conventional stage plays (tragedies, comedies, pastoral, and mystery plays) to court ballets, royal entrances, and meta- and para-theatrical writings of the period from 1485 to 1640, French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory seeks to deepen and problematize our knowledge of texts, co-texts, and performances of drama from literary-historical, artistic, political, social, and religious perspectives. Moreover, many of the articles engage with contemporary theory and other disciplines to study this drama, including but not limited to psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, and performance theory. The diversity of the essays in their methodologies and objects of study, none of which is privileged over any other, bespeaks the various types of drama and the numerous ways we can study them.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes on Sources and Translations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE. Mystery Plays Reloaded: Performing Demonic Possession in the Histoires véritables
• CHAPTER TWO. Abraham sacrifiant and the End of Ethics
• CHAPTER THREE. Farce, Community, and the Performativity of Violence in Rabelais’s Quart Livre: The Chiquanous Episode
• CHAPTER FOUR. Calvinist “Comedie” and Conversion during the French Reformation: La comedie du Pape malade (1561) and La comedie du Monde malade et mal pensé (1568)
• CHAPTER FIVE. French Humanist Comedy in Search of an Audience: The Case of Jean de la Taille
• CHAPTER SIX. Rethinking the Politics of Court Spectacle: Performance and Diplomacy under the Valois
• CHAPTER SEVEN. Our Future Barbarism: Sacrifice, the Body, and Performance in Robert Garnier’s Greek Tragedies
• CHAPTER EIGHT. Courtroom Drama during the Wars of Religion: Robert Garnier and the Paris Parlement
• CHAPTER NINE. From the Politics of Performance to the Anthropology of Festivals: Montaigne’s “Of the Education of Children” (I.26) and “Of Coaches” (III.6)
• CHAPTER TEN. Too Late? The Drama of the Cannibals in Rouen
• CHAPTER ELEVEN. Red and Black, Pink and Green: Jacques de Fonteny’s Gay Pastoral Play
• CHAPTER TWELVE. Stage Designs of Cruelty: Theater in Rouen at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN. The Court Turned Inside Out: The Collapse of Dignity in Louis XIII’s Burlesque Ballets
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN. Poison in French Tragedy and Tragic Stories, 1600–1636
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN. Et in Arcadia alter egos: Playing Politics with Pastoral in Two French Baroque Dramas
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors