French Renaissance Tragedy: The Dramatic Word

Cambridge Studies in French

FRENCH RENAISSANCE TRAGEDY

Cambridge Studies in French General editor: MALCOLM BOWIE Recent titles in this series include: DALIA JUDOVITZ Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity RICHARD D. E. BURTON Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity MICHAEL MORIARTY

Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France JOHN FORRESTER The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida JEROME SCHWARTZ Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion DAVID BAGULEY Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision LESLIE HILL Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words F. W. LEAKEY Baudelaire: Collected Essays, 1953-1988 SARAH KAY Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry For a full list of books in the series, see the last pages in this volume.

Tragic stage-design {scena tragica) from Sebastiano Serlio's De architectura libri quinque (Venice, 1569), reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

FRENCH RENAISSANCE TRAGEDY THE DRAMATIC WORD

GILLIAN JONDORF Fellow of Girton College and Lecturer in French in the University of Cambridge

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521360142 © Cambridge University Press 1990 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1990 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Jondorf, Gillian. French Renaissance tragedy: the dramatic word / Gillian Jondorf. p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in French) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 521 36014 5 1. French drama — 16th century — History and criticism. 2. French drama (Tragedy) - History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PQ523J59 1990 842'.05120903-dc20 89-78350 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-36014-2 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-36014-5 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521 -02558-4 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-02558-3 paperback

In memoriam M.R.M. & O.M.

CONTENTS

A cknowledgements Note on references and spelling 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

page xi

xii

Introduction Allusiveness Exposition The rhetor The Chorus Characterisation Shape Pleasures

1 9 29 45 65 87 111 131

Appendix: The tragedians Notes List of works cited and consulted Index

155 161 163 169

IX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the University of Cambridge and to the Council of Girton College for the period of leave during which a large part of this book was written, and for grants which enabled me to spend that leave in Paris. I have enjoyed useful discussions with Dorothy Coleman, Frangoise Charpentier, and Richard Griffiths, and more general encouragement and help from Elizabeth Wright, Tom Loe, W.R. Jondorf, and Alice Jondorf; I am grateful to them all. Alison Fairlie read the book in draft and made many valuable suggestions: the latest of innumerable kindnesses I have received from her over the years, since she admitted me to Girton as an undergraduate. Susan Moore copy-edited the text with a searching eye and great patience, both of which I much appreciated. My last debt of gratitude is to two friends to whom I can no longer express my thanks, and to whose memory the book is dedicated: Ruth Morgan encouraged me to begin it; Odette de Mourgues (who, with Alison Fairlie, introduced me to French Renaissance tragedy) read several chapters in draft, and commented on them with her characteristic blend of courtesy and penetration.

XI

NOTE ON REFERENCES AND SPELLING To keep notes to a minimum, sources are indicated in parentheses in the text, by author, date, and, where necessary, page-number. For quotations from sixteenth-century tragedies, act and linenumber are given. I have followed the spelling used in the texts cited for the names of characters in plays, but have used the standard English forms for the names of the historical or legendary figures on whom those characters are based.

XII

INTRODUCTION

The subject of this book is sixteenth-century French tragedy, which is variously referred to as 'humanist tragedy', 'Pleiade tragedy', 'learned tragedy', 'early regular tragedy', 'rhetorical tragedy', or 'pre-classical tragedy'.1 Anyone interested in this tragedy owes a great debt to early explorers of the field such as Gustave Lanson, Eugene Rigal, and numerous German scholars (including Karl Bohm, Fritz Holl, Paul Kahnt, and Otto Reuter), as well as to the notable contributions of Raymond Lebegue, to more recent works by Richard Griffiths, Donald Stone Jr, John Street, Fran^oise Charpentier, and to the editors of the various modern editions which have prompted me to write this book. Those who work on humanist tragedy have long pleaded for it to be judged by appropriate criteria, preferably its own; but it has always tended to be seen (often by the very people who have made the plea) in relation to the classical tragedy of the seventeenth century. One manifestation of this is to see in these texts (particularly in the plays of Robert Gamier) a quarry from which Corneille and Racine extracted some beaux vers, and with their superior skill turned them into proper seventeenth-century poetry. A. Maynor Hardee, in the introduction of his edition of Montchrestien's La Reine d'Escosse (1975a), praises Montchrestien for poetic qualities which 'annoncent parfois l'art de Racine', or for his 'heureux emploi de la stichomythie... [qui] oriente la tragedie sur la voie ou s'affirmera plus tard la glorieuse maitrise de Corneille' (16). Reading Jan Antoine de Baif's speech for the Fury, Megere, composed as an addition to Mellin de Saint Gelais's Sophonisba (Baif, 1965, 204), I noticed an 'anticipation' of Oreste's hissing snakes at the end of Racine's Andromaque: 'Sus serpens sur ce chef, / Sus sifflez sautelans joyeux de ce mechef. Probably every modern reader of Gamier, Jodelle, or Montchrestien has made similar discoveries. How we think of them, how they 1

French Renaissance tragedy affect our attitude either to the sixteenth century or to the seventeenth century, is another matter. Thierry Maulnier was so enthusiastic about Gamier that he was almost inclined to regard Racine as a plagiarist for purloining some of Garnier's best lines (Maulnier, 1939, 86). An even commoner way in which readers bring the earlier and later tragedy into a relationship with one another is by thinking in terms of evolution. Sixteenth-century tragedy is seen as the evolutionary ancestor of seventeenth-century classical tragedy; a typical example of this approach can be seen in Micheline Sakharoff's Le Heros, sa liberte et son efficacite de Gamier a Rotrou (1967); this contains many statements like the following: 'le theatre du XVIe siecle represente une etape dans l'elaboration du genre tel qu'il apparaitra au siecle suivant' (29). The notion of evolution is one which is very hard to exclude. We are all postDarwinians, and the Darwinian model is now firmly fixed in our mental landscape. In her excellent book on humanist tragedy (Pour une lecture de la tragedie humaniste, 1979), Frangoise Charpentier says: 'c'est une perspective fausse que d'evaluer les oeuvres en fonction de 1'evolution qu'allait connaitre leur genre' (6); but if she does not want to use this evolutionary model as a criterion for evaluation, it is clear that even Charpentier (a very sympathetic and perceptive reader of humanist tragedy) still finds the evolutionary idea useful for description: 'Nous sommes ici a un moment decisif de la doctrine tragique... il est clair que Montchrestien, un peu trop oublie, occupe une position charniere entre la maniere de Gamier, et la tragedie exemplaire et heroique que Corneille a portee a sa perfection' (51). The drawback is that the evolutionary model is evaluative, since by the Darwinian hypothesis it is impossible to evolve for the worse. The theory of descent from an ancestor implies ascent from a lowly origin. In the case of French tragedy, this ascent is deemed to falter somewhat in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and then to find its direction again, to culminate in what we grandly call French classical tragedy, when what we probably mean is fewer than half of Corneille's plays, and eight of Racine's (excluding La Thebai'de, Alexandre le Grand, and Esther). Although I think that the discovery of imitated lines has more interest for the study of Corneille and Racine than for that of

Introduction Gamier, Jodelle, or Montchrestien, and although I distrust some of the implications of the evolutionary model, I also think that it is neither possible nor necessary to try to pretend, when reading humanist tragedy, that we have not read Corneille or Racine. As soon as we read the second book in our lives, we are no longer in a void; we cannot evacuate our minds before reading something new to us, and our reading would be impoverished if we could. Accordingly, in this book I have frequently drawn comparisons between humanist and later tragedy, but not, I hope, to the disadvantage of either. Any reader of humanist tragedy is bound to have some notions as to what tragedy is, or ought to be. For Englishspeaking readers of French, these notions are probably based either on Shakespeare or on Corneille and Racine. This is why I have, at several points in this book, traced a reversed chronological path, to show that features of humanist tragedy which might seem difficult or rebarbative are also present (even if in different proportions or different forms) in more familiar works, where they do not impede the reader's enjoyment. When critics called for humanist tragedy to be considered on its own terms, one proposal as to what these terms should be was put forward by those to whom I have sometimes referred in this book, for brevity, as the rhetoric-critics. These critics (of whom the most influential has been Richard Griffiths with his book on Montchrestien, 1970) broke new ground in the study of humanist tragedy. Briefly, they emphasised the central importance of rhetoric in the schooling common to the tragic authors of the sixteenth century, and suggested that rhetorical display was an end in itself in humanist tragedy (see, for example, R.M. Griffiths, 1970, 37; T.L. Zamparelli, 1978,10; C.N. Smith in Montchrestien, 1972, 8). I am sure that the rhetoric-critics are right in saying that an understanding of the importance of rhetoric is essential for an understanding of humanist tragedy. I would reproach them not with overestimating the place of rhetoric in humanist tragedy, but rather with adopting too narrow a view of it. Rhetoric is not only I'art de bien dire, it is also I'art depersuader, not only fine writing but purposeful writing. It has always had this double identity, and cannot therefore be a matter of a poet 'bombinans in vacuo', or of a kind of writing where content,

French Renaissance tragedy reference, and values are irrelevant. The concerns of rhetoric include the didactic (in the broadest sense) as well as the impressive. Rhetoric becomes a red herring when interpreted too narrowly, and when it is one of the reasons adduced for a supposedly almost unbridgeable gap between humanist tragedy and the modern reader. It should also be remembered that (as the work of Peter France, A. Kibedi Varga, Marc Fumaroli, and others has amply shown), rhetoric does not fade out at the end of the sixteenth century. When Kibedi Varga (1970) refers to 'siecles classiques', he means the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even the beginning of the eighteenth. To think of sixteenth-century tragedy as rhetorical, and of seventeenth-century tragedy as having freed itself from the bonds of rhetoric (with perhaps a few regrettable vestiges in Corneille), is an absurd distortion. It is partly to emphasise this that I have used the 'reversed chronology' mentioned above. Rhetoric does not represent the only perspective adopted by students of humanist theatre. Another approach, emphasising the didactic rather than the formal element in humanist tragedy, has tended to focus particularly on plays with biblical subjects, and plays of political propaganda. There have also been occasional attempts to work out a philosophical stance from the sententious content of plays (for example by Kurt Willner, 1932). Donald Stone Jr's book, French Humanist Tragedy. A Reassessment (1974), is the best exposition of didacticism in humanist tragedy, which he links, in this respect, with earlier French theatre and with other sixteenth-century French forms of didactic writing. My own view of these two strands of criticism, the rhetorical and the didactic, is that they belong together. I believe that sixteenth-century humanist tragedy is didactic or edifying - but I use these words in a broad sense: I think that most humanist tragedies have something to say. This may be a precise political or religious message: 'Gaspard de Coligny was a villain, and the St Bartholomew Massacre a good thing'; 'God requires absolute submission and obedience.' It may be an edifying statement of a more general kind: 'Pride is dangerous'; The higher you climb, the harder you fall.' It may occasionally be an unresolved problem: 'Is tyrannicide justified, given that it may lead to disorder and much suffering?'; or a specific question arising from the subject matter:

Introduction 'What was the meaning of Alexander the Great's craving for immortality?' I am not asserting that 'message' always preceded 'medium' in the sense that a man wrote a play because of a message that he wanted to deliver, although plainly this must sometimes have been the case, most obviously in plays with a strong political or sectarian bias. I am claiming that a humanist tragedy typically contains a thesis or problem which forms its intellectual basis, a tenor of which various structural and stylistic elements in the play are the vehicle. I have suggested elsewhere that a reason why some of these plays are more satisfactory than others may be found in the degree of harmony between this 'message', the intellectual kernel of the play, and the way it is embodied in the play (Jondorf, 1978,274). I find some of these plays more pleasing than others, and some not pleasing at all. While aware of the perils of guessing at intentions, I surmise that the pleasure afforded by a play may be related to how successfully the author has carried out what appear to be his aims, and also to what those aims seem to be (I am repelled, for example, by a play which seeks to justify the St Bartholomew Massacre, and so have not discussed Frangois de Chantelouve's La Tragedie de feu Gaspard de Colligny in this book). Many humanist tragedies seem to me to have an intelligible design, coherently and persuasively executed. It is a question of the use of rhetoric - rhetoric in the sense of choice of diction (elocutio), but also in the sense of choice and arrangement of material (inventio and dispositio). Rhetoric thus transcends a fond/forme division, for it is concerned with both, and the moral or intellectual content is inseparable from the way in which the material is selected, organised, and expressed. It is in this perspective that I look, for example, at the deployment of character in Filleul's La Lucrece in Chapter 5, and at aspects of structure in Chapter 6. Throughout, although most explicitly in the last chapter, my object is to account for (and share) my pleasure in these plays. Over the last fifteen or twenty years, there has been a great increase in the number of texts of sixteenth-century tragedies available in modern editions, usually excellent. The genre has long since established its droit de cite in university syllabuses. I find it odd that some of those who have worked to promote it, with so

French Renaissance tragedy much erudition and skill, do not seem to like it very much or think very highly of it. Even Raymond Lebegue, after years of pioneer work on sixteenth-century theatre, concluded in 'Les Juives' de Robert Gamier (1979, 5) that humanist tragedy is worth reading because it helps us to appreciate 'les Corneille et les Racine' (I am intrigued by his use of the plural). Donald Stone Jr declines to commit himself on the merits or defects of the plays he examines, or is mildly disparaging about them. Other critics (Kathleen Hall, Christopher Smith, Enea Balmas, Fran^oise Charpentier, Odette de Mourgues) communicate greater enthusiasm, and I hope that this book will be seen as contributing to their efforts to encourage readers to regard these plays as worth reading for their own sake, and not merely as literary-historical documents or reflections of sixteenth-century taste. In the discussions that follow, I have made a point of referring almost exclusively to plays available in post-1960 editions, so that inaccessibility of texts need not deter any potential reader of humanist tragedy. I have sometimes wondered whether readers who distrust highly rhetorical writing are less ill at ease with a form of rhetoric which derives a good proportion of its figures from the Bible, rather than from Greek or Latin orators, dramatists, or poets. Could this account in part for the widespread approval of Garnier's Les Juifvesl Sometimes I almost wish that Gamier had never written LesJuifves. Thierry Maulnier, for all his admiration for the plays of Jodelle and Gamier (which he liked mainly for their poetic qualities), described LesJuifves as *la plus ennuyeuse' of Garnier's plays (Maulnier, 1939, 82). That is perhaps rather petulant, but I sympathise with his exasperation. Les Juifves is a play whose qualities are striking, and easy to appreciate; it allows readers to feel that they have done justice by humanist tragedy, because they like and appreciate this play. After all, it is a typical representative of the genre; it is plainly very rhetorical - Richard Griffiths has provided a scheme whereby the whole play is chopped up into 'set pieces' (Griffiths, 1986, 30-1). It is Senecan, and imitative: Nabuchodonosor's tyrant-speech, 'Pareil aux Dieux je marche', is modelled, at least in its opening movement, on Seneca's 'Aequalis astris gradior' (Thyestes, 885). Several of the choric odes have obvious biblical models. As if showing how far imitation can be pushed, Gamier has even imitated himself, his Amital recalling the

Introduction Hecube of his own Troade. Les Juifves is judged to be both typical of humanist tragedy, and superior to all the rest, which is therefore disregarded. I certainly agree that Les Juifves is a good play, but it seems a pity to let it stand in the light, and prevent us from enjoying other plays by Gamier, let alone by anyone else. In this book, I have tried to bring some other plays into the light. I have been conscious, while looking at these plays, of the distinction made by Valery (in Tel Quel, I) between 'valeur' and 'merite': La critique, en tant qu'elle jugerait, consisterait dans une comparaison de ce que Tauteur a entendu faire avec ce qu'il a effectivement fait. Tandis que la valeur d'une oeuvre est une relation singuliere et inconstante entre cette ceuvre et quelque lecteur, le merite propre et intrinseque de l'auteur est une relation entre lui-meme et son dessein... Une critique ... ideale prononcerait uniquement sur ce merite, car on ne peut exiger de quelqu'un que d'avoir accompli ce qu'il s'etait propose d'accomplir. (Valery, 1960, 479-80)

This seems to beg some questions; there is plainly enormous difficulty in the attempt to give an account of merite, since we may easily misjudge the author's aim. There is also the whole problem of reading works composed a long time ago: even if we renounce the task of defining merite, and limit ourselves to valeur, are we to try to imagine the responses of contemporary readers, or rely on our own? If we try to do the former, we can never be sure how well we are succeeding, and in any case our enjoyment will probably be very limited if we are constantly having to make concessions to the tastes and procedures of another time; on the other hand, we plainly must make some attempt to equip ourselves with the wherewithal to read as a contemporary reader would have read, otherwise many of the works of the past will be almost unintelligible. Or should we look for a kind of transposed topicality, seeking parallels between events and figures portrayed in these plays, and modern civil strife, modern tyrants, the aftermaths of modern wars? This exercise might be more rewardingly carried out on overtly topical plays like the moralites polemiques (such as those edited by Jonathan Beck (1986) under the title Theatre et propagande aux debuts de la Reforme) than on humanist tragedy. But even in the face of these difficulties and uncertainties, perhaps

French Renaissance tragedy valeur may be worth setting out, although it is 'singuliere' and subjective, for one reader's account of valeur may enhance another's pleasure. That is the hope in which I read works of criticism, and in which I have written this book.

1 ALLUSIVENESS

An obvious feature of any sixteenth-century French poetry, of whatever genre, is its allusiveness; this could hardly be otherwise, given the importance of imitation as a principle of poetic creation in the Renaissance, and the Pleiade reliance on a select, welleducated readership who would recognise and appreciate echoes and re-workings of classical models. The effect produced on a reader by allusiveness depends, first, on the extent to which writer and reader share a common culture. Such a common culture could be assumed, for an educated class in Europe, for several centuries. It was based on the literature of Greece and Rome, and the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. One consequence of such a shared background is the shared possession of a repertory of ideas, myths, and images which, when used in poetry, do not necessarily constitute specific, intentional allusions to earlier literary texts. In a poem such as 'Cupidand my Campaspe playd, / At Cardes for kisses' there is an amusing anachronistic jolt between the playing cards and the figure of Cupid with 'quiver, bow and arrows, / His mother's doves, and team of sparrows', but these 'classical' appurtenances are not intended to remind the reader of any specific poem from older literature.1 Cupid in the guise of a playful boy is a stock figure, whose origins in the Greek Anthology the reader is not called upon to know, or to recall precisely, in order to enjoy the poem. On the other hand, although in a great number of European poems there are allusions to specific earlier texts, and although recognition of these allusions enriches reading, recognition is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for understanding and enjoyment of a text. The weeping Pleiads wester, And the Moon is under seas; From bourn to bourn of midnight Far sighs the rainy breeze: 9

French Renaissance tragedy It sighs from a lost country To a land I have not known; The weeping Pleiads wester, And I lie down alone.

This poem by A. E. Housman (from More Poems) can be enjoyed for its pleasing patterns of alliteration and repetition, its restrained melancholy, the flexibility of its rhythms. These pleasures do not depend on recognition of what is presumably the source, Sappho's lyric fragment: Ae8i)Ke u£v d Kai nAj|id5e<;, f^eaai 5e vuKTeq, 7iapd 6' epxex' a>pa, eyco 8e n o v a KOIT£\38CO.

(VI, 111)

(The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, time is passing, and I lie down alone.') Recognition provides its own pleasure, but to my mind does little else for the allusive text in this case: in comparison with Sappho, Housman no longer appears poignantly brief and controlled, but padded and sentimental. In this example, source-text and allusive text are so close that Housman's poem amounts to a free translation or reworking of Sappho's, but it is also possible for a poem to allude only glancingly to another text, and the texts brought together by the use of allusion may seem startlingly far apart. This is often the case with Baudelaire, who uses classical references in unexpected contexts. Don Juan on his way to Hell in 'Don Juan aux Enfers' pays an obol to Charon, and is rowed by 'un sombre mendiant, l'oeil fier comme Antisthene' (Antisthenes was the Athenian founder of the sect of Cynic philosophers): a legend from Catholic Europe is boldly linked to the worlds of classical epic and pagan philosophy. 'Le Cygne' opens with an invocation to Andromache, and at the end of its first section the swan raising its head is compared to Thomme d'Ovide', the reference being to the passage {Metamorphoses 1,84) where Ovid implies that man's superiority over other creatures is demonstrated by the fact that he alone has an upright posture and can look at the heavens: pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus. 10

Allusiveness Not only are Andromache, the swan, and the T of the poem linked by the pain of loss and exile, but the reference to Ovid enriches this theme in quite a complicated way. The comparison between the 'homme d'Ovide' and the unhappy swan stretching its head towards the sky suggests that man's heavenward gaze may be one of sorrow and reproach, not pride or worship; and to mention Ovid is also to name the great poet of exile, the poet of the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto. Literary reminiscence similarly reinforces the combination of memento mori, love-poem, Epicurean atomism, aesthetics, and irony in 'Une Charogne'. Critics from Brunetiere on have traced relationships between this poem and other texts, including the Bible, Petrarch, and many French poems ranging in date from the sixteenth century to Baudelaire's own time. Impossible to pin to a single source, but of great importance in the way the poem works, is the elaborately formal mode used intermittently to address the woman. Phrases like 'mon ame' and 'Etoile de mes yeux' are part of the diction of conventional love-poetry, and particularly of Renaissance love-poetry. Use of this diction in 'Une Charogne' not only contrasts sharply with the detailed description of the rotting carcase, but recalls various attitudes to love, death, and poetry expressed in Renaissance poetry using this formal diction. The power of love to transcend time and death; the power of poetry to confer immortality, which is therefore in the gift of the poet, and may be withheld from a woman who withholds her love; a warning of the imminence of old age or death; all these themes, used by poets such as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Sceve, and Ronsard, may be present in a reader's mind, called up by '6 la reine des graces' or '6 ma beaute', and reinforcing ambiguity and irony, particularly at the end of the poem. What if a reader cannot supply these associations? He can have them supplied, in notes or commentaries, and failing that will still realise something of what Baudelaire is doing, for even a naive reader will notice the contrast between formality and horror, and respond to it in some way. Lamartine uses classical allusions or echoes without the startling shifts of context found in Baudelaire. When the Meditations poetiques were published in 1820, Eugene Genoude in a preface introduced the poems as 'les epanchements tendres et melancoliques des sentiments et des pensees d'une ame qui s'abandonne 11

French Renaissance tragedy a ses vagues inspirations'. What could sound more Romantic? Yet the diction and style of the Meditations are essentially neo-classical, in the prevailing mode of eighteenth-century poetry. M.-F. Guyard remarks (Lamartine, 1963, xv) that one reason for the immediate success of the Meditations was that 'les lecteurs ouvraient un livre dont l'auteur ne bouleversait aucune de leurs habitudes de langage ou de rhetorique'. But Lamartine had not only read Voltaire and Delille, he also knew the Latin poets, and it is above all the echoes from Latin poetry that make 'Le Lac', for example, a poem with which a seiziemiste can feel curiously at home. The classical allusiveness of *Le Lac' manifests itself in theme, in imagery, and in the associations of particular phrases. The themes of personal loss, nostalgia, and the flight of time have been abundantly and memorably treated by Roman poets including Ovid, Horace, and Catullus, and an Ovidian note is struck right at the beginning of the poem where there is a traditional image of time as water: Ainsi, toujours pousses vers de nouveaux rivages, Dans la nuit eternelle emportes sans retour, Ne pourrons-nous jamais sur T ocean des ages Jeter l'ancre un seul jour? This recalls a passage from Pythagoras' exposition of his philosophy, as imagined by Ovid, in Metamorphoses XV, particularly because the prominent word 'pousses' is so close to Ovid's passive verbs 'inpellitur' and 'urgetur': cuncta fluunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago. ipsa quoque adsiduo labuntur tempora motu, non secus ac flumen. neque enim consistere flumen, nee levis hora potest, sed ut unda inpellitur unda, urgeturque eadem veniens urgetque priorem, tempora sic fugiunt pariter pariterque sequuntur et nova sunt semper. (XV, 178) ('AH things flow, and all forms are subject to change; time itself flows on with unceasing movement, like a river; for neither a river nor a fleeting hour can stand still; but as wave is driven on by wave, and as each oncoming wave is pushed, and itself pushes the wave in front of it, so time both flees and pursues, and is always new.') 12

Allusiveness Various other parallels suggest themselves for Lamartine's presentation of time as elusive and slipping away; one of the closest is between the words spoken by the loved woman in 'Le Lac' 29-30 and Horace, Odes I, xi, 7-8: 'Mais je demande en vain quelques moments encore, Le temps m'echappe et fuit' dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

('While we speak, envious time will have been escaping; grab today, and trust as little as possible to tomorrow.') But the climax of the loved woman's remembered speech, at lines 29-36 of 'Le Lac', also resembles another famous classical text: 'Mais je demande en vain quelques moments encore, Le temps m'echappe et fuit; Je dis a cette nuit: "Sois plus lente"; et l'aurore Va dissiper la nuit. 'Aimons done, aimons done! de Pheure fugitive, Hatons-nous, jouissons! L'homme n'a point de port, le temps n'a point de rive; II coule, et nous passons!' Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis. soles occidere et redire possunt: nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux nox est perpetua una dormienda. (Catullus, v, 1)

('Let us live, dear Lesbia, and love, and let us not give a farthing for the mutterings of grim old men. Suns can set and rise again, but when once our brief light has faded, there is one everlasting night to sleep through.') This comparison makes us see that the presence of Catullus by the shores of Lamartine's lake is already announced in the first stanza by the phrase 'nuit eternelle' (line 2). There are many slighter echoes. Time as a winged being, and the personification of the hours ('O temps suspends ton vol! et vous, heures propices, / Suspendez votre cours!') have antecedents in classical poetry and visual arts; 'les soins qui les devorent' (line 27) can point us either to Ovid, who uses the word 'edax' of time 13

French Renaissance tragedy ('tempus edax rerum': 'time the devourer of things') or to Horace, who uses it of 'curae' ('cares'); the use of 'trace' in line 41 ('He quoi! n'en pourrons-nous fixer au moins la trace?') seems to overlap with a Latin word: 'vestigium' means 'trace' but 'vestigium temporis' means 'instant' or 'moment', and in 'n'en pourrons-nous fixer au moins la trace?', the pronoun 'en' refers to 'moments' in the previous stanza. The 'rochers muets', 'foret obscure', and 'rocs sauvages' of the fourth and third stanzas from the end (49-56) seem to carry a hint of Petrarch's much-imitated sonnet 'Solo e pensoso' (Canzoniere, 35), but we are back in classical territory again with the rather Virgilian moonscape of lines 59-60 (Tastre au front d'argent qui blanchit ta surface / De ses molles clartes!'). There is much more that a classical lens reveals about this poem; it lends itself admirably, for example, to rhetorical analysis as expounded by A. Kibedi Varga (Kibedi Varga, 1970), and as well as reflecting the rhetorical principles of inventio and dispositio, it displays a wealth of tropes and figures which fulfil the requirements of elocutio. To play on his reader's classical culture as Lamartine seems to be doing in 'Le Lac' is perhaps a form of captatio benevolentiae, a rhetorical strategy to win the reader's goodwill, in this case through a recognition of shared culture and through the pleasure afforded by the poems recalled. Yet with all its echoes, this is also a poem whose poignant mood, beguiling rhythms, harmonious succession of sounds, and undemanding evocation of natural beauty give it great appeal for many readers who bring to it no memories of Ovid or Horace. When an author is treating a subject which is itself drawn from ancient literature, the reader's consciousness of allusion is heightened from the start. For example, Racine's subjects are taken from classical drama, ancient history, and the Bible, so that any reader conscious merely of the existence of older works containing the source material of Racine's plays must inevitably be aware that a relationship exists between Racine and these earlier texts. That awareness is a minimal level of response to allusiveness, and most modern readers of Racine are led, by the circumstances in which they read Racine and the editions they use, to slightly more knowledge than this. For instance they are often aware of divergences from ancient sources even when unacquainted with those sources; so they probably know that Aricie is a Racinian 14

Allusiveness addition to the usual form of the Hippolytus-plot and that the lovetriangle of Titus, Berenice, and Antiochus is not vouched for by Roman historians, any more than that of Neron, Junie, and Britannicus. They are less likely to be aware of positive and precise literary echoes which have their origin in a work other than the obvious source-text. Such an echo can be found in Berenice, IV, v. In his last speech in this scene Titus cites, although not by name, several great Romans who have sacrificed life or feelings to patriotism and honour: M. Attilius Regulus, who kept his word to Carthage at the cost of his life; T. Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus, who as consul had his son executed in the presence of the assembled army, for disobeying the consular edict which forbade any Roman to engage in single combat with a member of the opposing Latin army; and L. Junius Brutus, the legendary first consul who put his two sons to death, for attempting to restore the Tarquins: Deja plus d'une fois Rome a de mes pareils exerce la Constance. Ah! si vous remontiez jusques a sa naissance, Vous les verriez toujours a ses ordres soumis. L'un, jaloux de sa foi, va chez les ennemis Chercher, avec la mort, la peine toute prete; D'un fils victorieux l'autre proscrit la tete; L'autre, avec des yeux sees et presque indifferents, Voit mourir ses deux fils par son ordre expirants. Malheureux! mais toujours la patrie et la gloire Ont parmi les Romains remporte la victoire.2 (IV, v, 1158) Two of these, Torquatus and Brutus, are named in thzAeneidby Anchises' ghost, giving Aeneas a preview of Roman history: vis et Tarquinios reges, animamque superbam ultoris Bruti, fascesque videre receptos? consulis imperium hie primus saevasque secures accipiet, natosque pater nova bella moventis ad poenam pulchra pro libertate vocabit, infelix! utcumque ferent ea facta minores, vincet amor patriae laudumque inmensa cupido. quin Decios Drusosque procul saevumque securi aspice Torquatum et referentem signa Camillum. 15

(VI, 817)

French Renaissance tragedy ('Do you want to see the Tarquin kings, and the proud spirit of the avenger Brutus, and the fasces recovered? This Brutus will be the first to accept the office of consul, and grim authority; and he, a father, will for the sake of glorious liberty call for the punishment of his sons when they stir up renewed war, unhappy man! Whatever later generations make of his deeds, his patriotism and his huge lust for glory will triumph. Indeed look over there at the Decii and the Drusi, and Torquatus, ferocious with his axe, and Camillus recovering the standards.') That Racine had this passage of the Aeneid not far from the front of his mind when he wrote Titus' speech seems certain, in view of the similar, striking position of Virgil's 'infelix!' and Racine's 'Malheureux!' The parallels between the two passages are obvious: both tell of tough-minded Roman heroes, both proclaim the value of 'amor patriae laudumque inmensa cupido' or 'la patrie et la gloire'. So much is plain, but there are other, more subtle uses of allusion to be considered here. First there is a pleasing manipulation of the dimension of time, brought about by the different contexts of the two speeches. In the Aeneid Virgil, like Racine, is citing Roman history and legend, but for Anchises this history lies ahead, and he is foretelling the already predetermined future. In Racine this 'Through the Looking Glass' effect of recapitulating the future has disappeared because Titus, unlike Aeneas, knows these heroes as figures of the recorded past; nevertheless the presence of the Virgilian text in the mind of the reader creates a sort of double perspective, almost a stereoscopic effect. Even more interesting than the Anchises-Titus link is the Aeneas-Titus one. Racine in his preface to Berenice is quite expansive about the parallels and differences between the story of Dido and Aeneas and that of Berenice and Titus: En effet, nous n'avons rien de plus touchant dans tous les poetes, que la separation d'Enee et de Didon, dans Virgile. Et qui doute que ce qui a pu fournir assez de matiere pour tout un chant d'un poeme heroique, oil Faction dure plusieurs jours, ne puisse suffire pour le sujet d'une tragedie, dont la duree ne doit etre que de quelques heures? II est vrai que je n'ai point pousse Berenice a se tuer comme Didon, parce que Berenice n'ayant pas ici avec Titus les derniers engagements que Didon avait avec Enee, elle n'est pas obligee comme elle de renoncer a la vie. 16

Allusiveness Any reader who has read that preface has been prepared by the author to be receptive to echoes of the fourth book of the Aeneid, where Virgil relates the love of Aeneas and Dido, and Aeneas' desertion which provokes Dido's suicide. In Act IV, v we do indeed find a clear Virgilian echo, in Titus' speech, quoted above. But what has happened? The echo is not from the Dido book {Aeneid IV) but from the Underworld book (Aeneid VI); Dido has already been deserted, and has already committed suicide - as Berenice threatens to do at the end of this scene. Indeed, Aeneas has already, earlier in Book VI, spoken to her stonily silent ghost in the Mourning Fields ('lugentes campi', line 441), offering the most unpardonable excuse imaginable for his desertion of her: 'I could not believe you would mind my going so much' ('nee credere quivi / hunc tantum tibi me discessu ferre dolorem', line 463). It is after Aeneas has already demonstrated his 'Roman' tough-mindedness andpietas by abandoning Dido that he is told, in Aeneid VI, of Roman heroes to come; he was able to make the decision to leave her without any examples of Roman heroism to guide him. Titus, however, is using the parade of heroes to bolster his resolve and justify an action he is at this moment involved in, the dismissal of Berenice. Aeneas' grim descendants embody Roman values, which transcend personal inclination and instinctive love. By those values it is sweet and seemly not only to die, but to kill your children and drive your lover to suicide, pro patria. Titus has sworn to stand by those values, but admits the pain it costs him, 'Oui, Madame, il est vrai, je pleure, je soupire, / Je fremis'. Aeneas weeps on meeting Dido's ghost, when it is too late, but in Book IV the tears of Dido and her sister could not shake his resolve, and his grief was contained in his 'magno ... pectore', while 'mens inmota manet; lacrimae volvuntur inanes' ('his mind remains unmoved; the tears are shed in vain').3 If we follow the allusion, we are nudged into increased sympathy for Titus, because he expresses his suffering. Yet another theme that links the two passages is that of reputation and 'exemple'. Brutus, as described by Anchises, has an enormous desire ('inmensa cupido') for fame, and his action is determined by this and by his love of Rome, even though there is doubt about posterity's verdict on him ('utcumque ferent ea facta minores'). Titus claims that he is capable of leaving 'un exemple a la posterite, / Qui sans de grands efforts ne puisse etre imite'. 17

French Renaissance tragedy Later generations will doubt not the value of the example, but their ability to follow it. Berenice rejects this idea with scorn, and believes that Titus' action requires no effort at all on his part ('je crois tout facile a votre barbarie'), but at the end of the play she has come to understand the exemplary role that she, Titus, and Antiochus must act out: Adieu: servons tous trois d'exemple a Punivers De l'amour la plus tendre et la plus malheureuse (V, vii, 1502) Dont il puisse garder l'histoire douloureuse. This tendre', then, and 'plus malheureuse' than the love of Dido and Aeneas? Aeneas is promised a line of heroic descendants, culminating in Augustus, to mirror his own heroism and dedication. Dido, in the Mourning Fields, flits among the ghosts of other women who have died for love, including faithful wives (Evadne, Laodamia) and rejected or disgraced lovers (Phaedra, Pasiphae), and she is plainly worthy to be ranked with these exemplary figures. Racine's use of superlatives ('la plus tendre et la plus malheureuse') suggests that an even more exceptional quality attaches to Berenice, Titus, and Antiochus, who by a unique reciprocal sacrifice consent to their own desolation. As well as these thematic links, small verbal details form part of the complex relationship between Racine and Virgil. Two examples may suffice. The first concerns the word 'infelix' and its French equivalent. I mentioned above that the prominent placing of 'infelix' at the beginning of a line (Aeneid VI, 822) is imitated by Racine with 'Malheureux', also used at the beginning of a line (IV, v, 1167). Two further suggestions could be made here: the first arises from the fact that 'infelix' had already appeared at the beginning of an earlier line m Aeneid VI, in the very passage I have been linking with Titus' speech - Aeneas' address to Dido's ghost in the Mourning Fields (VI, 456). There, 'infelix Dido' is the opening phrase of Aeneas' speech. So Racine's 'marker', his way of clearly designating a link between Titus' speech and Anchises' speech {Aeneid VI,817-25), also provides a formal link with Dido. The second point about 'infelix' is that it is clearer in meaning than 'Malheureux', or at any rate clearer in reference. In VI, 456 it refers to Dido and is feminine, singular and in the vocative case; in VI, 822 it refers to Brutus, being in apposition 18

Allusiveness to 'hie' in line 819, and is therefore masculine, singular, and in the nominative. In short, 'infelix' is singular and can be masculine or feminine; 'malheureux' is masculine but can be singular or plural (and if plural, it could also apply to nouns of mixed gender). If 'Malheureux' simply renders 'infelix' then it refers to Brutus alone, mentioned as 'L'autre' two lines before. But it could very well refer, either instead or as well, to the 'deux fils' in the line immediately before. And if it is indeed plural, could it not refer to all the people mentioned in Titus' catalogue, agents and victims alike? This fits in with Titus' assertion that he, as agent, is as pitiable as his victim, Berenice; and the point is emphasised when, two lines further on, he applies the same word to himself. My last example of verbal links between Racine and Virgil comes from Aeneas' speech to Dido in the Underworld. By stars and gods and human faith he swears to her (VI, 460) that 'invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi' ('unwillingly, O Queen, I left your shore'). The first two words, 'invitus, regina', recall the Latin sentence placed by Racine at the head of his preface to Berenice, strung together from several sentences of Suetonius: 'Titus reginam Berenicen, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab Urbe dimisit invitus invitam' ('Titus immediately sent Queen Berenice, to whom he was even said to have promised marriage, away from Rome against his will and against hers'). A further, rather disconcerting twist here is that Virgil's line is itself imitated from Catullus lxvi, 39: 'invita, o regina, tuo de vertice cessi' ('unwillingly, O Queen, I left your head'), words which are spoken to Berenice by a lock of her hair. This was not, of course, Titus' Berenice, who was born nearly eighty years after the death of Catullus, but the most famous holder of the name, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes, of the dynasty which ruled Egypt from the death of Alexander until the arrival of Julius Caesar. That earlier Queen Berenice, of the third century BC, dedicated a lock of her hair as an offering for her husband's safe return from an expedition to Syria, and it was said to have become a constellation (so that the world could 'garder l'histoire' of her love ...). The name Berenice seems to link Racine with Catullus' text, by way of Virgil's. Catullus' poem is, as he explains in the poem before, a translation of a poem (of which little has survived) by Callimachus. This explains why, unlike most of Catullus' work, it has no overt personal reference. A poem of varied tones, its 19

French Renaissance tragedy dominant theme is married love and particularly the strength of love and desire in women, so that although the connection is unexpected it is not inappropriate. The starting-point for this Virgilian exploration was given by Raymond Picard in the Pleiade edition of Racine; he draws attention in a note (Racine, 1950,1114) to the fact of Racine's imitation of Virgil, although with an inaccurate line-reference to Virgil. Now that I have seen this web of connections and responded to the Aeneas-Titus parallel proposed by Racine in his preface, I know that I shall always be conscious of these things when I read Berenice, and no doubt further aspects will occur to me; for example, could one say that Antiochus replaces, in the pattern, Dido's husband Sychaeus who, in Aeneid VI, 474, 'respondet curis aequatque ... amorem' (in Dryden's translation, 'answers all her cares and equals all her love')? Such recognitions increase the pleasure and excitement of reading Racine. I realise that there must be countless further examples arising from every page of Racine, but I do not find this a depressing thought, nor do I think that my previous reading of the play was unsatisfactory or philistine. Titus' speech in Berenice, IV, v, even without the Virgilian echoes, is impressive and moving; we are aware of Titus' need to justify himself, of the awful weight of Roman history, as heavy as the burden of imperium itself; we experience the shocking offensiveness of this speech to Berenice, reflected in her refusal to believe in his pain ('je crois tout facile') and in the fact that she, a non-Roman, dismisses Roman values as 'barbarie' and calls Titus 'parjure' for being faithful to his oath to maintain Roman law. It needs no acquaintance with the Aeneid to furnish such a reading, which should not be considered thin or unresponsive. Racine's text, in other words, reconciles autonomy and allusiveness. On the one hand, the play is coherent and can communicate its 'tristesse majestueuse' even without reinforcement from its more subtle allusions. On the other hand, to read the play merely in search of its allusions is a pedant's game. The impossible ideal would be to read feelingly and yet with immense alertness, catching every reminiscence and echo. The unlikely minimum is a completely naive reading. Any stage in between is worthwhile if the reader finds it rewarding. One reason why we should not condemn an imperfectly erudite reading of a text is that we can never tell which allusions are 20

Allusiveness intentional, which are intentional but not necessarily intended to be noticed, and which are accidental. Among the accidental sort are those which remind a reader of a work which the poet is very unlikely to have read, or even a work which he could not possibly have read because of its date, although in such a case we are talking about resemblance rather than allusion. In 'Le Lac', the fifth stanza may possibly remind some readers of Theophile de Viau. Here is Lamartine: Tout a coup des accents inconnus a la terre Du rivage charme frapperent les echos; Le flot fut attentif, et la voix qui m'est chere Laissa tomber ces mots ... And Theophile de Viau: D'une main defendant le bruit, Et de Pautre jettant la line, Elle fait qu'abordant la nuict Le jour plus bellement decline. Le Soleil craignoit d'esclairer, Et craignoit de se retirer, Les estoilles n'osoient paroistre, Les flots n'osoient s'entrepousser, Le Zephire n'osoit passer, L'herbe se retenoit de croistre. (La Maison de Silvie, ii, 11)

It is very unlikely that there is an allusion here; but resemblance can have the same effect as allusion in that it can lend to one text something of the other's flavour, adding here a touch of Theophile's sophistication and delicacy. Since resemblance is not limited or controlled by what we think we know of an author's intention, we can even find this process working the other way, from a later work to an earlier one, so that, for example, Silvie's gesture in Theophile's poem may take on some of the poignancy of the 'accents inconnus a la terre' heard beside Lamartine's lake. Is it improper for a reader to allow such associations to be set up where they cannot possibly be intended? A possible answer is that associations are only undesirable if they do disservice to the text, and that sympathetic readers, receptive to the range and tone of a text, seldom find intrusive or jarring associations getting in the way of their response. 21

French Renaissance tragedy If readers can be trusted to react with a fair degree of alert sensibility to the controlled melancholy of Lamartine, the transformations of horror in 'Une Charogne', the compassion of 'Le Cygne', there is no reason why sixteenth-century texts should be thought inaccessible. Here is a passage which seems typical in the kind and amount of allusiveness which it contains - the first twenty lines of Robert Garnier's Hippolyte. The speaker is 'L'ombre d'Egee', the ghost of Aegeus, father of Theseus and grandfather of Hippolytus: Je sors de VAcheron, d'ou les ombres des morts Ne ressortent jamais couvertes de leurs corps: Je sors des champs ombreux, que le flambeau du monde Ne visite jamais courant sa course ronde: Ains une espoisse horreur, un solitaire effroy, Un air puant de souphre, un furieux aboy Du portier des Enfers, Cerbere a triple teste, Maint fantome volant, mainte effroyable beste. Mais T horrible sejour de cet antre odieux, De cet antre prive de la clairte des cieux, M'est cent et cent fois plus agreable, et encore Cent et cent autres fois, que toy, que je deplore, Ville Cecropienne, et vous mes belles tours, D'ou me precipitant je terminay mes jours. Vostre Pallas devoit, belliqueuse Deesse, Destourner ce mechef de vous, sa forteresse: Et alme, vous garder d'encombreux accidens, Puis qu'elle a bien daigne se retirer dedans: Et de plus en plus faicte a vostre bien proclive, Vous orner de son nom, et de sa belle olive.

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At first sight, this may seem full of things that need explanation. For a start, there are various proper names and adjectives: Egee, Acheron, Cerbere, Cecropienne, Pallas. Then there are periphrastic expressions: 'le flambeau du monde'; 'cet antre odieux'; there are also references to incidents from myth: 'belles tours, / D'ou me precipitant'; 'orner de son nom'. But even without the help provided (sometimes rather erratically) by modern editors, none of this need really halt a reader. Garnier himself provides most of the help that might be needed, either in the play or beforehand, in the 'Argument' which not only summarises the play but provides full 22

Allusiveness background. For instance, he identifies Egee in the 'Argument', and tells us that he ruled Athens, so that we are not handicapped if we do not know who Cecrops was ('Ville Cecropienne' 13), or that Pallas (15) is Pallas Athene who gave Athens its name and the olive tree. Other things are explained in the text. The significance of Acheron is made plain by 'd'ou les ombres des morts / Ne ressortent jamais couvertes de leurs corps'. Of Cerbere (7) the text tells us that he barks (so he is a dog), is the gatekeeper of Hell and has three heads: we need no more. Should we have forgotten what we read in the 'Argument' and find ourselves struggling with 'Cecropienne' (from Cecrops, first king of Athens, who chose Pallas Athene as tutelary deity when she offered the gift of the olive tree), Athens will be named en clair in line 29. The periphrases and references to myth are usually either very easy to understand ('le flambeau du monde'), explained in the 'Argument' ('d'ou me precipitant'), or clarified in the text itself (it is obvious that the 'antre odieux' of line 9 is Hell, already described). The only reference here which is neither explained nor self-explanatory is the allusion to the name of Athens and to the olive tree. A reader who misses this will not be losing anything vital to understanding. A second large area of allusiveness here concerns the relationship between this play and Seneca's Hippolytus (the imitation of Euripides' Hippolytus is very slight indeed). This is of interest to anyone acquainted with Seneca's play (which means a good many of Garnier's first readers and most of those who, today, take a scholarly interest in French humanist tragedy). The recognition of Senecan elements will also include phrases and movements imitated from other Senecan plays {Agamemnon, Thyestes). A reader competent in Latin may find enjoyment in tracing these similarities and divergences, but it is an exercise which is certainly not indispensable for enjoyment of Gamier, nor does it have the enlarging effect upon the text that the parallel with Dido and Aeneas has upon the text of Berenice. These two elements - allusions to classical myth and transpositions of Seneca - contribute to the third resource, the third kind of response which Gamier presumably expected his reader to bring to the text. It is surely the most important, and no alert reader need miss it, since it requires only an attentive ear and a willing imagination. In these opening lines we are struck by the 23

French Renaissance tragedy assonances in 'or', 'on', and 'om', extending the effect of the words 'Acheron', 'ombres', and 'morts'; by the words expressing fear, loathing, and disgust ('horreur', 'effroy', 'furieux', 'effroyable', 'horrible', 'odieux'); and by the horrible sights, sounds, and smell ('Cerbere a triple teste', 'fantome volant', 'effroyable beste', 'furieux aboy', 'air puant de souphre'). Darkness, horrible noises, the smell of brimstone - these elements of wild horror are controlled and contained by the almost ceremonial formality of Egee's speech, manifest in such features as the self-presentation ('Je sors ... Je sors'); the elaborate emphasis of 'cent et cent fois plus agreable, et encore / Cent et cent autres fois'; the address to Athens; the Latinate vocabulary ('ombreux', 'antre', 'alme', 'belliqueuse', 'proclive'). The contrast between a nightmare world and this formality of presentation makes the speech extremely disturbing. Sometimes the solemn awfulness of Egee's speech seems to be increased by appeals to different sets of associations. The 'air puant de souphre', for instance, recalls the Bible ('he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone', Revelation 14:10; there are many other biblical references to brimstone, starting with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:24). The reference to Pallas protecting a fortress-city in which she deigns to dwell calls up images of the Palladium kept in another doomed city - Troy. In Hippolyte the references are classical. In plays on nonclassical subjects, whether biblical or modern, classical allusions are found alongside those belonging to the subject. The invocation by the witch of Endor in Jean de La Taille's Saiil lefurieux exemplifies this technique of contamination or mixing. Not only has the witch become a 'Phytonisse' or 'Phitonisse' (from the title of the priestess of the Delphic oracle), but she invokes, alongside Sathan, Belzebus, and Belial, such spirits as the angels 'Que l'arrogance fit avecques Lucifer / Culbuter de l'Olympe', and refers to the sun as Phoebus, just as Garnier's Nabuchodonosor, in Les Juifves, compares himself to Jupiter. Both classical and modern allusions are found in the opening speech by the Reine d'Angleterre (Elizabeth I) in Antoine de Montchrestien's La Reine d'Escosse (published in 1601 as L 'Escossoise but quoted here in the much revised edition of 1604): 24

Allusiveness Enfin jusques a quand mon ame desolee D'effroyables sursauts doit-elle estre esbranlee? Jusques a quand vivray-je exposee au danger Du poison domestique et du glaive estranger? «Un corps sous le Soleil n'a jamais plus d'une ombre, «Mais tant et tant de maux qu'ils surpassent tout nombre, «Accompagnent le Sceptre, envie des humains, «Lourd fardeau toutesfois de l'esprit et des mains, «Qui croist de jour en jour, puis a la fin accable «Son possesseur superbe encor que miserable. Bien qu'un monde de gens me respecte a l'envi, Me regarde marcher d'oeil et d' esprit ravi: Bien que cent Nations admirent mes richesses, M'eslevent plus d'un rang sur les autres Princesses; J'estime quant a moy malheureux mon bon-heur, Qui prend pour les seduire un vain masque d'honneur. Le glaive de Damocle appendu sur ma teste Menace de la cheute, et moins que rien l'arreste: L'Espagnol non content de son monde nouveau Veut son trosne orgueilleux planter sur mon tombeau: Ou la force ne vaut l'artifice il employe, Pour remettre ma vie et mon Estat en proye: Ce Pyrrhe ambitieux, dont la toile est sans bout Embrasse tout d'espoir, aspire a gagner tout, De la fin d'un dessein un autre fait renaistre: Des deux bouts de la terre on le connoist pour maistre: Encor' sa convoitise il ne peut assouvir, S'il ne vient, 6 forfait! ceste Isle me ravir; Et sans la main d'enhaut qui m'est tousjours propice, L'innocence auroit veu triompher la malice. Ma Tamise l'honneur de nos fleuves plus beaux Rouleroit pour luy seul ses tributaires eaux; Et mon peuple guerrier en armes indontable Porteroit gemissant son joug insupportable. Mais a quoy desormais me reserve le sort? Lors que moins je me doute, on me brasse la mort. Une Reine exilee, errante, fugitive, Se degageant des siens qui la tenoient captive, Vint surgir a nos bords contre sa volonte: Car son cours malheureux tendoit d'austre coste. Je l'ay bien voirement des ce temps arrestee, Mais, hors la liberte, Royalement traitee; 25

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French Renaissance tragedy Et voulant mille fois sa chaine relascher, Je ne s?ay quel destin est venu m'empescher. Chacun par mon exemple a l'advenir regarde, «Qu'une beaute Royale est de mauvaise garde.

45

The 'modern' references here are particularly easy for an English reader. Elizabeth speaks of the wealth enjoyed by her kingdom and of the prowess of its people; of the threat offered by Philip II of Spain ('L'Espagnol', 19) who has large conquests in the Americas but still has ambitious designs on Britain; and of the other principal character in this play, Mary Queen of Scots: 'Une Reine exilee, errante, fugitive' whom, somewhat reluctantly, Elizabeth keeps prisoner. Line 36 is a reference to the Babington plot, while lines 21 and 28 hint at Spanish plots against Elizabeth's life. Localisation is provided by the reference to the Thames (31) and to the fact that Britain is an island (28). Threaded among these contemporary and local details are references to the older tradition. A sententious passage (marked with guillemets as was the practice both in humanist tragedy and in humanist editions of Seneca's tragedies) expresses briefly the theme of the lure and burden of kingship (5 -10). This is a frequent theme in ancient drama, particularly in Seneca, and is often used by Gamier. There are also two references to ancient history. The first is in line 17, 'le glaive de Damocle'. Damocles was a courtier of Dionysius I (c. 430-367 BC), tyrant of Syracuse, who obsequiously and exaggeratedly praised the tyrant's happiness, which provoked Dionysius to invite him to a feast where he had to sit with a sword hung over his head by a hair (the story is told by Cicero in the TusculanaeDisputationesV,61). This citation comes in a particularly appropriate context here, since Elizabeth, like Dionysius, thinks that because she is a ruler people have an exaggerated, and indeed erroneous, idea of her happiness. Secondly, there is a reference to Philip II of Spain as 'ce Pyrrhe ambitieux' (23). The allusion is probably to the most famous of the Molossian kings of Epirus, who lived from 319 to 272 BC, and gave his name to the 'Pyrrhic victory', more costly to victor than to vanquished. However, mention of the name also recalls his legendary ancestor, son of Achilles, who fought at Troy and killed Priam at the altar of Zeus; thus the use of the name suggests simultaneously a brilliant military tactician who steadily enlarged his kingdom by conquest 26

Allusiveness (the historical Pyrrhus, described by Plutarch), the general prepared to pay a great price for victory (the historical Pyrrhus known proverbially as the winner of a 'Pyrrhic victory'), and the brutal, impious warrior who emerged from the wooden horse to take a leading part in the sack of Troy (the legendary Pyrrhus, whom we can read about in Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Virgil). These allusions lend to the almost contemporary story (Mary Queen of Scots was executed in 1587; Elizabeth I was still alive when the first edition of Montchrestien's play appeared in 1601; and Philip II had died only three years before) the grandeur, and the sense of belonging in literature, of the heroes of ancient history and legend. At the same time, they help to delineate Elizabeth as a suitably eloquent and cultivated figure, whose language is enriched with figures and allusions, making it impressive and dignified. Allusiveness increases the range of a reader's response to Garnier's or Montchrestien's text; and certainly the degree of allusiveness practised by these authors need not be a barrier to comprehension or response. The 'air puant de souphre' described by Garnier's Egee is horrible whether we notice its biblical flavour, or assume it is part of the classical Hell signposted by the names Acheron and Cerbere, or simply imagine a foul smell. If we have never heard of Damocles or Pyrrhus, Montchrestien's text ensures that we still understand that Elizabeth feels insecure and that Philip II has territorial ambitions. Furthermore, allusiveness may be many-layered, unprovable, or debatable. The speech of Egee may raise again the problem of the inappropriate association. Garnier's phrase 'portier des Enfers' reminds me of Macbeth. This is inappropriate in that the context is so different although the wording ('If a man were porter of hell-gate', Macbeth, II, iii) coincides. On the other hand, although the porter's speech in Macbeth is completely different in tone from that of Garnier's Egee, the atmosphere of the play as a whole, an atmosphere in which 'Light thickens' ('une espoisse horreur') and 'night's black agents to their preys do rouse' ('Maint fantome volant, mainte effroyable beste'), is similarly nightmarish. The occasion is accidental, or rather, Gamier and Shakespeare are alluding independently to a common stock of images. But the reader perceiving such an association is no worse off than when, as happens 27

French Renaissance tragedy sometimes, the writer makes an erroneous allusion. In Hippolyte (III, 1432), Garnier's Phedre, while making her declaration of love to Hippolyte, apostrophises her sister Ariadne in these words: Tu as aime le pere, et pour luy tu desfis / Le grand monstre de Gnide, et moy j'aime le fils\ 'Gnide' is presumably a slip of the pen for 'Gnosse' (Knossos) since the reference must be to the Minotaur, while Gnide (Knidos) was a town in the colony of Karia in S.W. Asia Minor, noted not for monsters but for a statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles. Literature is full of such errors and they confirm the point I have wanted to establish in this chapter: allusiveness is one resource among many upon which writers draw. We should let it enrich our reading to the best of our competence, but not let it harass or intimidate us. Theseus, thanks to Ariadne's thread, could find his way into and out of the labyrinth of Knossos; Oedipus, ignorant and misinformed, had lost touch with his own past. Certainty and error were equally productive of adventure. Even if we could always be sure of having hold of the right ball of string, allusion-spotting can sometimes lead to odd results. What appears to be a deliberate literary allusion may lead us to something of such different tone and context that we wonder if the writer is playing games with us. The recollection of Berenice's hair in Aeneas' words to Dido is one example. Another, from the sixteenth century, is Jacques de La Taille's Alexandre who declares that he fears no danger Tuis que je ne me sens entache d'aucun crime' {Alexandre, 11,279). Perhaps La Taille is not intending to allude to any earlier poet here. Or if there is a deliberate echo, perhaps its message to the reader is simply 'Do you catch the echo of Horace's "Integer vitae, scelerisque purus"?' This form of brief literary reminiscence gratifies the reader who spots it, and creates a feeling of friendly collusion with the author. At the same time it implicitly makes a claim for that author to be likened to the classical writer whom he has called to the reader's mind, a claim which could not, without immodesty, be made openly. If we are able to play this game of 'Did you hear that? See what I have done with my model!', we are taken further into the allusive text in that we see something of its composition. But perhaps it is above all in Montaigne, rather than the humanist dramatists, that we lose some of the meaning of the allusive text if we are not familiar with the context of the allusion. 28

2 EXPOSITION

In most kinds of play where a strong dramatic illusion is aimed at, the author's voice is for the most part concealed behind the voices of his characters, although at times a character may be deemed to be speaking for the author. A particular case of author speaking to audience occurs in expository scenes, which are needed in most plays, in the absence of a pure authorial or narrative voice, to provide information essential for the comprehension of the action. Expository scenes are indispensable in plays which open in medias res, as humanist plays regularly do, or in any play where the author wishes to respect the unity of time. It might appear unnecessary to offer much exposition in a play whose subjectmatter is well known, but even while acknowledging and indeed exploiting the familiarity of their subjects, authors still need some way of leading their audience into the play. Moreover, some plays are not on well-known subjects and some authors make substantial changes to the donnees of the fable (more frequently in the seventeenth century than the sixteenth: Racine's inventions of Aricie and Eriphile are conspicuous, but not exceptional, examples of this freedom). An unfamiliar story, or a story which has been much adapted, needs particularly careful introduction. In order to see how the mechanisms of exposition work, I shall look first at some expository scenes in seventeenth-century tragedy. After considering some of Racine's expositions, I shall use Corneille as a springboard back to the sixteenth century. Racine handles exposition with competence and sometimes with ingenuity. Often his exposition is unobtrusive. Even in his first tragedy, Alexandre le Grand (1666), we can see his deftness in this respect. The first two speeches of the first scene, where the speakers are Taxile and Cleofile, occupy between them only twenty-four lines, but transmit a good deal of information. We learn that we are in the presence of an Indian king, Taxile (who has an ally called 29

French Renaissance tragedy Porus), and his sister; that Taxile proposes to fight Alexandre, already the conqueror of many kings, a course of action which his sister regards as foolhardy and bound to fail. In her view, Taxile should try to treat with Alexandre and thus avoid an otherwise inevitable defeat. By the end of the scene (less than a hundred lines later), we know of the relationships between Porus, Axiane, and Taxile and have been introduced to Racine's inventions - the figure of Axiane, the consequent amorous rivalry between Taxile and Porus, and the brother-sister relationship between Taxile and Cleofile. This has been transmitted very unobtrusively, and the dramatic interest of the dispute between Taxile and Cleofile enables us to absorb the information almost unawares. In the first scene of Andromaque (1668), Oreste meets his friend Pylade after a separation of six months during which each feared the other dead. This is the 'Fancy meeting you here!' mechanism of exposition, neat though far from novel. Pylade can legitimately ask what Oreste has been doing lately and why he has come to Epirus, so that Oreste can conveniently provide information useful to the audience. There is a certain sketchiness as to the reason for Pylade's presence in Epirus, but this is no bad thing as it focuses attention on the more important question of why Oreste has come there. If the 'reunion of friends' format is a rather hackneyed one, the use made of it here by Racine cleverly points forward as well as filling in earlier events. Pylade's questions and Oreste's answers make us realise that Oreste has come on a double and devious errand, so that this scene provides a key to the one which follows, when Oreste presents his embassy to Pyrrhus (discussed in next chapter, 48). But whatever its merits, this is a fairly blatant expository mechanism, and in later plays Racine moves on to greater sophistication and discretion, so that exposition is treated less and less as a separate element which needs to be got out of the way before we can proceed with the action. In Berenice (1671), for example, part of the exposition is delayed until Berenice forces Antiochus into expository speech (I, iv). inPhedre (1677) the opening line, in which the hero announces his intention of immediate departure, has the force of a coup de theatre; the ensuing dialogue of Hippolyte and Theramene not only conveys a great deal of information as Hippolyte tries to justify his proposed departure and Theramene probes for its real motive, but also introduces 30

Exposition (notably in Theramene's first speech of fourteen lines) a number of themes and images which will later be revealed as significant: the possibility that Thesee is in or near the Underworld; the death of Icarus (a young man dying in the sea while in flight from tyranny, and from Crete); Thesee as philanderer; Hippolyte's 'pudeur'. The astonishing first line and the need to explain it combine to motivate an economical and unforced exposition (which is not, of course, complete until we have seen Phedre, who does not enter until line 153), an exposition in which the author's voice is concealed. CorneiUe is closer to earlier practice and covers his tracks somewhat less. In expository scenes he produces lines like 'Albe, ou j'ai commence a respirer le jour' (Sabine, Horace, I, i, 29), or 'Dis-moi done, je te prie, une seconde fois' (Chimene, Le Cid, I,i,7). Rodogune (performed 1644 or 1645, published 1647) is a play where the material to be transmitted is quite complicated and unlikely to be familiar to an audience. The expository first scene takes place between two courtiers, Timagene, 'gouverneur' to the twin princes Seleucus and Antiochus, and his sister Laonice, confidant to Cleopatre, reigning queen and mother of the princes. It is full of rather creaking phrases such as 'trouvez bon ... Que j'apprenne de vous', 'et me souviens encor', 'Je n'ai pas oublie', 'Sachez done que ...' The scene ends when Laonice says 'Je vous acheverai le reste une autre fois, / Un des princes survient'. Sure enough, three scenes later they are alone together again and Laonice introduces seventy-three more lines of exposition with Tour la reprendre done ou nous l'avons laissee'. If Corneille's expository manoeuvres are transparent, CorneiUe himself is not unaware of this. In Medee, his first tragedy on an ancient theme (performed 1635, published 1639), CorneiUe uses for exposition the device of separated friends meeting unexpectedly, like Racine's Oreste and Pylade. In his 'Examen' of the play, CorneiUe makes plain that he is well aware of the conventionality of this procedure and of the difficulty of making it plausible: Pollux est de ces personnages protatiques qui ne sont introduits que pour ecouter la narration du sujet. Je pense Pavoir deja dit et j'ajoute que ces personnages sont d' ordinaire assez difficiles a imaginer dans la tragedie, parce que les evenements publics et eclatants dont elle est composee sont connus de tout le monde et que, s'il est aise de trouver des gens qui les 31

French Renaissance tragedy sachent pour les raconter, il n'est pas aise d'en trouver qui les ignorent pour les entendre. In the case of Pollux, Corneille has at least ensured that he does a little more than just 'ecouter la narration du sujet'. Although Pollux, unlike Pylade, does not stay for the kill (disappearing after IV, iii, before any of the five deaths), he is nevertheless given a slight part in the intrigue, as Corneille points out, because Jason's civility in seeing him out of the city causes Jason to be absent when Creon and Creuse touch the poisoned robe, and when Creon dies. Jason returns in time to see Creuse die, but his absence has allowed Corneille to 'n'en avoir que deux a la fois a faire parler'. Even in the first scene Pollux's function is a little more than the minimal one of 'ecouter'; his questions not only elicit the expository facts but bring out Jason's least admirable aspects in his self-congratulatory and cynical replies. A transparent expository technique 'nuance' by one means or another: such a formula describes the opening of many of Corneille's plays, and there is great variety in the means chosen to tone down some very obvious manoeuvres of exposition. In the late play Pulcherie (1673), a 'comedie heroique' where the solution is even more absurd than the problem, the opening speech by the Roman empress Pulcherie gives us the names of her grandfather and father, the length of her brother's reign, the fact of his death, the names of five of her suitors and of the father of one of them, together with an account of the father's military brilliance. No 'fiction' such as that which brings Pollux to Corinth at the beginning of Medee is resorted to here, to mask the mechanics of exposition. Instead, Corneille distracts attention by a startling opening line. Pulcherie's opening words are: ' Je vous aime, Leon, et n'en fais point mystere', and although not irregular (since Pulcherie's imperial rank gives her a freedom not allowed to less elevated heroines), such a declaration coming from a woman gives the opening of the play a quality of surprise. Eurydice, in the first scene of Surena (1675), announces her love not to the man she loves but, more conventionally, to a confidant. In Surena, however, there is a much less explicit and mechanical exposition, indeed it is quite difficult to gather the necessary information; although some names are glossed (Tavare Crassus, chef des troupes romaines'), others are not ('Hecatompyle'), and to work out the 32

Exposition references in Eurydice's first short speech to 'deux Rois\ 'La Reine et la Princesse', 'Le roi' and 'le Prince' requires not only a clear head, but knowledge which we only acquire later. No wonder that Andre Stegmann, annotating the 'Integrate' edition (Corneille, 1963), has judged it necessary to provide seven footnotes for the first thirty-six lines of the play. This play, Corneille's last, has a bleak and sombre colouring, and Corneille seems to be refusing any concessions to the audience. There is no space here for an expansive 'personnage protatique' with time to spare (like Timagene and Laonice); Eurydice is already preoccupied by her predicament and we must piece the story together as best we can. Surena seems to me to be unlike the rest of Corneille's theatre in this respect; much more typical is the opening speech by Placide in Theodore (1646), which contains such straightforwardly informative lines as 'Mon pere est gouverneur de toute la Syrie' (and no shadow of a fiction that this comes as news to his interlocutor). In addition, however, Corneille here expands the scope of expository dialogue by making Placide address his stepmother Marcelle (who is not present) within the framework of the speech to his friend Cleobule: Marcelle, en vain par la tu crois gagner un gendre: Ta Flavie a mes yeux fait toujours meme horreur. Ton frere Marcellin peut tout sur l'Empereur, Mon pere est ton epoux ...

(I, i, 20)

This is highly rhetorical. Not only does it employ the rhetorical device of apostrophe (address to an absent person), but it is rhetorical in another, more slippery, sense. What Corneille is doing here is masking one kind of artifice by another. Who is it who needs to be told that Placide's father is married to Marcelle? It is we, of course, the readers or spectators. If Placide informed Cleobule not only that his father governed the whole of Syria but also that his father was married to Marcelle, we might jib, or at least Corneille probably thought we might. The address to Marcelle is such an obvious artifice, so plainly a 'rhetorical effect' very far removed from a natural register of speech, that it distracts attention from the lesser artifice of exposition. This then is a 'rhetorical' way of handling exposition, and it provides a useful point of comparison with sixteenth-century 33

French Renaissance tragedy techniques. The expository manoeuvres of sixteenth-century dramatists are often extremely obvious. Without going quite to the lengths of Shakespeare's 'hempen homespuns' (This man is Pyramus, if you would know: / This beauteous lady Thisby is certain'), the playwright tells the reader what he needs to know in a direct and open way. The use of elaborate forms of address facilitates identification of characters whether they address themselves: 'Cesar, non plus Cesar, mais esclave de crainte! ... O premier Empereur!' (Grevin, Cesar, 1,7; 1,9) or each other: SIRENE

Eh mais voici Rustan. ROSE

Vient il ici? ROSE

O Rustan des Baschas le plus que fortune. (Bounin, La Soltane, 1,216,229)

Copious speech can remind or inform us of historical or biographical detail: 'Aborder un Cesar, a qui n'est eschappee, / Sans d'elle se vanger, l'audace de Pompee!' (Grevin, Cesar, 1,47). Sometimes these playwrights resort to what one might call the 'As you know, Muriel, we have been married ten years' style of exposition: CESAR

Vous allez au Senat. M. ANTOINE

Ja le Soleil est hault Ce qui me faict haster puis vous s?avez qu'il fault S'assembler aujourdhuy, et que vostre presence Est requise sur tout. (Grevin, Cesar, 1,213)

Often the play opens with what amounts to a speech to the audience, even if this is faintly disguised as a prayer or other form of address to a supernatural being or abstract entity. Thus the Sophonisbe of Nicolas de Montreux begins with a speech of 114 lines by the Roman general Scipion (Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major, 236-7183 BC). The first words are an apostrophe to 'Invaincu Jupiter', but this invocation leads nowhere; even syntactically we are at a dead end and, abandoning Jupiter without 34

Exposition a main verb, Scipion moves on to another deity: 'O divine clarte, 6 Phebe'. He has not very much to say to Phoebus either, and in a few lines it becomes clear where the speech is really heading towards a panegyric of Rome. The tenuous sequence of ideas is: Jupiter guides the sun, the sun shines upon Thonneur de Rome triomphante'. Plainly the real target of these words is neither Jupiter, nor Phoebus, nor the other characters on stage (Scipion's friend Lelius and the captive king Siphax, king of the 'Massesiliens' or Masaesyles), but the audience. The speech is expository in function, situating us in time (after the defeat of Carthage both at home and in Spain) and place (North Africa). It conveys not only these factual details but also the buoyant, indeed perhaps hubristic, self-confidence of Rome and her representatives. Although references to past Roman defeats show an awareness of loss and weakness, the hubristic note strikes through: Tuisque Rome florist indomtable au destin' (1,64), and this, not inappropriately, casts a slightly dubious light on Rome and Roman boasting; here, as in Cleopatra-plays, the Romans do not have it all their own way and their power turns out to be slightly less than they supposed. Neither Sophonisba nor Cleopatra were to ornament a Roman triumph. After listening to Racine and Corneille, we can surely hear this speech of Scipion's as sounding in a double voice; a quasi-authorial voice, the voice of character-as-expositor, speaks through it, giving us both facts and moral or emotional colouring, while the voice of Scipion-as-character displays him as representative of mighty and arrogant Rome. The opening speech of Garnier's La Troade is 124 lines long, much of it being loosely based on the protasis of Seneca's Troades, although greatly expanded. The speaker is Hecube, widow of Priam king of Troy, and she addresses variously 'Quiconque a son attente aux grandeurs de ce monde', Troy, its ashes, Priam, all Priam's and her children, their son Paris in particular, herself, the gods, and Fate, before finally turning to the 'cher troupeau', the Chorus of captive Trojan women, whom she invites to weep and in whose threnody she then takes part. Like Scipion's speech, Hecube's is aimed not at the Chorus, still less at the various dead or supernatural persons addressed, but at us. Like Scipion's speech, Hecube's combines fact and feeling. We are given the name 35

French Renaissance tragedy Troye' in the seventh line, and Troy's destruction by fire in the eighth. More precise indications of place are given at lines 99 ('en ces fatales naus') and 108 ('nous qui sommes sur ce port'). Many Trojans and Greeks are mentioned, the Trojans by name, the Greeks mostly by patronym or periphrasis ('Le caut Laertien, ny le vaillant Tydide': Ulysses and Diomedes; 'le jeune Pelean': Pyrrhus, son of Achilles and grandson of Peleus). Some of the people mentioned appear in the play (Cassandre, Andromache, Helen (i.e. Helenus), Pyrrhe, Ulysse, Polyxene) but others are dead (Paris, Priam) or at any rate will not appear in the play (Diomedes, Sinon). They are in the speech because they are part of the Trojan story of which Gamier is reminding us, just as the description of Troy burning is aimed at us, not at the Chorus. The extreme artifice and public nature of the voice here are emphasised by Hecube's acting as Chorus-leader, regulating the actions and words of the Chorus, and then silencing the Trojan women not for a naturalistic reason, such as that someone is approaching (the arrival of the Greek herald is observed only after they have been told to stop their 'langoureuses plaintes'), but for a reason that is purely rhetorical. Hecube had instructed the Chorus to weep for Hector, and then for Priam. After a 22-line poem in honour of Priam the Chorus is told by Hecube, at some length, to stop: Cessez, filles, cessez vos langoureuses plaintes, Estouffez les soupirs de vos ames contraintes, Laissez, laissez vos pleurs, vos gemissables pleurs, Laissez vos tristes chants, et les tournez ailleurs. Le destin de Priam ne semble lamentable, Le destin de Priam ne luy est miserable, Priam est bien-heureux, qui, bornant son ennuy, Vieil a veu trebucher son royaume avec luy.

(1,257)

We are not to assume that Hecube has suddenly become cheerful here: this is a cadenza at the end of the movement. The figure of rhetoric employed is correctio and its effect is to underline the formal, public quality of the speech. At the same time, this public quality in Hecube becomes part of the way she is characterised. Like a masked actor of antiquity she takes on the largeness of a type, almost an abstraction (compare Amital in Les Juifves: 'Je suis le malheur mesme'). She is not only the embodiment of grief 36

Exposition and misfortune, but in an allusion to her prophetic dream while carrying Paris (she dreamed that she gave birth to a firebrand which burned down the city), she becomes the very destruction of Troy: C'est moy qui Tay souffle, c'est moy qui vay bruslant Les grands murs d'llion, les antiques Pergames, Hecube, c'est ton feu, ce sont tes propres flames.

(1,64)

We are strongly conscious of the quasi-authorial voice, telling us what the author wants us to have in mind, and yet because we are also viewing, or at least imagining, a figure on stage, the public voice becomes part of our perception of that figure.1 The history of tragedy reinforces, in this case, the relationship between authorial voice and character-voice. When Hecube instructs and leads the Chorus she takes on, like the Nourrice at the end of Garnier's first play, Porcie, the role of xopo5i8daKaA,o<; (chorusmaster) or Kopucpaioc; (leader of the chorus) and thereby comes to represent the author, for in classical antiquity the dramatic poet himself was commonly the xopoSiSdoKaXoc; who trained the Chorus, and the older poets not only taught their Choruses but took on the part of KOpixpaiOQ to lead them in performance, as Gamier surely knew. A certain difficulty arises about exposition in cases where the subject-matter is well known; if the author wants the play to be self-sufficient, self-explanatory, a well-known subject is a help; but in humanist tragedy the action commonly starts so late that retrospective narrative is still required, if only to tell the spectators whereabouts they are in a familiar body of material. One device which is frequently used for this purpose is that of a protatic character who never appears again: if this character is a ghost (as in Garnier's Hippolyte and Jodelle's Cleopatre captive) or a Fury (as in Garnier's Porcie), then, as in Corneille's Theodore, one artifice masks another, in that the artificiality of expository discourse disappears behind the larger, but impressive, extraordinariness of being harangued by an apparition. At the same time, the sinister, hellish tone of a speech like that of 'L'ombre d'Egee' at the beginning of Hippolyte (analysed in the previous chapter) is an important part of the design of the play; in this case, it contrasts strongly with Hippolyte's speech immediately after it, and matches the nightmare development where Hippolyte relates 37

French Renaissance tragedy his frightening dream of a hunt where he became the quarry (see analyses by O. de Mourgues, 1968, 193, and J. Holyoake, 1987, 110). Perhaps it is because the exposition is not trying to disappear that it can employ rhetoric boldly (which paradoxically sometimes has the effect of making it disappear), and can be fitted into the larger rhetorical patterns of the play, as Hecube's relationship with the Chorus in the expository scene of La Troade sums up the central image of the play: the group of mourning women led by the still commanding figure of the mourning queen. One device used by several humanist dramatists is to provide, very early in the play, a minimum of information which can be picked up quickly, followed later by a more explicit and detailed exposition. An example of this is in the first act of La Peruse's Medee Tu'enfant of 1556 (La Peruse, 1985). The modern editor says that 'il n'existe nul besoin d'exposition' in this play (La Peruse, 1985, xiv), but I think the author has, in fact, provided some exposition. As in Seneca's Medea, Medee's opening speech is a prayer to the gods, particularly to those who can be deemed to take an interest in marriage and fidelity. From this first speech of thirty-six lines, we learn that the speaker is married to Jason, that she helped him win the Golden Fleece, and that she is now cursing him because he is 'perjure' and 'deloiaT. After a passage of dialogue between Medee and her Nourrice (including one speech of forty-two lines from the Nourrice), the Nourrice makes her second long speech (also of forty-two lines) in which using a formula of 'N'etoit-ce asses' four times, she gives a resume of Medee's previous hardships, including her murder of her brother Absyrte, and of her present grievance. This leads up to a 'replique' which every reader of Seneca must have been waiting for, which is rendered thus by La Peruse: NOURRICE

Ainsi des biens un seul bien ne te reste. MEDEE

Je reste encor, Nourrice, et en moi tu peus voir Assembles tous les maus que le Ciel peut avoir 38

(1,138)

Exposition This surely has not the same sharp brilliance as Seneca: NUTRIX

Abiere Colchi, coniugis nulla est fides nihilque superest opibus e tantis tibi. MEDEA

Medea superest, hie mare et terras uides ferrumque et ignes et deos et fulmina.

(164)

('Colchos is far away, your husband is faithless, and of all your wealth nothing remains. - Medea remains, and in her you can see land and sea, fire and the sword, the gods and thunderbolts.') Possibly La Peruse preferred to choose his own high points rather than follow docilely the lead of his precursors, but perhaps also he did not want to use a rhetorical jewel of this kind at a moment when he is still engaged in exposition. It is not until the Nourrice's next speech that we hear the name of Glauque (and we might have been expecting to hear another name, for Seneca calls her Creusa), and immediately after that the action is really launched, when a messenger arrives to tell Medee that she is ordered out of Corinth. We have still not been told in so many words that Jason is to marry Glauque, but the juxtaposition in line 156 has made it almost explicit: 'Et Glauque aussi, et Jason fause-foi'. This first act is by a considerable margin the longest in the play. The division of lines between acts is: I II III IV V

366 200 234 256 150

I agree with Frangoise Charpentier that '[la] longueur respective des actes peut, evidemment, etre l'effet du hasard, ou d'une "panne" imaginative de l'auteur; mais il est juste de penser que chez les plus conscients et les meilleurs, elle est premeditee' (Charpentier, 1979, 23). This very long first act, which goes against the tendency noted by Charpentier for both the first and the fifth act to be shorter than the middle three, has the effect of emphasising Medee's isolation and sense of rejection. Abandoned by Jason, ignored by Creon until the order of expulsion comes, she can rely 39

French Renaissance tragedy only on herself for help or vengeance (' Je reste encor, Nourrice'), and the length of this act ensures that we appreciate this fact. An author who sets himself a particularly delicate problem of exposition is Jean de La Taille in Saul lefurieux. The play opens with the protagonist 'tout furieux', for La Taille follows his own advice (drawn from Horace's Ars Poetica) 'de ne commencer a deduire sa Tragedie par le commencement de l'histoire ou du subject, ains vers le milieu' (he says this in the dedicatory essay, De I'Art de la tragedie, accompanying Saul; La Taille, 1972, 21). Although the madness of Saul has classical models (notably Seneca's Hercules furens, possibly Euripides' play of the same name and Sophocles' Ajax), in none of these are we confronted with a mad hero at the beginning of the play. Like La Peruse in Medee Tu 'enfant, La Taille does his exposition in two stages. Neatly and economically, he tells us in the opening lines what we need to know. In line 7, we learn that the madman is a king (he is addressed as 'Sire'). In lines 21 and 24 we learn that he is Saul and that his interlocutor is Jonathe, two other sons being also on stage. The next eleven lines tell us about David and that Israel is at war, and Abinade in a further six-and-a-half lines gives more information about the war. It is perhaps a pity that La Taille feels the need to add more details later, but it may well be that the passage where he does this would work better on the stage than in the study. It is in Act II, when Saul, 'revenant a soy' from his hallucinations, asks his squire where he is and gets this answer: L'ESCUYER

Ne vous souvient il plus, 6 Sire, qu'on appelle Ce mont cy Gelboe, ou vous avez assis Vostre camp d'Israel pour marcher contre Achis, Qui a campe cy pres sa force Philistine

(11,270)

For a moment, we are perilously near the hempen homespuns ('this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog'); but if the clumsiness of this delayed expository device gives rise to any awkwardness, it is probably redeemed by the theatrical quality of the scene, and by the emotional power of Saul's despairing reaction to the return of his memory. The last play I want to look at here has what I consider one 40

Exposition of the most skilfully handled expositions of all humanist tragedies. It is Etienne Jodelle's Cleopatre captive (Jodelle, 1979).2 The play is introduced by a verse prologue addressed to Henri II, which virtually incorporates an 'Argument', thus making the 'Argument' part of the play instead of a prose annexe to it. Jodelle has been much criticised for starting his tragedy after the death of Marc Antoine. Yet in the prologue he says of the play: C'est une Tragedie, Qui d'une voix et plaintive et hardie Te represente un Romain Marc Antoine, Et Cleopatre Egyptienne Roine (Prologue, 37) We see the explanation of 'represente ... Marc Antoine' as soon as the prologue is over, for the play proper begins with a speech of 106 lines by the 'Ombre d'Antoine'. One of the play's modern editors, Enea Balmas, writes well about this: II [Marc Antoine] interviendra partant dans Faction, juste au debut de la piece, pour projeter sur l'ceuvre un halo sombre, et comme une senteur de soufre et d'enfer; et pour rappeler au spectateur, par sa seule presence, quel est le terme de reference permanent, le pole magnetique qui aimante toute Faction, et entratne le personnage principal, Cleopatre, vers sa mine necessaire. (Jodelle, 1968, 447) Antoine's ghost tells the story of his and Cleopatre's love, and makes it sound as horrific as the 'eternelle peine' in that 'val des durables tenebres' to which he is now condemned: C'est que ja ja charme, enseveli des flames, Ma femme Octavienne honneur des autres Dames, Et mes mollets enfans je vins chasser arriere, Nourrissant en mon sein ma serpente meurdriere, Qui m'entortillonnant trompant Tame ravie, Versa dans ma poitrine un venin de ma vie, Me transformant ainsi sous ses poisons infuses, Qu'on seroit du regard de cent mille Meduses.

(I, 105)

He then briefly relates the battle of Actium, and his own suicide. The last part of his speech combines prophecy with recapitulation: Encore en mon tourment tout seul je ne puis estre, Avant que ce Soleil qui vient ores de naistre, 41

French Renaissance tragedy Ayant trace son jour chez sa tante se plonge, Cleopatre mourra, je me suis ore en songe A ses yeux presente, luy commandant de faire L'honneur a mon sepulchre, et apres se deffaire, Plustost qu'estre dans Romme en triomphe portee

(I, 157)

By the end of this scene we know all we need to know. In the scene immediately following (with no choric intervention) we move from the ghostly voice of Marc Antoine to an animated debate between Cleopatre, Eras, and Charmium (the scene consisting partly of an elaborate form of stichomythia with three voices instead of the usual two). This scene adds nothing to our knowledge of facts, except some more details of Marc Antoine's suicide, and confirmation of the dream mentioned by the ghost. Yet it is expository in a slightly different way, in that it gives us a picture of both the power and the almost decadent refinement of the love of Marc Antoine and Cleopatre: Ha l'orgueil, et les ris, la perle destrempee, La delicate vie effeminant ses forces, Estoyent de nos malheurs les sub tiles amorces! Quoy? pourrois-je oublier que par roide secousse Pour moy seule il souffrit des Parthes la repousse, Qu'il eust bien subjuguez et rendus a sa Romme, Si les songears amours n'occupoient tout un homme (I, 202) It is because this vision of delightful languor is retrospective that we can consider it expository. The final element in the exposition, already mentioned by the ghost, is Octavien's wish to display Cleopatre and her women in his triumph. This is mentioned again by Cleopatre and her attendants, but we shall not have confirmation of it until we meet Octavien in the next act, and hear that he does indeed intend this humiliation: plus grand tesmoignage De mes honneurs s'obstinans contre l'aage, Ne s'est point veu, sinon que ceste Dame Qui consomma Marc Antoine en sa flame, Fut dans ma ville en triomphe menee.

(11,555)

The handling of exposition in this play seems to me to be of a high order. As in Theodore, La Troade, or Hippolyte, it masks 42

Exposition one device by another. The startling, sombre presence of Antoine's ghost, and the power of his language, distract attention from his prosaic function of telling us 'I am Marc Antoine, I am dead, having lost the Empire for love, and Cleopatre will soon be dead too.' Listen to the end of his speech, describing how he has visited Cleopatre in a dream, urging her to kill herself rather than appear as a captive in a Roman triumph: L'ayant par le desir de la mort confortee, L'appellant avec moy, qui ja ja la demande Pour venir endurer en nostre palle bande: Or' se faisant compagne en ma peine et tristesse, Qui s'est faite long temps compagne en ma Hesse.

(1,164)

There is a complicated pattern here, expressing the idea that the afterlife is horrible ('endurer', 'peine', 'tristesse') and yet that it offers the only comfort available to Cleopatre and Antoine ('confortee', 'compagne') as well as being the proper sequel to their love (repetition of 'compagne', rhyme of 'tristesse' and 'Hesse'). Summed up here are the essences of those forces in the play - the forces of love and death - which elude Octavien's control and therefore bring about his partial defeat. Although, as 'maistre et Roy / De tant de biens' (11,448), Octavien stands at the summit of human power, he will never be able to compel Cleopatre to walk in his triumph, and the last words of 'L'Ombre d'Antoine' both predict and explain this. It is the humanist playwright's confidence and ease in the use of rhetoric which enable him to employ, in the service of exposition, such bold and improbable devices as ghosts, Furies, or ritualised dialogue with the Chorus. The result often constitutes not only a triumph of rhetoric, but an elegant solution to a problem over which many playwrights have stumbled.

43

3 THE RHETOR

When certain kinds of rhetoric are used in drama (and indeed in other forms of fiction), they raise what one might call a problem of Voice' or of 'degree'. The problem could be expressed thus: when we hear or read an overtly rhetorical speech (one whose purpose within the fiction is to persuade, or which is conspicuously ornamented with rhetorical figures, or which answers both these descriptions), does the author wish us to admire the rhetorical skill of his character? or does he want us to be 'worked on' by the rhetoric, as if it were aimed straight at us rather than at the other inmates of the fiction? In the latter case if, upon reflection, we admire the rhetoric, we shall be commenting directly upon the author's skill in rhetoric rather than upon his use of rhetoric as one means of animating his characters. We know that we are reading or hearing rhetoric, but are we to perceive the author, or his character, as the rhetor? The distinction is bound to affect our reception of dramatic language, and our response to it. It is less likely to have been a problem for sixteenth-century audiences and readers, because having no tradition of naturalist drama, and being accustomed both to public disputation and to overt story-telling in the theatre, they would probably see many of the most elaborately worked speeches in terms of prosopopoeia, a rhetorical term indicating the attribution to an individual of speech appropriate to his or her situation and known character; the author would be perceived as knowingly and skilfully deploying figures in the service of his art, expecting to be admired for it, and not necessarily intent on disappearing behind the personalities of his characters. The problem arises for us, if only because we are accustomed to plays written in the seventeenth century, when the shift from public storytelling to a more naturalistic drama had already begun. Changes such as the dismissal of the Chorus and the reduction in the use 45

French Renaissance tragedy of sententiae lessened the overlap between a possible authorial voice (or a general voice representing that of the audience) and the voices of the dramatis personae. If we can say that in scenes of exposition the author can be embodied in a character (like Hecube), speaking 'alongside' a character (Scipion), concealing himself behind the scene (Hippolyte and Theramene), or using various degrees of transparency (exposition-scenes of Andromaque, Theodore, LaSoltane, Cesar), then plainly the problem of 'voice' is a complex one, and perhaps there will be no simple answer to the related question of whether, in a rhetorical (but not necessarily expository) speech we perceive the speaker as rhetor. In examining this question I shall again start from Racine. We have seen that in expository scenes Racine is quite capable of masking himself almost completely, and his first and last secular tragedies (Alexandre le Grand and Phedre) both illustrate this. Also, his rhetoric is often relatively disguised in the sense that he makes less obvious use of figures than Corneille (although the use of plain language is itself a rhetorical device, familiaritas). But he does exploit rhetoric with great skill, and there are some extremely clever passages where two levels of rhetoric are operating simultaneously. One is the second scene of Andromaque, where Oreste makes his embassy to Pyrrhus. Here is Oreste's first speech to Pyrrhus, and the first twenty lines of Pyrrhus' reply. I quote from the re-edition of the original text of 1668 (Racine, 1977); although the punctuation of this edition may strike a modern reader as inconsequential, the use of capital letters, particularly for such phrases as Tils d'Achille', 'Vainqueur de Troye', and Tils d'Agamemnon', has rhetorical value and their disappearance from modern editions impoverishes the text somewhat: ORESTE Avant que tous le Grecs vous parlent par ma voix, Souffrez que je me flate en secret de leur choix, Et qu'a vos yeux, Seigneur, je montre quelque joye De voir le Fils d'Achille, & le Vainqueur de Troye. Ouy: Comme ses exploits, nous admirons vos coups; Hector tomba sous luy; Troye expira sous vous; Et vous avez montre, par une heureuse audace, Que le Fils seul d'Achille a pu remplir sa place. 46

145

150

The rhetor Mais ce qu'il n'eust point fait, la Grece avec douleur Vous voit du Sang Troyen relever le malheur, Et vous laissant toucher d'une pitie funeste, D'une Guerre si longue entretenir le reste. Ne vous souvient-il plus, Seigneur, quel fut Hector? Nos Peuples affoiblis s'en souviennent encor. Son nom seul fait fremir nos Veuves, & nos Filles, Et dans toute la Grece, il n'est point de Families, Qui ne demandent conte a ce malheureux Fils, D'un Pere, ou d'un Epoux, qu'Hector leur a ravis. Et qui s^ait ce qu'un jour ce Fils peut entreprendre? Peut-etre dans nos Ports nous le verrons descendre, Tel qu'on a veu son Pere embrazer nos Vaisseaux, Et la flame a la main, les suivre sur les Eaux. Oseray-je, Seigneur, dire ce que je pense? Vous-mesme de vos soins craignez la recompense, Et que dans vostre sein ce Serpent eleve Ne vous punisse un jour de l'avoir conserve. Enfin, de tous les Grecs satisfaites l'envie, Assurez leur vangeance, assurez vostre vie. Perdez un Ennemy d'autant plus dangereux, Qu'il s'essayra sur vous a combattre contre eux.

155

160

165

170

PYRRHUS La Grece en ma faveur est trop inquietee. De soins plus importants je l'ay crue agitee, Seigneur, & sur le nom de son Ambassadeur, 175 J'avois dans ses projets conceu plus de grandeur. Qui croiroit en effet, qu'une telle entreprise Du Fils d'Agamemnon meritast l'entremise, Qu'un Peuple tout entier, tant de fois triomphant, N'eust daigne conspirer que la mort d'un Enfant? 180 Mais a qui pretend-on que je le sacrifie? La Grece a-t'elle encor quelque droit sur sa vie? Et seul de tous les Grecs ne m'est-il pas permis D'ordonner des Captifs que le Sort m'a soumis? Ouy, Seigneur, lors qu'au pied des murs fumans de Troye, 185 Les vainqueurs tout sanglans partagerent leur Proye, Le Sort, dont les Arrests furent alors suivis, Fit tomber en mes mains Andromaque & son Fils. Hecube, pres d'Ulysse, acheva sa misere; Cassandre, dans Argos, a suivy vostre Pere. 190 47

French Renaissance tragedy Sur eux, sur leurs Captifs, ay-je etendu mes droicts? Ay-je enfin dispose du fruit de leurs Exploits? The reason why there are two levels (at least) of rhetoric here is that Oreste has two errands, as we know from the expository first scene with Pylade, in which Pylade's advice to Oreste was 'Demandez tout, pour ne rien obtenir.' Oreste's public mission, as ambassador of the Greeks, is to demand the surrender or death of Hector's son Astyanax. His covert object is to win Hermione, by force if necessary, but he hopes that if Pyrrhus rejects the Greek demand to give up Astyanax, he will also decide not to marry Hermione, daughter of the Greek prince Menelaus. Oreste's two errands are mutually antagonistic, the success of the second would be promoted by the failure of the first, and we already know this when he presents his embassy. As a speech in favour of his public mission, Oreste's embassyspeech is a well-constructed piece of eloquence, and if Menelaus himself were listening he would surely approve of it. However, it covertly promotes Oreste's private mission by making it unlikely that Pyrrhus will accede to the Greek request. For example, Oreste recalls to Pyrrhus (lines 146-50) not only Pyrrhus' own heroic past, but the exploits of his heroic father Achilles, who of course was notable for not doing what the Greeks wanted, and for sulking in his tent while Greeks fought and died on the plains of Troy. He then misrepresents Pyrrhus' motive as 'une pitie funeste' for Astyanax (153); not only is Pyrrhus likely to be indifferent to the boy except as a tool to use in his pursuit of Andromaque, but if he were subject to such unpatriotic pity the phrase 'malheureux Fils' (159) might well reawaken it and, speaking as ambassador, Oreste is imprudent to use it. Finally he insults Pyrrhus under the guise of a prudent, well-meant warning, by suggesting (166, 168, 170-2) that the mighty Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, should be frightened of a child. Sure enough, the public mission fails, to the potential advantage of the private quest. The reference to Achilles, and to Pyrrhus' exploits in Troy (Troye expira sous vous'), provokes the remark that as a victor he is entitled to his war-booty (Achilles reckoned he was cheated of his: that was why he sulked), and has the right to do what he likes with the captives who fell to his lot. The barbs concealed beneath the surface deference and goodwill have stung 48

The rhetor Pyrrhus as intended. While the overt mission has apparently been perfectly properly (though unsuccessfully) carried out with a display of rhetorical competence, even more powerful rhetorical means have been used to advance the covert mission. The perception of this double level is gratifying for reader or spectator, as well as causing him to see Oreste as a rather tricky and complex figure. Here, I think, we can appropriately regard skilful rhetoric as belonging to the character (as well as admiring the skill of the author who supplies it); Oreste would be an unconvincing and unlikely ambassador if he were inarticulate or uneloquent. But few characters in Racine have such justification for eloquence. One of the most ingenious speeches in Racine's theatre is that made by Iphigenie to Agamemnon in Act IV, scene iv of Iphigenie, If we judge rhetoric by its results in the play, this is poor, for Agamemnon responds to it only with some rather shifty answers. But while we listen to Iphigenie's speech we do not yet realise that it will fail, and we are bound to admire it. We admire such strokes as the play on 'trahir' in the opening lines; Clytemnestre, two scenes earlier, had spoken of Agamemnon's 'trahison', meaning his intention of sacrificing Iphigenie, and in this later scene Agamemnon had declared 'Ah! malheureux Areas, tu m'as trahi', where 'trahir' meant 'reveal my intentions'. When Iphigenie begins her speech with 'Mon pere, / Cessez de vous troubler, vous n'etes point trahi' (IV, iv, 1174), she means neither of these things; 'trahir' here means something more like to disappoint or fail someone. Iphigenie continues with an expression of submission which subtly carries with it an element of reproach ('Vos ordres sans detour pouvaient se faire entendre' - no need to resort to subterfuge and mean deceptions) and a suggestion that she does not yet accept that her death is inevitable ('Je saurai, s'il le faut...'). There is an almost mocking ambiguity in her phrase 'Un pere tel que vous', and the sharpest touch of all is her continual reference to the idea of blood, her blood (which by kinship is also his) being shed at the altar, an image which must appal Agamemnon: Je saurai, s'il le faut, victime obeissante ... Vous rendre tout le sang que vous m'avez donne. C'est moi... ... pour qui tant de fois prodiguant vos caresses, Vous n'avez point du sang dedaigne les faiblesses.

49

French Renaissance tragedy Je ne m'attendais pas que pour le commencer, Mon sang fut le premier que vous dussiez verser. (IV, iv, 1181, 1195, 1203) Iphigenie is not an ambassador, she is not a person of whom any degree of oratorical skill could necessarily be expected. Yet we are not obliged to hear the author's voice intruding here, for Racine has prepared us for the eloquence of Iphigenie in an earlier scene. In Act III, scene vii, when both Clytemnestre and Achille know Agamemnon's intention, Iphigenie asks her mother's help in restraining Achille (who is boiling over with straightforward indignation and pugnacity), and proposes to Achille that her mother's grief and her own words be given the chance to act upon Agamemnon: Laissez parler, Seigneur, des bouches plus timides. Surpris, n'en doutez point, de mon retardement, Lui-meme il me viendra chercher dans un moment: II entendra gemir une mere oppressee; Et que ne pourra point m'inspirer la pensee De prevenir les pleurs que vous verseriez tous, D'arreter vos transports, et de vivre pour vous? (Ill, vii, 1066) When Iphigenie confronts her father, she is duly 'inspired' by love of her mother and of Achille, and by the wish not so much to avert her death as to spare them the grief that it would cause, to find the words best calculated both to accuse Agamemnon, and to arouse in him (although not immediately) an awareness of his power of choice. Racine has, surely, deliberately prepared us for the eloquence of Iphigenie. In other cases, however, where rhetorical skill would be less appropriate to the character, Racine has used a different technique. There are passages where he uses rhetorical figures more oddly, with deliberately surprising effects, to give a less polished impression. This happens in Hermione's famous line,' Je t'aimais inconstant, qu'aurais-je fait fidele?' {Andromaque, IV, v, 1365). There is a rhetorical figure here, that of antithesis ('inconstant'/ 'fidele'), as well as what is commonly known as a rhetorical question (the figure of interrogatio); but there is also an extraordinary ellipsis (another rhetorical figure) which suppresses most of an implied protasis (which would be 'si tu avais ete fidele'). The meaning would be 50

The rhetor more apparent if French were an inflected language. In Latin one could say: 'te inconstantem amabam; quanto magis te fidelem amavissem.' The line is undeniably powerful for, as Pascal says, Ha vraie eloquence se moque de l'eloquence', and rather than working on a double level of overt and covert message, like Oreste's speech, this might be described as having simultaneously a negative and positive effect - it is strange French and cannot mean anything: it means so much that it cannot fit into standard French. Or we can describe it in terms of two levels, but they are the two levels of our own response: we have the impression of an unskilled and yet powerfully eloquent speaker, and at the same time we admire the boldness and skill of the writer who can take such liberties with language. Hermione is not a public speaker like Oreste on his embassy, we do not expect her to make an elaborate deployment of figures. We experience simultaneously the effect of the figures used (antithesis, ellipsis, alliteration, interrogatio), and the effect produced by the imperfection of the sentence, suggesting that the power of emotion ruptures grammatical (as well as other) restraints. We are surely impressed, in the study if not in the theatre, by the confidence and subtlety of an author who can manipulate words like this. One more example from Racine: Phedre's last words which have been endlessly analysed and commented upon: Et la mort, a mes yeux derobant la clarte, Rend au jour, qu'ils souillaient, toute sa purete. (V, vii, 1643) These unforgettable lines are in several ways comparable to Hermione's ellipsis. They have a distinct rhetorical quality. There is paradox in that death is usually regarded as a source of darkness but here, while destroying 'clarte', it thereby restores the brilliance of 'purete' to daylight. Again, eyes, which in the language of lovepoetry (abundantly drawn upon in this play) emit light, like stars or suns, here emit darkness, and there is a trope, whereby darkness is expressed in terms of staining or soiling of the light. The combination of these paradoxical and altered figures gives a sense of strangeness which is appropriate not only to the 'amateur' speaker and her dying state, but to the strained atmosphere of the play, redolent of distress, danger, and frustration. And while we enjoy Racine's daring in warping rhetoric like this, we also realise that he has used Phedre's last words to give final expression and 51

French Renaissance tragedy resolution to the thematic images of light and dark which have dominated the play. Corneille uses strongly patterned language much more freely than Racine, and resorts less frequently to those shifts from formality to bare simplicity which characterise Racine, as when Agamemnon, after trying to dodge Achille's questions in four pompously evasive lines, suddenly bursts out with Tourquoi le demander, puisque vous le savez?' (Iphigenie, IV, vi, 1340). Racine swoops often to this register, Corneille rarely. Nevertheless we can distinguish in Corneille, as in Racine, between the public and the private voice, the professional and the amateur speaker. The professional speech in Corneille is often a forensic one. An example of this is Don Diegue's speech in defence of Rodrigue, in Act II, scene viii of Le Cid: Qu'on est digne d' envie Lorsqu'en perdant la force on perd aussi la vie Et qu'un long age apprete aux hommes genereux, Au bout de leur carriere, un destin malheureux! Moi, dont les longs travaux ont acquis tant de gloire, Moi, que jadis partout a suivi la victoire, Je me vois aujourd'hui, pour avoir trop vecu, Recevoir un affront et demeurer vaincu. Ce que n'a pu jamais combat, siege, embuscade, Ce que n'a pu jamais Aragon ni Grenade, Ni tous vos ennemis ni tous mes envieux, Le Comte en votre cour l'a fait presque a vos yeux, Jaloux de votre choix, et fier de l'avantage Que lui donnait sur moi l'impuissance de 1'age. Sire, ainsi ces cheveux blanchis sous le harnois, Ce sang pour vous servir prodigue tant de fois, Ce bras, jadis l'effroi d'une armee ennemie, Descendaient au tombeau tout charges d'infamie, Si je n'eusse produit un fils digne de moi, Digne de son pays et digne de son roi. II m'a prete sa main, il a tue le Comte, II m'a rendu l'honneur, il a lave ma honte. Si montrer du courage et du ressentiment, Si venger un soufflet merite un chatiment, Sur moi seul doit tomber l'eclat de la tempete: Quand le bras a failli, Ton en punit la tete. 52

700

705

710

715

720

The rhetor Qu'on nomme crime ou non ce qui fait nos debats, Sire, j'en suis la tete, il n'en est que le bras. Si Chimene se plaint qu'il a tue son pere, II ne Peut jamais fait si je l'eusse pu faire. Immolez done ce chef que les ans vont ravir Et conservez pour vous le bras qui peut servir. Aux depens de mon sang satisfaites Chimene: Je n'y resiste point, je consens a ma peine Et loin de murmurer d'un rigoureux decret, Mourant sans deshonneur, je mourrai sans regret.

725

730

Don Diegue is acting as counsel for the defence, but in an irregular way, since he is not only an interested party, but is claiming responsibility for the act which, as he euphemistically puts it, 4 fait nos debats'. Some rhetorical elements in this speech are obvious, elements both of form (the strong patterns of repetition which impart a quality of 'speech-making') and of content (the stress on his age and past service, with slightly pathetic effect). Others are more subtle, and among these we might note the build-up of the Comte into a kind of monster, as the culmination of a list which includes events ('siege', 'embuscade'), states (Aragon, Grenade) and people ('ennemis', 'envieux') so that he partakes of the qualities and dimensions of all of these; the involvement of the king, both in the Comte's offence ('en votre cour', 'presque a vos yeux', 'jaloux de votre choix') and in the definition of Rodrigue's honour ('digne de son roi'); the neat way in which he belittles the crime, both by giving a series of euphemistic re-definitions of it ('II m'a prete sa main ... II m'a rendu l'honneur... montrer du courage... venger un soufflet') and by slipping an avowal of the crime ('il a tue le Comte') in among these periphrases, so that it seems to be an unquestionably good action, on a par with 'laver ma honte' or 'me preter sa main', things which a son is surely right to do for a father; the recall of words and themes from Don Diegue's earlier speech immediately after the 'soufflet' ('O rage! 6 desespoir! 6 vieillesse ennemie!' I,iv, 237), which has the effect of demonstrating the continuity of the character - although he is now making a public speech to the king, and was then soliloquising, he is recognisably the same speaker; lastly there is a rhetorical flourish in the form of the challenge at the end (727), when he makes an offer which he knows 53

French Renaissance tragedy cannot be accepted (that he should be punished for Rodrigue's crime). The rhetorical sophistication of this speech can be justified not only by the fact that it is so very public, perhaps comparable in that respect to Oreste's ambassadorial speech, but also by the difficulty which confronts this counsel for the defence, by the harmony between this speech and his earlier soliloquy (so that we accept this speech as being not far removed from a register we have already heard Diegue using), and by the fact that although Diegue here lays emphasis exclusively on his successful career as a soldier (702, 705, 711-13), the Comte had called him a 'vieux courtisan', which prepares us for some degree of address and sophistication. The elaborate patterning is in any case in keeping with the generally formal nature of Corneille's language. Is there an equivalent in Corneille to Racine's un-rhetorical rhetoric, as uttered at climactic moments by Hermione or Phedre? I think there is, but in Corneille that too takes a stylised form. Look for example at a line where Corneille perhaps comes nearest to Racinian colloquial simplicity: CHIMENE

Va, je ne te hais point. RODRIGUE

Tu le dois. CHIMENE

Je ne puis. (LeCid, III, iv, 963)

The line is touching in its absolute simplicity, reinforced by the use of monosyllables. The short words make the line seem long, since it contains twelve words, whereas many lines, even some of those split between two speakers, contain six or fewer. But for all its apparent length the line is of course regular, and for all its apparent simplicity it is nevertheless patterned; although it is divided into three utterances, there is symmetry about the caesura, for each hemistich contains a positive verb in the second person ('Va', 'dois') and a negative verb in the first person ('je ne te hais point', 'Je ne puis'). As we look at this broken line on the page, the rhetoric may seem to have collapsed; yet the design holds. One further example of non-public speech from Corneille will demonstrate how he combines rhetorical stylisation with the effect 54

The rhetor of simple pathos produced by dividing a line between two speakers. It is the farewell of Severe and Pauline, at the end of Act II, ii of Polyeucte: SEVERE

Puisse le juste ciel, content de ma mine, Combler d'heur et de jours Polyeucte et Pauline! PAULINE

Puisse trouver Severe, apres tant de malheur, Une felicite digne de sa valeur! SEVERE

II la trouvait en vous. PAULINE

Je dependais d'un pere. SEVERE

O devoir qui me perd et qui me desespere! Adieu, trop vertueux objet, et trop charmant. PAULINE

Adieu, trop malheureux et trop parfait amant.

(II, ii, 565)

The symmetry of the first two couplets, and the return to symmetry at the end, are obvious immediately, but many other things contribute to the effect created by these lines. Severe's two lines are full of indications of his generosity. Even if his use of 'juste' is tinged with irony, it still suggests that he has accepted that it is in some way 'right' for Polyeucte to have Pauline, even if 'right' only means 'ordered by capricious gods'. Although he still feels pain and bitterness, he has already restrained their expression so that they are compressed here into the hemistich 'content de ma mine'. To name Polyeucte and Pauline instead of using a second-person address may seem a way of distancing himself, but at the same time to name them as a couple is to recognise them, to legitimise them, and almost constitutes a kind of blessing. Pauline's reply matches Severe's words in form and spirit. She uses a half-line, matching his, to acknowledge his pain ('apres tant de malheur'), and meets his generosity with her own as she simultaneously wishes him happiness and praises him ('digne de sa valeur'). The farewell seems complete and the scene could have ended there; but in a bold final movement Corneille shows that Severe cannot leave it there, and the pain and reproach burst out, masked 55

French Renaissance tragedy only by the use of the third person ('II la trouvait'). In reply to this, Pauline can only remind him of what they both know, and so line 569, shared between them, expresses the whole situation as it existed when they first met and loved. It seems that there is now no way forward, unless they repeat the whole scene. Instead, Severe, after a line which acknowledges the force compelling Pauline's refusal ('O devoir'), while mocking by its echo-effect the object of that duty {'perd\ 'deses/?ere'), restores the dialogue to formality with his farewell line in which the pain and bitterness have been further compressed, into the repeated 'trop'; Pauline again matches his words (though with a pleasing variation of rhythm produced by the different placing of 'objet' in Severe's line and 'amant' in hers). Symmetry expresses self-possession, and they are able to part. Plainly, we cannot be unaware of formality and rhetorical patterning in a dialogue such as this; it has not the excuse of being public speech, like Don Diegue's, but, rather, conveys in stylised form the reciprocal rhythms of tense dialogue. Opera goes to far greater lengths of artifice and stylisation, and succeeds in moving its listeners. In such passages, the design of the language at once stirs our feelings and distances and abstracts the characters. We shall find similar effects in sixteenth-century tragedy. Highly formal language with a wealth of rhetorical figures is easy to find in humanist tragedy. Long speeches are often composed in conformity with the patterns of expository rhetoric, or there may be a well-known non-dramatic source, well-known to a contemporary audience - from Plutarch, the Bible, Homer, or Virgil - which provides model midpoint de repere for rhetoric, in addition, perhaps, to a 'professional' reason for a character's eloquence (professional in the sense that Oreste's ambassadorial eloquence is professional). Three examples from the theatre of Robert Gamier will illustrate this form of public voice in humanist tragedy. The first example I have chosen is that of the anonymous prophet in Les Juifves. This personage appears twice in the play. He occupies the first act with a single speech of ninety lines (followed by ninety lines from the Chorus), which is rich in biblical echoes (particularly from the Psalms and from Jeremiah) and which constitutes a prologue rather than an exposition scene exposition is delayed until the second act where it is performed 56

The rhetor by the Hecuba-like figure of Amital. The Prophete in the first act addresses God and Israel alternately, lamenting God's ang^r, admitting Israel's guilt and calling on Israel to repent. Although not precisely expository, this speech does refer back to events occurring before the opening of the play, whereas in the Prophete's other appearance, in the last act, his prophecy takes the form (unlike much Old Testament prophecy) of foretelling the future, so that he extends our vision beyond the unbearable present and shows the punishment waiting for Nabuchodonosor. The Prophete has been artfully fitted into the play. He has been given a dramatic function in that Gamier uses him as messenger, instead of the dim nuntius-figure of Seneca's tragedies; it is he who describes to Amital, the Jewish queens, and the Chorus of Jewish women the climactic scene of execution and torture. Furthermore, his language constantly recalls the Bible: with homely imagery, as when he compares Nabuchodonosor to the rod with which a child is punished by a loving parent, which is afterwards broken in pieces or burned; with imagery drawn from nature and the elements ('comme foudres', 'comme tempestes', 'comme unoraged'eclairs'), echoing the language of Isaiah (Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire', Isaiah 29:6); and with a use of parallelism that recalls both the prophets and the Psalms: Ennemi des mortels et leur commune peste ... Que tu es impiteux, que tu es sans merci... Je t'atteste, Eternel, Eternel je t'appelle ... Us se gaussent de toy, ta force mesprisee Par nos adversitez leur sert d'une risee. (V, 1839, 1841, 1847, 1867)

(Compare, with this last, Jeremiah 20:7: 'I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me.') What the Prophete has to convey in this authentic style is also authentic, both because it tallies with the Bible and because it can be slotted into known history. The prediction of the defeat of Babylon by 'les peuples d'Aquilon' (V, 2133) is based on Jeremiah 50:3: Tor out of the north there cometh up a nation against her' 57

French Renaissance tragedy (Vulgate: 'gens de Aquilone'), and the description of the invaders' sparkling armour recalls Nahum 3:3: The horseman lifteth up both the bright sword and the glittering spear.' In its biblical context this can be taken to refer to the overthrow of Babylon by the Medes and Persians under Cyrus in 538 BC, but to those more familiar with slightly later history, it could equally well evoke Alexander's capture of Babylon (then one of the capitals of the Persian empire) in 331 BC. Alexander too came 'ex Aquilone', from the Plains of Gaugamela near Nineveh, where he had just defeated Darius. The prophecy of Nabuchodonosor's transformation into 'un boeuf pasturant et buglant' is, of course, also biblical (Daniel 4:25; 4:32; 5:31) but at the same time suggests the Minotaur, or some of the more alarming metamorphoses of Greek mythology (Lycaon, Io, Atalanta). So the Prophete stands as a sort of embodiment of the principle of contaminatio; he is biblical because of his diction and what he says, he is classical because he is prologue and nuntius, and because he brings classical, as well as biblical, history and mythology into our minds. His main function in the play is a doctrinal one: it is important that we understand Nabuchodonosor's position (as Nabuchodonosor himself does not), which is that he is indeed the 'verge' which God is using to punish his chosen people. He will later be broken and discarded, to punish not only his barbarous cruelty but his hubris, in supposing himself to be acting in defiance of God, rather than according to the divine plan. But precisely because this is part of the central thesis of the play, we need to be told it from within the play and not merely in an 'Argument' or preface; and so the Prophete has to be integrated into the play, and thereby serves at the same time to strengthen the characteristic atmosphere of the play, an atmosphere strongly biblical yet also classical. The public voice here, then, has multiple functions: dramatic, intellectual, and aesthetic. Another kind of quasi-professional speaker is the philosopher, and there are several of these in Gamier. In Porcie there is Aree, who is clearly modelled on the character Seneca in the Senecan (or pseudo-Senecan) tragedy Octavia. In Cornelie there is Ciceron. In Marc Antoine there is Philostrate, whom I shall consider here. A philosopher of this name, living in Alexandria, is mentioned by Plutarch (Garnier's source) who speaks of him as the most 58

The rhetor articulate and eloquent of the sophists and rhetoricians of his time. His are not the only, or even the most, philosophical utterances in the play; for example, Agrippe in Act IV moralises about Marc Antoine's defeat and takes the side of mercy in a clemence/rigueur debate with Octave; Marc Antoine's confidant, Lucile, defends Cleopatre against Antoine's accusations and delivers speeches about friendship, virtue, fortune, and the disastrous consequences of 'volupte'; Cleopatre and her 'femme d'honneur' Charmion argue about personal responsibility and fatality. What is curious about Philostrate is that he has been put into the play to make only one speech. Philostrate is presented, through his words, as a Hellenised Egyptian: his speech opens with a reference to Megere, one of the Furies, but goes on to emphasise the distinction between Greek and Egyptian, by listing the great criminal ancestors from Greek mythology - from whom, as he points out, the Egyptians are not descended - Ixion, Salmoneus, Tantalus, Atreus. This recollection of myth, and the evocation later in the speech of the 'horrible amour' which led to the destruction of Troy, provides a possible clue to the reason for Philostrate's appearance in the play. He is not used as a philosopher, he offers us no understanding of nature, or technical skills of argument, or special views on the relationship between men and gods, but the fact that he is a philosopher (or rather, that the character named Philostratus in Plutarch is a philosopher) allows him to be used simply as a 'speaker', a sort of free-lance who needs no special or logical motivation for his entrance or his speech. What he does in that speech is to enlarge the scope of the play, as we shall see. Dryden gave the title All for Love to his version of Antony and Cleopatra, and the theme of the world well lost for love is prominent in Garnier's first act, occupied by Antoine: J'ay pour elle quitte Mon pais, et Cesar a la guerre incite ... ... je n'ay plus rien, tant je suis delaisse, Que ces armes icy, que je porte endosse ... Bref, tu soumets ta vie aux yeux de Cleopatre. 59

(1,7, 23, 78)

French Renaissance tragedy The theme is presented even more forcefully in Antoine's next scene, which comes in Act III (Philostrate having made his single appearance in Act II), when Antoine says to Lucile: Ait Cesar la victoire, ait mes biens, ait Thonneur D'estre sans compagnon de la terre seigneur, Ait mes enfans, ma vie au mal opiniatre, Ce m'est tout un, pourveu qu'il n'ait ma Cleopatre. (Ill, 918) If kept at this level, the tragedy would be a relatively personal one; Philostrate is one of the means of transforming it into something larger. He reminds us, for one thing, that if the lover considers the world well lost for love, the world which is lost may suffer a great deal in the process, not by its own fault. Philostrate describes the plight of Egypt, where 'la presente mort nous marchande a tous coups', under the burden of invasion and with the imminent prospect of defeat and captivity. In so doing, he points out that the vagaries of great men determine the fate of nations: thousands will suffer because a love-affair has gone awry. The personal disaster becomes a public one, its scale is shown to be huge. Garnier has suppressed the personal motive to which Plutarch attributes Philostratus' dread of Octavian's victory over Antony, so that when we listen to Philostrate we think not of personal enmities and private vengeance, but of the proper subjects for tragedy, as recommended by Jean de La Taille in his essay De VArt de la tragedie (La Taille, 1972,19): 'guerres, pestes, famines, captivitez, cruautez des Tyrans et bref, que larmes et miseres extremes, et non point de choses qui arrivent tous les jours naturellement et par raison commune'. Furthermore, the evocation of Greek myth - the criminal ancestors of legendary Greek heroes, the Trojan war - enlarges the tragedy in another way, as well as providing a sort of local colour in that these are acceptable allusions for a Hellenised Alexandrian to make. The figures of Ixion, Tantalus, and so on are frequently cited by Seneca in his tragedies; not only that, but their descendants are prominent among the dramatis personae of classical tragedy and Homeric epic. From Salmoneus are descended Jason and Alcestis; from Tantalus came Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Aegisthus, Iphigenia, Electra, Orestes; from Ixion, Theseus' friend Pirithous. So Philostrate here, and 60

The rhetor by his reference to Troy, links the story he is in with the great subjects of tragedy and epic (and all the great ancestor-criminals committed crimes of passion and of depraved love). In his description of comets, ghosts, and other portents, the tragedy even seems to take on a cosmic dimension. What this amounts to is that Philostrate, a 'professional' speaker with no dramatic role in the play - he meets no other character, plays no part in the plot - is used for no other purpose (apart from a touch of local colour) than to suggest to the audience a wider scope to the tragedy than its personal core might otherwise seem to allow it. The technique is one that a seventeenth-century author would be very unlikely to use, nor can I think of another sixteenth-century author who has done quite this; but it is somewhat reminiscent of Shakespeare's occasional use of a Chorus. In a narrow sense Philostrate is expressing part of the 'doctrina' of the play when he comments on Thorrible amour': Tant il est pestilent, tant il esmeut d'orages, Tant il ard de citez, tant il fait de carnages, Quand sans reigle, sans ordre, insolent, aveugle, Nos sens il entretient d'un plaisir dereigle.

(11,293)

But in a wider sense he is expressing a tragic mood, a dark view of humanity and its doomed enterprises. The last kind of public speech I want to look at here is the 'jactance' or boasting speech, made by a conqueror or tyrant. The most famous is that made by Nabuchodonosor in Les Juifves (Tareil aux Dieux je marche' II, 181). A king or general is really a 'licensed' public speaker only on, say, a state occasion or the eve of battle. That does not apply to Nabuchodonosor, and the function of his first speech is, among other things, to identify him as a tyrant and as an exaggeratedly hubristic man. Nor does it apply to the 'jactance' of Cesar (that is, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, later to become the emperor Augustus) in Act IV of Marc Antvine. Why does Garnier put a 'jactance' into Cesar's mouth at this point? The gist of the speech is this: 'O Gods, who have all power over nature and men, you raised Rome to the pinnacle of world-conquering greatness. Yet now Rome has been conquered by one man; I rule over Rome and the world and, equal to Jupiter, dispose of Fortune. I am worshipped, the world fears Caesar, and Antony recognises this.' 61

French Renaissance tragedy What Gamier does with this speech is prepare for the second part of the play's double moral. The first part of the moral message is represented by Antoine, who loses everything because of love and because he chooses to: s'esbatre Dedans Alexandrie, avec sa Cleopatre En plaisirs dereiglez, ne faisant nuict et jour Que plonger leurs esprits aux delices d'Amour.

(IV, 1380)

Cesar inflicts Antoine's punishment on him by defeating him in battle; and just as Nabuchodonosor punishes the Jews, but must in his turn be punished, Cesar too (though his offence is less) will not escape punishment for his hubris. Cesar loses because he is too sure that he has won. He is jubilant in victory and proposes to be harsh in rule. In the clemence/rigueur debate with Agrippe which follows his boasting speech he defends rigueur, and a very bloodthirsty form of it: Done a fin que jamais aucun durant mes jours Se voulant elever ne treuve du secours, II faut de tant de sang marquer nostre victoire, Qu'il en soit pour exemple a tout jamais memoire: II faut tout massacrer, si qu'il ne reste aucun Qui trouble a l'advenir nostre repos commun. (IV, 1494) In Corneille's Cinna, this more than Machiavellian programme has become Auguste's past, which he must in some way expunge or expiate in order to merit trust and respect. Gamier does not look so far ahead; but it is necessary that this cruel and hubristic man be in some measure defeated, otherwise the world that Gamier shows us will be not tragic but perverse. Cesar will rule the Roman world, but he will not rule Cleopatre, and Cleopatre's suicide demonstrates this other side of the moral - tyrants do not have things all their own way, cannot completely stamp out the freedom of others, and are therefore never quite as powerful as they think they are. Cesar will have to content himself (as history records) with displaying Cleopatre's effigy, and not her person, in his triumph. Like the speeches of the Prophete and Philostrate, then, Cesar's speech is related to doctrina; but, more than these other two 62

The rhetor speeches, it is also necessary for the understanding, the right perception, of the character Cesar himself, who is by no means a walk-on part like Philostrate. Yet that characterisation is itself part of the moral design, and the moral design in turn creates the tragic pattern. Garnier's perspective is not a simple one in which Antoine and Cleopatre are wrong because led by 'La douce volupte, delices de Cypris' (the phrase is spoken by Lucile, III, 1170), and Cesar right because embodying the spirit of Roman rule and Roman self-control. MarcAntoine is a tragic play because two flawed systems are in conflict: the doctrine of 'all for love' and the doctrine of military supremacy tied to self-aggrandisement. The fact that Cesar has won the battle of Actium does not mean that he is in the right; and so the suicide of Cleopatre is not only the end of the love-story but a humiliating setback for Cesar. Garnier's use of the public voice is varied but has as a rule little to do with characterisation, much more to do with making contact with the audience and transmitting the moral content of his plays.

63

4 THE CHORUS

We know tantalisingly little about how the humanist dramatists used, or wished to use, their Chorus on stage. Writing about the Chorus in Garnier's Les Juifves, R. M. Griffiths says firmly: The Choeur des Juifves is, like all Renaissance choruses, present on the stage throughout the action' (1986,57); but it is by no means certain that this is true of 'all Renaissance choruses'. Frangoise Charpentier (1981, 575) holds that in plays of Montchrestien where the Chorus is 'personnalise' {La Reine d'Escosse, LesLacenes), there must also be a 'Choeur impersonnel', although this is not mentioned in the list of 'Entreparleurs'; but this too is only surmise. Charpentier also speculates about the deployment of the Chorus on the stage: 'Sur la scene meme, il faut imaginer les acteurs du Choeur en retrait, operant, au moment de prendre la parole, un mouvement pour occuper le devant de la scene, et peut-etre masquer les deplacements des autres acteurs en train de l'evacuer.' The continuous presence of the Chorus is one way of both imposing and guaranteeing the unities of time and place; but even if we assume that once the Chorus appeared it remained on stage for the rest of the play (and this seems unlikely in plays with multiple Choruses, such as Garnier's Antigone), we need not necessarily suppose that it appeared as soon as the play began. In plays which open with a supernatural figure (for example a Fury in Garnier's Porcie, ghosts in Garnier's Hippolyte and Jodelle's Cleopatre captive), we can very well imagine that the Chorus comes on to replace these figures, rather than sharing the stage with them, so that the arrival of the Chorus marks the shift from the supernatural to the human level. We might wish to extend this supposition to other plays where the presence of the Chorus during the body of the first Act seems particularly inappropriate, for example Filleul's Lucrece, where Act I shows Tarquin boasting in anticipation of his rape of Lucrece. We may then be further tempted to 65

French Renaissance tragedy remove the Chorus from other scenes that seem unfit for it to hear. Certainly we should take this liberty if it assists our imaginative perception of a play in the theatre of our mind; but probably we are taking too literal, too naturalistic a view of the Chorus if we feel that its presence must necessarily disturb a scene which seems to require privacy, whether for tenderness (Hemon and Antigone, in Act III of Gamier's A ntigone), or for plotting (the conspirators in Act III of Jacques de La Taille's Alexandre, where the Chorus consists of Alexandra's own soldiers). However, it does seem likely that Choruses particularly associated with one person would be on stage only in the presence of that person; thus the 'Choeur de filles Thebaines' in Garnier's Antigone has surely not been seen until, late in Act IV, it accompanies Antigone on her way to die. We are not helped, in contemplating these problems, by the carelessness of many authors or printers of humanist tragedy, who did not consistently indicate who was present in a scene, nor identify a choric speech as coming from a 'Choeur impersonnel' or from one of the 'Choeurs personnalises' (to borrow Charpentier's terms). But if we are uncertain about the way Choruses were used or intended to be used on stage, we can nevertheless, by looking at the texts, see that they have several functions in humanist tragedies. So many, indeed, that we may wonder how the seventeenth century does without them. If we consider these two things (the functions of the Chorus, and alternative seventeenth-century solutions) we shall see that in suppressing the Chorus, later writers have not suppressed its functions but redistributed them. The formal function mentioned above, of guaranteeing unity of time, is typically replaced in later classical tragedy by references within the text to the time-scale of the action. In Bajazet, the vizier Acomat says in the first scene: 'J'espere qu'aujourd'hui / Bajazet se declare, et Roxane avec lui', and from then on the play is punctuated with reminders of the brief time-span and of the need for rapid decisions and actions, including the following: Termonslui des ce jour les portes de Byzance ... hatons-nous' (I,ii,226); 'le temps qu'elle vous donne' (II, v, 778); 'il vous demande avec impatience' (III, viii, 1105); 'il est necessaire / D'achever promptement ce que vous vouliez faire' (IV, iii, 1177); 'En quels retardements / D'un jour si precieux perdez-vous les moments?' (IV, vi, 66

The Chorus 1331); 'tu n'as qu'un moment' (V,iv, 1542); 'Cejour meme, des jours le plus infortune' (V,vi). The unity of place is indicated similarly; in the absence of a Chorus, and even without benefit of scenery, we are constantly reminded in Bajazet of the setting, by mention of Byzantium, of the Bosphorus, and of the seraglio itself, with its labyrinthine architecture, and its gates leading to an unattainable freedom. At times the Chorus is employed in exposition and retrospective narrative; we have already seen that in later tragedy these tasks are accomplished by other characters whether prominent (Corneille, Pulcherie), minor (Corneille, Rodogune), or one of each (Corneille, Medee; Racine, Andromaque). The narration of tragic events, which in humanist tragedy is usually received by the Chorus, with or without the additional presence of major characters, is in later tragedy delivered to major characters without loss of dramatic effect, but what does disappear is a lyric resource, since choric reactions to tragic recits often take the form of very fine poems. Another function of the Chorus is that of moralising, in the widest sense: reflecting on the moral, ethical, religious, or political implications of the action, as well as voicing wise or 'right' ideas. In the absence of the Chorus this activity will have to be displaced, if it is carried on at all. The most suspect place it can move to is the preface; suspect because this is where the author makes a public defence of his work which may have more to do with placating 'les gens bien-pensants' than with expressing what an uncensorious reader will find in the play. So Racine writes in the Preface to Phedre: Je n'en ai point fait [sc. de tragedie] ou la vertu soit plus mise en jour que celle-ci; les moindres fautes y sont severement punies: la seule pensee du crime y est regardee avec autant d'horreur que le crime meme; les faiblesses de P amour y passent pour de vraies faiblesses; les passions n'y sont presentees aux yeux que pour montrer tout le desordre dont elles sont cause; et le vice y est peint partout avec des couleurs qui en font connaitre et hair la difformite. Racine's second statement here, that 'les moindres fautes y sont severement punies', suggests a simpler moral universe than we find in his plays, and perhaps represents a necessary but not very satisfactory defence against the charge of immorality often brought 67

French Renaissance tragedy against the theatre in the later part of the seventeenth century. The idea, expressed later in the sentence, that the display of vice and of the consequences of passion is enough to make a moral point, is more convincing. Corneille had made a similar claim in the dedication to his Medee: Je vous donne Medee, toute mechante qu'elle est, et ne vous dirai rien pour sa justification... Ici vous trouverez le crime en son char de triomphe ... II n' est pas question d'avertir ici le public que [les mauvaises actions] de cette tragedie ne sont pas a imiter: elles paraissent assez a decouvert pour n'en faire envie a personne. Another possible home for moralising, once the Chorus has gone, is in sententious passages, although these have many and often complex uses, and may be used to express opposition and conflict rather than an authoritative moral statement. Humanist tragedy has both Chorus and sententiae, and characters such as nurses and confidants are particularly ready to proffer elegantly worded gnomic statements. The current of sententious writing is still very strong in Corneille. In the first few pages of Le Cid we find the following: 1 Un moment donne au sort des visages divers. 2 L'amour est un tyran qui n'epargne personne. 3 dans les belles ames Le seul merite a droit de produire des flammes. 4 Si l'amour vit d'espoir, il perit avec lui; C'est un feu qui s'eteint, faute de nourriture. 5 Pour grands que soient les rois, ils sont ce que nous sommes: Us peuvent se tromper comme les autres hommes. 6 Mais on doit ce respect au pouvoir absolu, De n'examiner rien quand un roi l'a voulu. 7 Un prince dans un livre apprend mal son devoir. Some of these (for example, 1 and 2) are similar to the commonplace sententiae of earlier tragedy, and one can easily imagine them transposed to form part of a choric poem. Others are much more specific and linked to the dramatic situation. Those numbered 5 and 7 are of this kind; if 7 is true as a general proposition, Renaissance writers of Institutions du prince' were wasting their time, but it is a telling point in the specific context of the dispute 68

The Chorus between Diegue and Gomes, just as 6 represents an attempt by Diegue to close the discussion. It is only the more general kind that seems to have a function analogous to that of the Chorus, namely to enlarge the scope of the dramatic world and make us relate it to wider human experience. Although some characters in humanist tragedy have a confidant, in other plays the Chorus serves in that role. Whereas Racine's Andromaque makes her lamentation about the fall of Troy to her confidant Cephise, Garnier's Hecube makes hers to the Chorus. The confidant in later tragedy can take on some of the humanist Chorus's moralising or generalising function, since she or he is an observer, partial, but not blinded by prejudice or passion. Another part of the Chorus's activity, related to moralising but not restricted to that, is the task of representing public opinion, or indeed the public. The Chorus of Trojan women in Garnier's Troade, as in the source-plays by Euripides and Seneca, speaks for all the victims of the siege and sack of Troy, and for all women who suffer from men's bellicosity and from the hideous game of war. The Thebans who form one Chorus in Garnier's Antigone speak for the city, both as commentators and sufferers. It is they who, without judging the protagonists, give an account of Thebes' ordeal during the war, and as citizens they care about the fortunes of the ruling house. It is harder to achieve this public dimension without a Chorus. Sometimes individuals may claim to represent public opinion, and this has the advantage that it can be shown to be divided or changing. In Corneille's Horace Valere makes this claim: 'Que tous les gens de bien vous parlent par ma voix' (V, ii, 1482). In the next scene the value of public opinion is questioned by Horace's father, who tells Horace not to worry about the views of 'le peuple stupide' but to refer to the judgement of a smaller, aristocratic group ('C'est aux rois, c'est aux grands, c'est aux esprits bien faits / A voir la vertu pleine en ses moindres effets'); but almost in the same breath le vieil Horace makes an even larger claim than Valere's: 'Rome tout entiere a parle par ma bouche' (V, iii, 1728). These rival claims challenge the audience to make sense of them and to judge them, and to understand how both could be right - that the people of Rome could be both enthusiastic about Horace's victory and shocked by his murder of Camille. Such flexibility and dialectic 69

French Renaissance tragedy force is achieved by humanist tragedians partly by non-choric stichomythia, a duel of words where opposing sets of principles are brought into direct conflict, and partly by the use of multiple Choruses, for example the Trojan and Carthaginian Choruses which support Enee and Didon in Jodelle's Didon se sacrifiant. Racine sometimes uses techniques similar to that cited from Horace, but he has other ways of making us aware of an 'offstage crowd' in the absence of its representation by a Chorus on stage. The Levites in Athalie, the Greek army in Iphigenie, are alarming forces barely held in check, threatening to invade the stage at any moment. In Bajazet there are two such invisible groups. One consists of Roxane's women who tend (and rob) the unconscious Atalide; as soon as she recovers, 'leur troupe est disparue' (V, i, 1441), and they do not appear on stage. The other is formed by the armed mutes who wait, always out of sight, to carry out murderous orders. In Phedre and the Roman plays, we are aware of the population of Athens or Rome, who must be reckoned with politically. When Thesee is believed dead, Athens is reported to be divided into three factions, supporting Hippolyte, Phedre's son, or Aricie as his successor {Phedre, I,iv,326). In Britannicus, Neron cites what he claims to be the will of Rome to suit his own purpose (II, iii, 596; IV, ii, 1239), and Agrippine speaks of how she is regarded by the Roman people (I, ii, 251; V, iii, 1605). In Berenice, Paulin distinguishes (II, ii, 350, 371) between 'la cour' who will approve of anything Titus does (and who, as Titus' 'suite', are represented on stage) and 'Rome', unalterably opposed to the idea of a foreign queen on Caesar's throne or in his bed. When there is no Chorus, then, its functions, or some of them, are performed by other means and other characters. Let us now look in detail at the use of the Chorus in some humanist plays. Perhaps the play where the Chorus could most easily be shown to work richly and co-operatively is Garnier's LesJuifves, where it is the locus of much of the contaminatio in the play, carrying out its classical tasks in biblical modes. But the use of the Chorus in this play has been so often, and so well, discussed (recently, for example, by R. M. Griffiths, 1986 and T. Peach, 1986-7) that I have chosen instead to look at the Medee Tu'enfant1 of Jean de La Peruse (La Peruse, 1986), more briefly at Jacques de La Taille's Alexandre (La Taille, 1975), and at Garnier's Antigone (Gamier, 1952). 70

The Chorus The Chorus in La Peruse's posthumously published Medee Tu 'enfant is not identified but presumably, as in the Medea-plays of Euripides and Seneca, it is a Chorus of Corinthian women. As their first long ode shows, they are not without sympathy for the foreign Medee. The gist of the ode is: if only sea-travel had not been invented by curious and ambitious men, the A rgo would not have sailed, and so Medee would not have fallen in love with Jason, and would be much happier; but it would be still better for her if she had died at birth (this is not said malevolently, and has echoes both classical and biblical: Sophocles, Oedipus Coloneus 1225; Job 3:11). It takes the Chorus 108 lines to convey this, so obviously more is going on than the communication of this minimal message. What does this 'more' consist of? Part of it is that Medee's suffering is placed in a very wide context of human striving, ambition, and adventure. The Chorus also creates for us mental pictures of horrifying places and events, such as a storm at sea, accompanied by phenomena capable of frightening even Hercules; this is the sort of world into which Medee's crimes will fit. For contrast, the Chorus also gives us the picture of an idyllic past, before ambition and greed destroyed men's contentment and set them wandering and fighting. The ode also serves to place us in the fictional/mythological context of the Argonauts, and gives further literary enlargement too, for when we hear of Scylla, Sirens, and clashing rocks, we are in the world not only of the Argonauts but of Odysseus, while the opening of the ode, with its reproach to the over-bold man who first ventured to sea, recalls Horace {Odes I,iii). In addition to enlarging our field of perception, this ode also initiates a direction for our moral judgement, for by implication it places on Jason a share of the blame for what is to happen. Although according to the usual sources Jason's voyage to Colchis was part of a justifiable enterprise undertaken to recover a throne legitimately his, the emphasis here is on 'convoitise', 'avarice', and Thomme ambicieux... a son mal ingenieus!' Had Jason not been such a man, the Chorus implies, he would not have gone looking for the Golden Fleece, and Medee might still be in Colchis. The next ode, at the end of the second act, has more of Seneca in it than the others, but even so, fewer than half the lines have Senecan precursors, and the startling effect of nervous agitation 71

French Renaissance tragedy in the first strophe, the jerky rapidity so appropriate for the naming of dangerous, fast-moving phenomena, is entirely La Peruse's: De flame allumee Des vans animee, De trait decoche, Et du foudre vite, Maint et maint evite Qu'il ne soit touche.

(II, 507)

The choppy rhythm is reinforced by the uncomfortable word order. As the poem continues, Medee's mood is linked with these frightening elements, but particularly with fire, and also with prophetic 'fureur', the divine frenzy of an inspired priestess. This implies that what might be viewed as mere jealousy and bad temper is in fact a form of mania, both sacred and prophetic. There is then an interesting step from 'fureur' to 'furie': Comme la pretresse, Que la fureur presse Sou* le devin Dieu, Secoiie la tete En vain, et n'arrete Jamais en un lieu: Avec telle mine Medee chemine, Et n'arrete point: Ainsi la furie Qui la seigneurie Sa poitrine epoint.

(11,531)

Medee's passion is thus shown to partake both of human feeling and divine madness, but a link is also suggested with the Furies, the deities who avenge crime against the family. Medee has already murdered her brother, and caused the murder of Jason's uncle Pelias, and she is about to murder her children, so she may well have attracted the attention of the Furies already. But a different suggestion is made in line 556: Sa face ternie Son pas de furie, M'epouvantent fort. 72

(II, 555)

The Chorus If we read (or hear) 'furie' as 'Furie' we are offered the idea of Medee not governed by 'furie' but compared to a Fury, and we realise that she is taking on a Fury's role in avenging what she sees as Jason's crime against family - his abandoning of his wife for a younger woman through whom he seeks political and social advancement. Medee had invoked the Furies, indeed, in her opening speech, saying that they were present when she married Jason and must help her now to punish him (1,17). This network of associations and suggestions is extended by the strophe following the one in which 'furie' first replaces 'fureur', for there the Chorus alludes to Althaea, who murdered her son Meleager by throwing into the fire the brand to which his life was linked; another version of the Meleager myth relates that Althaea did not kill her son, but dedicated him to the Furies, so the overt allusion to Althaea's infanticide prefigures Medee's crime, while the alternative version, not cited here but perhaps present in the mind of some readers, alludes again to the Furies. This choric ode creates a very strong atmosphere of anxiety and restlessness, and links Medee with supernatural forces, whether through mania ('fureur') or through the Erinyes ('furie'), as well as with the elemental force of fire. It solicits not so much our pity for her, as our awe and terror. Pity is not forgotten, however, for it had already been expressed (and thereby solicited) earlier in this act, when the Chorus commented on the scene as it unfolded: Las-helas, qu'un deul Ne vient jamais seul, Las que la Fortune De divers travaus, De maus suivans maus Tou-jours importune. Fame miserable Ton sort pitoiable Me creve le coeur. 6 amitie feinte, 6 Roi de Corinte, 6 grande rigueur.

(11,457)

The tone of sympathy here ('Fame miserable / Ton sort pitoiable / Me creve le coeur') moves into one of ambiguous reproof ('O amitie 73

French Renaissance tragedy feinte, / O Roi de Corinte'). The ambiguity will prove ironic, since in the end the most successful and most disastrous 'amitie feinte' will turn out to be that simulated by Medee when she sends Glauque a poisoned crown. The short choric ode at the end of Act III recalls the storm image used in the first ode, and negates this image to produce a picture of calm: Tou-jours le vant tempetant Sur la Mer Aegee Ne va l'onde tourmantant De rage enragee: Et de Teau fiere l'effort Qui tanse sa rive, N'empeche tou-jours qu'au port La barque n'arrive.

(Ill, 765)

In spite of the unambiguous sense of these stanzas, they are still dominated by notions of turbulence which the grammatical negation (located only in 'Ne' in the first stanza and 'N'' in the second) can hardly quell. This indeed helps to create the contrast which is then established, between the mutability of nature (weather, day and night), which though changeable yet follows a pattern ('par ranc vont et revont', 783), and the unnatural fixity and unstoppable intensification of Medee's anger. Two other elements deserve comment in this third ode. The first is that of premonition. Given that the audience is expected to know the story, it is not really our anxiety that is being directly awakened by this. Rather, the audience is being confirmed in its knowledge of what is going to happen, while anxiety builds up on stage. The Chorus forms an innocent audience troubled by its own premonitions, which coincide with the exact foreknowledge of the theatre audience or the reader. The second point of interest is the mention of 'la Mer Aegee' in the lines quoted above. This is an anachronism in the mouth of the Chorus, since according to the chronology of the myth, Aegeus is alive in Athens at this moment. The Aegean Sea will take its name from him only later, when Theseus comes back from Crete, after killing the Minotaur, without changing his black sails, and his father Aegeus, thinking him dead, throws himself into the sea in grief and despair. The missing link is that 74

The Chorus when Medea left Corinth in her dragon-drawn chariot she went to Athens and became the mistress of Aegeus. When Theseus first arrived in Athens to claim his birthright, Medea tried to poison him. It is unlikely that La Peruse did not know this sequel to Medea's story, so we might surmise that the anachronism is deliberate and constitutes another kind of 'premonition', a reminder to the alert reader of the next stage of Medea's life. At the same time this reference, like those in the first choric ode, extends the geographical scope away from Corinth, to the Aegean Sea between Greece and Asia Minor. The Argo must have sailed across that sea, and through the Sea of Marmara, to reach distant Colchis on the Black Sea. This allusion works, of course, whether or not the anachronism is deliberate. This ode extends our thoughts in another way too. The first five stanzas, culminating in these lines in stanza 5: Sous le Ciel les choses sont Toutes inconstantes suggest that we are about to receive a homily on Tinconstante Fortune'. The effect is almost as if we had received such a homily, and we are then surprised to be offered a picture not of everchanging Fortune but of something whose fixity, in a world of flux, is unnatural and alarming - the anger of Medee. The last choric ode comes at the end of Act IV and it, too, is not derived from the Senecan source-text. It begins with an account of the departure of 'Equite' from the earth, and this can be read as a reference to the myth of Dike, or Astraea, daughter of Zeus and Themis, and personification of justice. The ode goes on in Platonic terms (using for example the unusual word 'esme', 'judgement'), describing how men seek to recover wisdom, fled with 'Equite', but in this imperfect existence can find only shadows of it. Then, unexpectedly, the poem becomes a celebration of the rather inglorious quality of 'Deffiance' ('caution', 'wariness'). Not only in the daily life of soldier or diner is this quality valuable: had Epimetheus possessed it (though La Peruse was no doubt aware that he could not, since his name declares him to be the man who, unable to foresee, reflects after the event), Pandora's vase would never have been opened. Pandora is referred to again later in the poem as 'la Tout-donnee', a rendering of her name. This 75

French Renaissance tragedy is a strange poem, sprinkled with obscure words (such as 'esme', 'la Tout-donnee', and Tuarge Cyllenien' for Hermes, because he was born on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia and killed the giant Argus) and difficult syntax. What it amounts to is a warning to Glauque (who is not present and indeed never appears in the play) not to touch Medee's gifts. Its length may be chosen for symmetry with the first choric ode which, like this one, has 108 lines, but it also has the effect of allowing a fair length of time to elapse between Jason's leaving the stage to take Medee's present of the deadly crown to Glauque, and the entrance of the Messager to relate her death. The Chorus should not be thought of as merely passing the time, however, even though the obscurity of parts of the ode could be seen as deliberate erudite display, perhaps intended to beguile the wait. But in addition, the poem is so shaped that after its rather leisurely, discursive main section the last three stanzas move at a brisker pace: Quelle simplesse de pouvoir Quelle folie de vouloir Croire en la feinte mine Des hommes, qui jamais au front Ne vont ecrivant ce qu'ils ont Cache dans la poitrine! Mais par sus tous est evante, Mais par sus tous a merite Qu'on l'ecrive au long rolle Des sots, qui de son malveillant Peut accepter le faussemblant, Et la Greque parolle. Fille a Creon, si tu m'en croi', Le don, bien que beau, ne re?oi' De la main ennemie: De crainte que ne soit cache Le Serpent de venin tache Dessoubs l'herbe fleurie.

(IV, 1039)

With their emphatic use of anaphora (repetition of line-openings: 1039-40, 1045-6) and familiarity (1047-8, 1051), these stanzas build up a mood of excitement and anticipation which prepares us very well for the Messager's irruption immediately afterwards; 76

The Chorus the rapidity is sustained after his arrival by the fact that his first exclamation and the Chorus's reaction to it form a rhyming 6-syllable couplet rather than an alexandrine: LE MESSAGER

Mon dieu tout est perdu. LE CHOEUR

Qu'a cet homme eperdu? In the rapid movement at the end of the choric ode, we may hardly notice the image of the snake in the grass (1055) but when we do see it, what does it suggest? Eden, perhaps, and the frequent Renaissance identification of Pandora, the most prominent figure in this ode, with Eve? Or Eurydice, who was bitten by a snake as she ran away from the lecherous Aristaeus? Eurydice's husband Orpheus is linked to the Jason-Medea story because he was one of the Argonauts, and he is mentioned twice in the first choric ode of this play (300, 312). Either or both of these possible allusions can increase the density of the poem. Looking at the choric odes in Medee Tu 'enfant individually, we have seen how each is shaped for its place in the play, and what it contributes. If we think about them more generally, we see that they extend the range of the play by making us think of things removed in time and space from the action, and that they touch on large general problems: human vice; the difficulty of guessing the future or of knowing whom to trust; the tug of contrary passions and loyalties (Althaea was 'mere felonne, / Toutesfois soeur bonne', killing her son because he killed her brothers; Medee had already shown herself to be a criminal sister, on the other hand she had sacrificed her family for love of Jason, by whom she is now betrayed). So the Chorus, as well as having a local part to play, reflecting on the action as it unfolds and experiencing foreboding and terror, also links the play to larger concerns and to a wider frame of reference. In this play the Chorus seems fairly non-partisan. In others its loyalty is more pronounced. In Jacques de La Taille's Alexandre the Chorus is identified in the list of characters as 'Chceur des Gendarmes', and these are Alexandre's own Macedonian soldiers, who have suffered, fought, and conquered with him all the way to Babylon, and now want nothing so much as to go proudly home 77

French Renaissance tragedy and show off their honourable scars. The substance of the play is Alexandre's uncertainty, now that he has arrived victorious in Babylon, as to whether he should push on or stay there; his more profound uncertainty as to whether he is the son of Jupiter; his death by poisoning and his attainment, through self-mastery in his agony, of the right to the apotheosis for which he has prayed. The Chorus in this play never takes part in dialogue and might even, for all we can tell, be off the stage except during its odes, until the last act; then, appropriately, it is present at Alexandre's last moments, to express immediate grief ('O crevecueur amer, 6 douleur, 6 martyre!' V, 1146) just before or at the instant of his death, and, nearly 150 lines later, to bid a dignified farewell to 'Nostre Prince tant glorieux' in a concluding ode. It does not, then, participate as a character in the dialogue scenes, nor even seem to have observed them; its functions are rather different. One purpose it serves is to give us a check, an indicator of the truth of what others say. For example when Cassandre, one of the conspirators plotting Alexandre's murder, refers to the Macedonian soldiers as 'pauvres mortepayes' (III, 567), we know that even if they are 'mortepayes' (that is, no longer on active service but still being paid), the pity or contempt of Cassandre's 'pauvres' misrepresents the spirit of these proud and cheerful, though weary, troops. Their first choric ode showed them rejoicing in a hard-won peace, proud of their 'belles playes', regarding themselves as 'valeureux champions', and eager to go home where each can 'Raconter ses vaillantises'. The Chorus also helps to develop what I take to be the central theme of the play, that of Alexandre's divinity (this theme and its treatment are discussed in Jondorf, 1987). When Cleon, an obsequious courtier, invites Alexandre to accept worship as if he were a god ('je m'en iray querir / Sus l'heure vos subjects, afin de vous offrir, / Et moy tout le premier, encens et sacrifice' 1,187), there follows immediately a choric ode in which the soldiers refer to Alexandre simply as 'un Maistre' (1,231). At the end of the play Alexandre has, by his courage and his attainment of selfknowledge, won the right to higher honours, which the soldiers duly accord him in their final ode: 78

The Chorus son renom ne perissant Contre Page ira fleurissant... Ainsi a tout jamais la gloire Dessus son chariot gemmeux Puisse guinder ton nom fameux.

(V, 1295, 1306)

Other playwrights, working without a Chorus, can confer this gift of immortality in other ways, a notable example being the last speech of Racine's Berenice: Adieu: servons tous trois d'exemple a l'univers De l'amour la plus tendre et la plus malheureuse Dont il puisse garder Thistoire douloureuse. (V, vii, 1502) That speech, every time it is pronounced, is self-justifying, for here we are, listening to it again. La Taille's technique is different, but there is a comparable element of self-verification. Alexandre had craved immortality and in dying has achieved it, as his soldiers proclaim and as the existence of the play, composed almost nineteen hundred years after Alexander's death, testifies. As La Taille wrote in his own liminary sonnet: Car aux meilleurs esprits qui te s^auront mieux bruire, Je laisse les honneurs de tes faicts a descrire, Quant a moy c'est assez si j'ay ta mort descrite. Alexandre's death, the play suggests, was all that was needed to keep his name alive. Gamier's Antigone ou laPiete is a play constructed from several sources. Act I (Edipe (Oedipus) laments and loathes himself; Antigone is tender and loyal) and Act II (Antigone has rejoined Iocaste in Thebes and Iocaste tries to stop her sons fighting) are based on Seneca's fragmentary Phoenissae. Act III (narration of the single combat between Eteocle and Polynice which ends with both dead) borrows from Statius (ThebaisXl) and goes on to add Iocaste's suicide (on stage, in Antigone's presence) and the only encounter between Antigone and her lover, Creon's son Hemon. Acts IV and V cover Antigone's attempt to bury Polynice, her death-sentence, Creon's change of heart, the suicides (off stage) of Antigone, Hemon and Creon's wife, and Creon's remorse. These two acts are based on Sophocles' Antigone. In considering the use of the Chorus in this play, I shall look at the way the choric 79

French Renaissance tragedy passages are linked to each other and to the rest of the play, by examining in some detail the first two choric odes and looking more briefly at the rest. The first point requiring comment is the presence of three Choruses. They are the 'Choeur de Thebains', a 'Chceur de Vieillards' and a 'Choeur de filles Thebaines'. It is clear that the 'Choeur de Vieillards' 'belongs' to Creon, and the 'Choeur de filles Thebaines' to Antigone (with a strong reminiscence, probably via Buchanan's Jephthes, sive votum, of the girls who accompanied the daughter of Jephtha when she 'bewailed her virginity upon the mountains', Judges 11:38). These Choruses enter with their character and presumably go out with her or him. What is not clear is whether they deliver the choric odes which occur in 'their' acts but are attributed simply to 'Choeur'. I am inclined to think that the Chorus of Thebans stays at its post and delivers these, and that is what I have assumed in the account which follows. In the choric ode of sixty-five lines at the end of the first act, we hear the Chorus of Thebans speaking as the collective voice of the city. Their ode is a prayer to Dionysus, and its connections with the act it concludes are strong if not obvious. First of all, the war they dread has already been alluded to in that act by Antigone ('pour Thebes defendre et la rendre delivre / Des combats fraternels... / Vous pouvez amortir cette guerre enflammee' 1,325), and is the indirect consequence of Edipe's abdication, and another stage in what Edipe has described as 'Ce malheur... conj oinct au sceptre Agenoride,/De s'acquerir tousjours avecque parricide'(1,309). Secondly, Agenor, mentioned by Edipe, is a common ancestor of both Edipe and the 'pere, 6 bon Denys' (Bacchus, Dionysus) to whom the Chorus prays. Agenor, through his son Cadmus (the founder of Thebes), was the grandfather of Semele, mother of Dionysus. Another of Cadmus' children, Polydorus, was the father of Labdacus, from whom the line goes through Laius to Oedipus. Thirdly, it is Dionysus' Theban connections that make him an appropriate recipient of this prayer for peace, as the Chorus makes clear in the twelfth stanza: 'Vien, nostre tutelaire Dieu'. Dionysus was conceived, and 'born' for the first time, in Thebes - that is to say, the foetus was removed from his mother's dead body and placed in the thigh of his father, Zeus. The 'premiere nativite' is referred to in the second and tenth stanzas of the ode. 80

The Chorus But while strongly linked to Act I, this ode also has an important function in connecting the first two acts. Antigone is the only play of Gamier's where the scene is specified, and to allow the running together of the subject-matter from his various sources, Gamier places the scene 'hors les portes de la ville de Thebes' (Argument), because Edipe is in voluntary exile from his city. But although the whole play takes place outside the city, it is only Edipe and Polynice who really belong outside. Between the exiled king and the queen, Iocaste, who has remained in Thebes and will dominate Act II, the Chorus forms a bridge; a bridge, one might almost say, that allows Antigone to cross from outside Thebes, where she has shared her father's exile, to inside Thebes when she returns to share the last torments of her afflicted family, even though the scene remains notionally 'hors les portes'. The next intervention of the Chorus, in Act II, does not mark a division between acts, but is ingeniously used to allow for another virtual change of scene. Just before this choric ode Iocaste has left Antigone and hurried off (running, as befits a Theban woman, as fast as a Maenad) to find her sons and try to stop the fighting. At the end of the ode, she and Polynice (and presumably Eteocle, as a mute character) meet on stage; even without a scene-change, it is as though the stage now represents the place to which Iocaste was hurrying before the choric intervention, and which she has now reached. The choric ode is sixty lines long and most of it is imitated from an ode in Seneca's Oedipus. The opening stanza, however, is not based on this model, and its subject, ambition, points ahead to the shocking, impious form in which this passion will manifest itself in Polynice later in Act II, when he declares (11,928): Pour garder un Royaume, ou pour le conquerir Je ferois volontiers femme et enfans mourir, Brusler temples, maisons, foudroyer toute chose: Bref il n'est rien si saint que je ne me propose De perdre mille fois, et mille fois encor, Pour me voir sur la teste une couronne d'or. The striking feature of the rest of the ode is the way it plays with two themes through which it is integrated into the play. As the Senecan Chorus remarks, 'nova monstra semper / protulit tellus' (723; 'our land has always produced new monsters'), and the two 81

French Renaissance tragedy themes of monsters and metamorphosis link several episodes of Theban history, and tie in with the rest of the play. In the course of this ode we are reminded of the following: • •

•

•

Zeus metamorphosed into a bull to carry out the abduction of Europa (her brother Cadmus' search for her led to the founding of Thebes); the monster (a dragon) killed by Cadmus; acting on divine instructions he sowed its teeth, which produced a crop of warriors (metamorphosis) who fought and killed each other until only five remained, to become the ancestors of the Thebans; Actaeon, who having surprised the goddess Artemis bathing was metamorphosed by her into a stag, and killed by his own hounds; the pertinence of this story lies in the way it links the theme of metamorphosis with that of divine anger; moreover, Actaeon was Cadmus' grandson and was killed on Mount Cithaeron, where Oedipus was exposed as an infant; the Sphinx (a monster), whose riddle Oedipus solved.

Of these, the story developed most fully is that of the dragon, which combines the two themes. It occupies four of the ode's ten stanzas, and is described with a richness which contrasts with the more perfunctory presentations of the Jovian bull, Actaeon, and the Sphinx. Perhaps this is because the dragon is an indispensable part of the story of how Cadmus built his city, and its emphatic representation suggests that the very origins of Thebes are tainted with monstrosity. The monsters are images of horror, perhaps of evil, and so connect with the last two lines of the ode, 'D'Edip' l'inceste brutal, / Et le parricide enorme' (II, 654); but the soldiers who sprang from the dragon's teeth, and killed each other, have less in common with Edipe than with his warring sons. The preparations for battle have already been described earlier in this act by the Messager (II, 532-49), and after this ode Iocaste reappears, to try to prevent her sons from imitating their dragon-bred predecessors who 'S'entre-occirent de leurs armes' (Chorus, 11,643). Seneca suggests the same parallel in his Oedipus by calling the dragon-soldiers 'agmina ... cognata', 'kindred armies'. A subsidiary theme in the ode is that of wandering to find a 82

The Chorus kingdom, as Cadmus did, and this will be picked up shortly afterwards in Iocaste's advice to the homeless Polynice to adventure further afield to find a kingdom rather than destroy his own birthplace. This choric ode, with its horrible creatures, its stress on origins (of Europe, of Boeotia, of Thebes, and of the Theban ruling house) and its picture of fratricidal war, is therefore very appropriate to its context. It has an abrupt ending, without any devices of closure, but this too seems appropriate. We last saw Iocaste hurrying off to find her sons; she now reappears and seems to interrupt the Chorus. The opening of her speech, in which each of the first three lines begins with an imperative, strengthens this impression. The other choric odes in the play also have very strong, and for the most part obvious, links with their context. That at the end of Act II, for example, is on fortune and kingship, and provides both a reflection on Polynice's unhappy predicament and an expansion of two earlier lines from Iocaste (11,918, 926) on the hideous life of a king who is not loved by his people. The choric presentation of the wretched life of nervous kings gives a picture of how Polynice would have to live if he succeeded in becoming king. In Act III the Chorus has only one ode (1456-1515), which links with that of Act I by reverting to the subject of Dionysus, recalling the great days when Thebans accompanied the god on his triumphant travels. Cadmus is recalled too, the Chorus using the term 'victoire Cadmee' for what in another context might be referred to as a Victoire a la Pyrrhus', that is to say one 'Ou les vainqueurs pleurent le plus' (Chorus, III, 1505). I presume the allusion is to the victory of the five surviving Sparti (the 'sown' men sprung from the dragon's teeth) over their brothers, and it therefore has a double aptness here, since it emphasises fratricide again. This ode expresses satisfaction that Polynice's allies, even if they claim victory, are too depleted to press it home or to take the city. The next choric passage, in Act IV (1622-1705), develops this satisfaction further, into a celebration of the successful defence of Thebes and of the heroism of its soldiers, sustained by the gods and especially by Zeus. The jubilant tone is rendered by a lively metre (a 6-line stanza, with 7,3,7,7,3,7 syllables) and an almost Marotic luxuriance of rhyme ('de se voir / Recevoir', 1703). There is however a certain 83

French Renaissance tragedy ironic quality to this ode. First, the Chorus mentions the deaths of two of Polynice's allies, Capanee and Amphiare, as evidence of divine help: Qui eust Capanee, estant Combattant Sur la breche demuree, Bouleverse mort a bas, Sans le bras Du foudroyant fils de Rhee?

(IV, 1634)

Voyant Amphiare aussi Sans merci Nous faire un mortel esclandre, Le fist pour nous garantir Engloutir Et vif aux Enfers descendre.

(IV, 1664)

Yet we know from the Messager's report to Iocaste and Antigone (III, 1016-17) that it was the deaths of Capanee and Amphiare, among others, that induced Polynice to call a stop to the battle and challenge his brother to single combat instead. The tragic consequences of that decision are still being worked out: Antigone has just gone out to bury Polynice's body. The metre which at first seems so cheerful and bouncy, fitting for an ode of jubilation, can also be heard as grimly appropriate to the horrors yet to come, with the short lines throwing into prominence such phrases as 'Sans merci' and 'Engloutir'. There is a form of dramatic irony here: the Chorus mistakenly thinks the events of the day are concluded, but we know that it is too soon to say 'Le Ciel retire de nous / Son courroux' (1622) until all of Edipe's family are dead. The 'Choeur de Vieillards' which accompanies Creon when he appears, after the celebratory ode just described, serves mainly to suggest the full weight of patriarchal authority with which Creon is now invested, just as the 'Choeur de filles Thebaines' attending Antigone to her death emphasises her youth and her weak female status, which make her moral heroism the more striking. The principal Chorus has two further odes, both important if less intricately tied in to the text than the earlier ones. One (IV, 2086-157) comes just after Creon has sentenced Antigone to death, and is in praise of justice. Although this might seem to 84

The Chorus represent a round of applause for Creon, that is not the case, for it explicitly condemns him, while conceding his honourable motive: Creon a vrayment tort De livrer a la mort Cette vierge royale. II pense tesmoigner Pour les siens n'espargner Qu'il fait justice egale.

(IV, 2146)

Gamier uses the Chorus here to provide a clear judgement on Creon. The Chorus's last ode closes Act IV (in Act V it takes part in dialogue, but there are no further lyric passages). This final ode is on love, which has become an element in the tragedy since the appearance of Hemon in Act III. It is very long (ninety lines) and rather weak, but perhaps serves two purposes. First, it creates a change of tone between Hemon's grief and anger just before, and the Messager's gloom at the beginning of the next act. Secondly, Gamier may have been motivated in part by a concern for vraisemblance (compare the placing of the choric ode in Act III, while locaste looks for Polynice), for as soon as Act V opens, the Messager tells us not only that Antigone and Hemon are dead, but that meanwhile Creon's decree forbidding the burial of Polynice had been rescinded on the advice of 'le conseil des siens' whom, no doubt, we have seen represented on stage by the 'Choeur de Vieillards'. It is not unusual for there to be no choric ode at the end of the fifth act (of the Senecan corpus, only Hercules Oetaeus and the pseudo-Senecan Octavia end with a chorus). In Montreux's Sophonisbe there is nothing from the Chorus at the end of either the fourth or the fifth act. In Jean de La Taille's Saul lefurieux there is no final ode from the Chorus, but when David delivers the 'Song of the Bow' (adapted from 2 Samuel 1:19-27) it is as if he has become a KOpixpaTog, addressing an invisible Chorus ('Vous d'Israel les filles' V, 1427). In Gavmer's Antigone, the fact that the Chorus closes the play not with an ode, but with four moralising alexandrines, means that the main attention at the end of the play falls upon Creon, wretched, remorseful, and longing for death. 85

French Renaissance tragedy Some twentieth-century dramatists have recalled the Chorus to the theatre, whether as a single figure (as in Anouilh's Antigone) or a group (like the women of Canterbury in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral), and opera has never lost it, so that modern readers or spectators have many points of reference available to them when considering the Chorus of humanist drama, not only the ancient drama which provided the humanists with their models. Creating atmosphere or local colour, shaping and pointing the themes of the play, speaking as the voice of morality or as vox populi, the eloquent, multifarious Chorus gave humanist dramatists a flexible and diversely exploited resource.

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5 CHARACTERISATION

It is a commonplace of literary history to say that in the middle of the seventeenth century the main focus of tragedy is on an investigation of human passions: and it is often assumed that this is the same thing as saying that the emphasis is on individual psychology. Manuals of literature (prepared for French schoolchildren, and often used by British undergraduates) offer a crystallisation of this view, for example: 'Le theatre de Racine doit son intense verite psychologique a la peinture de 1'AMOUR-PASSION... Mais divers traits de leur psychologie condamnent les heros raciniens a ajouter encore a leurs souffrances' (Lagarde, 1985,291, 299). Whether or not this is a satisfactory way of reading Racine, the absence of characterisation of this kind, perceived as somehow 'solid' or 'real', is a reproach often levelled at humanist tragedy. Even sympathetic critics like Raymond Lebegue, who did so much to establish sixteenth-century theatre as worthy of our attention, could not resist scrutinising humanist tragedy hopefully, and with great goodwill, looking for a touch of psychology here, an almost 'solid' character there. Few plays, however, can be salvaged in this way; there are other, more positive ways of approaching the absence of detailed psychological verisimilitude in humanist tragedy, and that offered by the rhetoric-critics is only one possibility. Of course, I agree that whatever humanist playwrights are intending to do in their theatre, there are certainly times when it seems to mimic psychological portrayal. That is why Raymond Lebegue was able to find here and there a 'caractere complexe', a 'caractere qui ait quelque relief or 'un etre vivant, et non un personnage stereotype et conventional' (Lebegue, 1944, 37, 48) and why most readers of Jean de La Taille's Saul lefurieux feel that they are encountering a personality as well as a 'personnage'. The drawback of looking at the plays in this perspective, however, 87

French Renaissance tragedy is that plays which cannot be shown to contain such nuggets of characterisation are regarded as dross. One has only to look at the scant regard accorded to Garnier's Porcie, and the neglect of his Cornelie, to see this happening. There is no doubt that the characters even in these, Garnier's least-regarded plays, make individually powerful and moving speeches. Let us look at an example. In Porcie, Garnier's first tragedy (published 1568), Porcie's first speech is eighty-four lines long and opens the second act of the play. Its content is easily summarised: Porcie is sorry for herself (199-210), wishes herself dead (211 -34), says that Cato and Pompey were relatively lucky in dying when they did (235-59), and prays to their spirits to advance her own death (260-82). PORCIE

Desja loin de Tithon, l'Aurore matineuse Chasse les rouges feux de la nuict sommeilleuse: Et ja Phebus monte sur le char radieux Vient de sa torche ardante illuminer les cieux. Sus, miserable, sus, sus, pauvre infortunee, Recommence tes pleurs avecques la journee: Que les piteux regrets des Alcyoniens, Et les plaintes que font les Pandioniens, Gemissant leur Itys sur les ondes enemies, Ne puissent egaler tes larmes continues, Helas! car aussi bien, car aussi bien, helas! Leurs desastres cruels les tiens n'egallent pas. Miserable Porcie, he! que la dure Parque Ne te renvoya-t'elle en Pinfernale barque Lors qu'elle commen?a de devider tes ans? He pauvrette! pourquoy ses ciseaux meurtrissans Ne trancherent soudain, alors que tu fus nee, Le malheureux filet qui tient ta destinee? Ah! me falloit-il done, devant que des Enfers Je veisse pallissant les abysmes ouvers Contrainte devorer tant de tristes encombres? Me falloit-il, parmy tant de Romaines ombres, Que le fer de Tyrans precipite la bas, Mourante esperonner mon paresseux trespas? Que ne mouru-je alors qu'aux rivages d'Afrique Mon pere combatoit pour nostre Republique? 88

200

205

210

215

220

Characterisation O genereux Caton, que ne commandois-tu Que ta fille Porcie ensuivist ta vertu, T'accompagnant la bas sur le sombre rivage, Ou descendit ton ame evitant le servage? J'eusse par mon trespas fait connoistre a Pluton Qu'a bon droit j'eusse este la fille de Caton, De ce Caton, Romains, que tout le monde estime, De ce Caton fameux, qui d'un coeur magnanime, Tant qu'il fut jouissant de la douce clairte, Combatit ardemment pour nostre liberte. Or es-tu plus heureux que tu ne pensois estre, N'ayant fuy seulement l'insolence d'un maistre, Mais de trois tout au coup: a qui ne suffit pas D 'avoir nos libertez, dont on ne fait plus cas. Aingois plus inhumains que les Ours d'Hyrcanie, Que les Tygres felons qu'enfante PArmenie, Ne se contentent pas de la mort seulement: Mais, cuidant que Ion ait encore sentiment Apres que le destin developpe nostre ame, Us privent les meurtris de la funebre lame. Or done, mon Geniteur, puissent a tout jamais Tes os ensevelis gesir en bonne paix, Puissent en bonne paix les cendres de Pompee Habiter mollement la rive Canopee, Sans que vous regretiez pour vos sepulcres vains Ces champs envenimez, ou les Dieux inhumains Hostelerent jadis vostre premiere enfance, Ces champs contaminez ou vous prinstes naissance. Las! voudriez-vous bien voir vos sepulcres cavez De nostre humide sang incessamment lavez: Et vos corps inhumez dans leurs urnes fatales Accravantez du poix de nos charongnes palles, Que les sanglantes mains de ces mortels bourreaux, Couchez l'un dessus l'autre, exposent aux corbeaux? Or reposez en paix, reposez, bons Genies, Loin de leurs cruautez, loin de leurs tyrannies: Et si quelque pitie loge encore entre vous, Si vous avez encor quelque souci de nous, Et qu'avecque le corps toute chose ne meure, Si quelque sentiment encore vous demeure, Pitoyables Esprits, par le throne des Dieux Qui conservent l'estat des Plutoniques lieux: 89

225

230

235

240

245

250

255

260

265

French Renaissance tragedy Par le Styx, des grands Dieux serment irrevocable, Par le Chef de Pluton, par sa femme implacable, Je vous requiers, Esprits, puis que le Ciel mutin A jure d'abolir nostre empire Latin, 270 Esbranle par Peffort de ces braves Monarques, Faites que les fuseaux des filandieres Parques Cessent de tournoyer le filet de mes ans, Abysmez au plus creux des Enfers pallissans. Ainsi du Chien portier les trois gueules beantes, 275 Passant les gouffres noirs, ne vous soyent abayantes: Ainsi tousjours Minos vous soit juge piteux, Attendant vostre sort sur VAcheron nuiteux: Ainsi pour le guerdon de vos vertus prisees, Puissent a tout jamais les plaines Elysees 280 Verser en vos gosiers le nectar gracieux Et le manger divin que savourent les Dieux. The speech is, as one might expect, exclamatory ('Helas! ... he! ... Ah! ... Las!') and full of words expressing both misery ('miserable', 'pauvre infortunee', 'pleurs', 'piteux', 'plaintes', 'gemissant', 'larmes continues', 'pauvrette', 'malheureux'; these are all in the first eighteen lines as well as two 'helas' and two 'he') and horror ('meurtrissans', 'pallissant', 'inhumains', 'Tygres felons', 'champs envenimez', 'champs contaminez', 'humide sang', 'charongnes palles', 'sanglantes mains', 'mortels bourreaux'). It is not, however, merely self-pitying. Two other powerful elements are worked into it. One is Porcie's filial pride, the other is her patriotism. They are linked when they first appear (223-4) and they are developed together (229-34). The patriotism theme is further developed into a description of the horrors of civil war (252-8). Knowledge of the background is assumed by Gamier, and in the 'Argument' he recounts events only from the assassination of Julius Caesar on. To follow Porcie's speech, the reader must know that Cato the Younger, her father, committed suicide in 46 BC in Utica (in modern Tunisia). Pompey the Great had already been murdered in 48 BC in Egypt, after being defeated by Julius Caesar at the battle of Pharsalus in Greece. Cato had been an opponent of Pompey when Pompey formed the first triumvirate with Julius Caesar and Crassus (61 BC) but in 49 BC when civil war broke 90

Characterisation out between Julius Caesar and Pompey (supported by the Senate), Cato decided that the only hope of saving the republic lay in supporting Pompey. Porcie's pride in being Cato's daughter is thus inseparable from patriotic and republican considerations. In the last part of the speech (259-end) her invocation of the spirits of Cato and Pompey combines several ideas. 1. By dwelling on the notion of Porcie's death, it creates a pattern of symmetry within this speech, but also makes of the speech an epitome of the design of the play: the shape of the play consists of Porcie longing for death, receiving bad news of the development of the civil wars and the deaths of Cassius and her husband Brutus, and committing suicide; this outline is anticipated in miniature in this first speech from Porcie, which goes from a longing for death to an evocation of the civil wars and of the deaths of Cato and Pompey, to conclude with a more active expression of the wish for death. 2. By addressing Cato and Pompey together, it emphasises the idea of public weal taking precedence over private enmities, since it was the cause of Roman republicanism which won Cato over to the side of his former enemy Pompey (and lurking behind this is an idea which forms its mirror-opposite: for the sake of Roman republicanism, Porcie's husband Brutus turned against his friend and patron Julius Caesar, but the outcome has done nothing for the republic). 3. When Porcie tells the spirits of Cato and Pompey how much worse off they would be if they had lived longer or died in Rome, the speech acquires topicality for sixteenth-century France by its reference to civil war. Porcie's speech does not really need to harmonise closely with any other individual speech of hers, since it is fenced off by choric odes: but these two choric odes are themselves quite closely linked to it. The ode at the end of Act I had already introduced the theme of the misery of Rome: Nostre Rome qui s'eslevoit Sur toutes les citez du monde, Et qui triomphante exclavoit A sa grandeur la terre et Ponde: Maintenant d'autant plus abonde 91

French Renaissance tragedy En cruelles adversitez Que jadis elle estoit feconde En joyeuses prosperitez.

(1,191)

The ode which follows Porcie's speech, separating it from the rest of Act II, picks up the theme of civil war: Helas! douce Paix, quand veux-tu Triompher de Mars abbatu? Quand veux-tu cette guerre Ensevelir sous terre? ... Destourne ces meurtres hideux De nos champs, et laisse au lieu d'eux Aux ames Citoyennes Les douceurs anciennes.

(11,375, 383)

Porcie's speech can hardly be described as 'static' (a frequent criticism of sixteenth-century tragedy) since it moves through a sequence of ideas and the transitions between them are smoothly managed. If we do think of it as static, it is perhaps because it is a monologue: we tend to think of dialogue as the medium for revelation and development. With its 84 lines, it is long by seventeenth-century standards (the 'recit de Theramene' is 72 lines long) but not by those of the sixteenth century (the speech of Megere which opens Porcie has 150 lines, and this is not at all exceptional). The speech is allusive and, as suggested in Chapter 1, allusiveness creates its own kind of movement and depth. Pinvert (Gamier, 1923, 327) annotates only one echo in this speech ('gemissant leur Itys': Horace, OtfesIV,xii,5, 'Ityn flebiliter gemens'), butLebegue (Garnier, 1973,248) cites various Senecan texts, and there are also echoes of Lucan in the 'horror' section (appropriately, since Cato and Pompey are the heroes of Lucan's Bellum Civile)', and to my mind the last twenty-two lines of the speech are characterised by reminiscences of Du Bellay's sonnet 'Palles Esprits, et vous Ombres poudreuses' (Antiquitez deRome, 15). The resemblance lies in the delaying structure, the reference to the Styx, the use of the 'si' clauses and of 'ainsi'. Both these echoes (Lucan and Du Bellay) situate Porcie's anguish in a greater historical, as well as literary, perspective. Lucan wrote under Nero, when a worse tyranny had replaced the one that Porcie contemplates. Du Bellay looks back 92

Characterisation at the whole Roman story, republican and imperial, reduced to a heap of crumbling stones yet still living, not only through its ghosts but through its literature, which can inspire a sixteenth-century Frenchman and so acquire a new life. In spite of all this there is still a stumbling-block for readers accustomed to Racine (and a fortiori for those who read Racine as a 'psychological' dramatist), namely that a succession of such speeches does not seem to coalesce into a coherent and 'convincing' personality. But perhaps we should rather view Racine as standing at a particular point on the line that extends from extreme stylisation, or allegory, to strenuous realism, and recognise that he has made that point so familiar to us that we tend to accept as normative what is merely particular. If characters are called Bel Accueil or Male Bouche we do not expect them to be 'rounded' or complete, but if they are called Phedre or Cornelie we do. As with other aspects of sixteenth-century tragedy, one might think that twentieth-century dramatic practice had taught us not to cling to these expectations. Monsieur and Madame Smith in Ionesco's La Cantatrice chauve are hardly rounded characters, indeed they are scarcely human in spite of their next-door-neighbour name; why should representations of the great semi-divine figures of Greek myth, the awe-inspiring actors in Roman history or legend, match up with some narrow, local notion of what constitutes a complete human personality? One possible way of looking at the representation of character in humanist tragedy is to see it as the outlining of different facets of mood or personality (this can be, and has been, expressed in rhetorical terms). Let us consider a text with this in mind, and examine the second act of Cornelie. Cornelie, Garnier's third tragedy (published 1574), is set in 46 BC, four years before Porcie. Cornelie's first husband was P. Licinius Crassus, son of the Crassus who formed the first triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey; her second husband, recently dead when the play opens, was Pompey. Her father was Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio, referred to by Gamier in his 'Argument' as Metel Scipion, whose suicide, after defeat by Julius Caesar in the battle of Thapsus, is reported to Cornelie in the last act of the play. 93

French Renaissance tragedy The second act of the play is occupied by Cornelie in dialogue with Ciceron. Two of her speeches are long (112 and 46 lines), the others range from single-line stichomythia to speeches of 10 or 12 lines. We could group and summarise Cornelie's speeches, in the order in which they occur in the scene, thus: 1 (112 lines): hatred of life; self-loathing as a curse-bearer who has caused death of both her husbands; praise of Pompey (223-334). 2 (4 + 4 lines): mourning for Pompey (339-42; 373-6). 3 (46 lines): grief at Pompey's death all the greater because he was murdered in her presence; her suffering so extreme (even during rare intervals of sleep) that she may be driven to suicide (387-432). 4 (2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 lines): knowledge of others' misery merely increases hers, which will end only with her death (starting 441, ending 454). 5 (8 lines): agrees with Ciceron that weeping is futile (463-70). 6 (4 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + Vi + 1 + 1 + 12 lines): a debate on death and suicide in which Cornelie holds her own quite well against Ciceron (starting 501, ending 540). This summary shows that we could see Cornelie's speeches as shifting from-a purely personal expression of 'mood' (self-loathing and grief; passages 1 - 4 in the list above) to a more philosophical, impersonal argument expressed in general, sententious terms (the group numbered 6 above), with the 8-line speech (5 in the list) forming a transition between these two modes. There is nothing incompatible or contradictory in these two 'voices' belonging to a single character, and a third register is added to Cornelie's repertoire in Act III, when she contemplates the political scene (641-57). How is one to judge whether or not this adds up to a 'solid' character? Arguably, one difference between this and a Racinian character is that Garnier's characters are more rounded, less dedicated to a single track. We see Racine's Phedre expressing weariness, guilt, desire, self-loathing, jealousy, remorse - all these being directly connected with her love for Hippolyte. We do not see her expressing, for example, affection for CEnone, or curiosity 94

Characterisation as to where Thesee is, or resentment of his possible infidelity. The standard comment here would be that this is because Racine shows how a violent passion drives every other thought or feeling out of the way. We need not, however, let pass unchallenged the notion that this is lifelike, true to our experience of our own or other people's emotions. Perhaps we see a glimpse of the petty scratchiness which can accompany illness or misery when Phedre complains about her head-dress, but this is a rarity in Racine, an unusual concession to that tendency of the mind to fix on unimportant things when troubled with strong, painful feelings. The singlemindedness or obsessiveness of Racinian characters is less a matter of likeness to life than of poetic abstraction. It is true that in Racine we generally see the reason for a change in mood, and often watch that change taking place. So Aricie moves from doubt to delight in Phedre, II, i, Phedre from remorse to homicidal rage in IV,iv-vi, and for both these characters we see what provokes the change (Ismene's assurances to Aricie of Hippolyte's love; Thesee's revelation of that love to Phedre). In Cornelie, and humanist tragedy in general, the changes seem less clearly motivated. Again, it seems futile to argue about this in terms of vraisemblance, but if we wanted to argue on those lines, we might well say that other people's behaviour often does seem to us inconsequential, their moods appearing unmotivated or at any rate mysterious. Even changes in our own feelings sometimes puzzle us, and lack surface logic, although with the help of La Rochefoucauld or Freud we may believe we can fill in the gaps. What we find in Racine is not necessarily a close-to-life representation of how and why people's moods and feelings change. If Racine chooses to portray feelings in this way it is surely for artistic reasons, with the result that the movement of the play conforms to a certain logic, intellectually and aesthetically pleasing like a Euclidean demonstration. The world in which 'any angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle' is not the everyday world but an idealisation or stylisation of it. That quality of logic is perhaps what Racine is talking about when he refers to the figure of Phedre as 'ce que j 'ai peut-etre mis de plus raisonnable sur la scene' (Preface to Phedre). To compare Garnier's characters with Racine's is not to compare unrealistic and realistic. It is to compare different kinds of stylisation. 95

French Renaissance tragedy Both are marked by a very high degree of artifice, beginning with the artifice of rhyming verse, and the fundamental theatrical artifice of showing deep feelings put into fluent speech. But whereas in Racine stylisation works to produce a visible, motivated shift from one state of mind to another, in the earlier writers it works to crystallise states of mind and present them in near-isolation, by means of long speeches or very formal dialogues. It is, of course, correct to regard this style of representation as predominantly rhetorical in the sense that it derives from an interest (and much practice at school) in finding suitable expression for a series of states of mind rather than being designed, for example, to illustrate a 'humour', or certain type of personality. It is, however, inadequate to regard the resulting assemblage as merely rhetorical in the sense of its being fine writing aimed only at provoking admiration for the writer's knowledge and skill. 'People' in plays are, of course, not people at all. They are words. The illusion that these words define and in some sense create a person is only one of the things an author may be aiming at. But he may be very far from wanting such a created 'person' to resemble someone we might meet tomorrow. The Greeks knew this, and masked their actors. Yet it is also the case that however stylised, or unlike ordinary life, are the figures composed by the author's words, once we see or imagine them moving on a stage they acquire life, even if it is a strange life. We may be quite clear in our own minds as to why it is silly to wonder 'How many children had Lady Macbeth?', or how old Phedre was, or whether Astyanax ever became king of Epirus, and yet we simply cannot help seeing them as 'people', in some sense, to some extent. This both explains, and renders unnecessary, the search for psychological vraisemblance which haunts even the rhetoric-critics and which is such a persistent feature of writing on humanist tragedy. Because the characters seem to be people we want to understand them as people, but there is no need, for they can be alive without that, even if in an unfamiliar way. Whether we consider the characters of humanist tragedy as lifelike because, like real people, they move mysteriously from mood to mood, or whether we think of them (in a way which must surely be closer to the authors' intentions) as stylisations of strong feeling or strongly held opinion, they need not disappoint. 96

Characterisation There is, however, another way of looking at them, and that is as part of the embodiment of theme or idea. This is not to say that they are allegorical. In allegory the personage is defined by name, and is constant. In other modes, characters may be so slippery or indeterminate that they lose or change their names or have none: Mephisto who becomes Phorkyas in Part II of Goethe's Faust, Strider/Aragorn/King Elessar in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the nameless narrator-protagonist of Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, to cite three contrasting modes. In humanist tragedy, the name unites the cluster of attitudes attributed to a character (and this may include conflicting attitudes), but another unifying principle, as well as the name, is the part each figure plays in an intellectual or moral scheme. This is certainly not a resource ignored by dramatists of the seventeenth century, particularly Corneille. There are many examples in his theatre of the deployment of characters contributing to the triumph of an idea. The conversion of Felix at the end of Polyeucte is much more astonishing, less plausible, than that of Pauline, but it demonstrates all the more impressively the effect of divine grace, by showing that God's power is not limited to working on noble souls of refined moral sensibility, but can also reach baser clay like Felix; furthermore it vindicates Polyeucte's martyrdom, and particularly his refusal to accept the bait offered by Felix in V,ii, the temptation to stay alive in order to convert Felix, who claims to wish to become Christian. The equally dramatic 'conversion' of Emilie at the end of Cinna also has more than one function; it resolves the conflicts in Emilie herself, it is dramatically necessary since without it Cinna would still be caught between conflicting demands, and it vindicates Auguste's choice of clemency. He did not choose clemency in order to win Emilie over; had he done so, it would have been an uninteresting and not particularly meritorious political tactic. He chose it for more heroic reasons and with a certain 'gratuite': he is rewarded by the submission of Emilie. As a character, Emilie shares in Auguste's moral triumph; but she has also been the triumphant means of concluding the design and meaning of the play. This manipulation of character is not restricted to the denouements of Cornelian plays, although it is prominent there. In Racine such techniques are used more rarely, but it would certainly be 97

French Renaissance tragedy possible to read Athalie in this way. Alternatively, a Freudian reading of Racine which finds a recurrent pattern of terrible fathers, or surrogate fathers, who threaten the lives of children {Andromaque, Phedre, Iphigenie, Mithridate, and an older brother in Bajazet), or mothers, stepmothers, and grandmothers who destroy them (Phedre, Britannicus, Athalie), transposes the place of the shaping idea to a level below that of conscious design, but thereby strengthens, rather than reduces, its hold on the play. If the author is shaping the play in response to desires or resentments of which he is not aware, then the characters are even more certainly the product of something other than a search for psychological vraisemblance. If the characters in humanist tragedy are being used quite consciously to present the ideas that govern a play, how does this reveal itself in practice? In Garnier's Les Juifves, a double pattern of guilt and retribution is being worked out; the 'good sinners', Amital and Sedecie, admit their faults, and in the long run the ground they have lost for the Jews will be made up. The 'bad sinner', Nabuchodonosor, does not realise either that he is acting with unjustifiable cruelty (deceiving the Jewish queens, killing the children, torturing Sedecie), or that he is being used by God (whom he does not believe in). If we are not to be revolted by the severity of God, the Jews must be promised better times and Nabuchodonosor worse ones, and it is the role of the Prophete at the end of the play to express these promises. Rather than go into further detail about the admirable working out of design in a play which has already had a great deal of favourable attention, I shall look next at a play which has had no such praise heaped upon it as Les Juifves has attracted, a play which can perhaps be thought of as typical of the strengths and weaknesses of humanist tragedy. The play I have chosen is La Lucrece by Nicolas Filleul. The play is part of an entertainment, lasting several days, offered by the Cardinal de Bourbon, Archbishop of Rouen, when in late September 1566 he received Charles IX and the court (including the queen mother, Catherine de Medicis) in his chateau at Gaillon, near Les Andelys. Nicolas Filleul wrote for the occasion a series of pieces published as Les Theatres de Gaillon. On 26 September the visitors listened to four eclogues devoted to their praises (it is unfortunate that in the pastoral code Catherine de 98

Characterisation Medicis becomes 'Catin' and the king 'Chariot'). On 29 September the programme consisted of a tragedy, La Lucrece, and a five-act pastoral, Les Ombres. La Lucrece was FilleuPs second essay in this genre, for he had already composed an Achille (1563). La Lucrece is a short play, of 940 lines (Racine's A ndromaque has 1648, Garnier's Les Juifves 2172, his Antigone 2741). The characters are few: Sexte Tarquin (son of the king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus), Lucrece, her nurse, her husband Collatin and his friend Brute. This small cast (five characters, plus the Chorus of Roman women) is smaller even than that of Berenice (six characters, plus Titus' 'suite'), and makes that of Athalie look almost Shakespearean in comparison. The play opens with a monologue by Tarquin, in praise of 'audace', and revealing his love for Lucrece and his confidence that he will possess her. The Chorus then discourses on the duties, virtues, and problems of kings. The rape of Lucrece takes place in the 'entr'acte', so in Act II Lucrece laments, thinks of inciting a revolt against the Tarquins, and contemplates suicide. The Chorus deplores modern decadence and corruption. In Act III, Collatin has been sent for, and he and Brute are anxiously returning to Rome from the theatre of war. The Chorus praises moderation and tranquillity, lost in this 'age de fer'. In Act IV, the Nourrice is still trying to dissuade Lucrece from suicide. It is she who tells Collatin and Brute about the rape. The Chorus speaks of the destructive power of love. In the last act, the Nourrice describes Lucrece's suicide, and Collatin and Brute plan their next actions, while in the background a Roman revolt against the Tarquins has already begun. The modern editor, Frangoise Joukovsky (Filleul, 1971), has given the reader every possible help with the appreciation of this play, although she plainly does not like it much and calls it 'une mauvaise tragedie'. Sources are supplied, attitudes to Lucretia in other writers are carefully detailed, the choric passages are traced to models in Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius. Joukovsky does appreciate Filleul, but not as a tragedian. Her final comment on the tragedy is: 'A part l'interet de cette oeuvre pour l'histoire de la tragedie, il faut reconnaitre que Filleul est egare dans ce genre. Nous retrouvons avec plaisir le poete bucolique dans la pastorale des Ombres' (Filleul, 1971, lxiv). Yet Joukovsky seems to notice merits in the play even without wanting to. Thus, she describes the 99

French Renaissance tragedy characters as 'peu fouilles', but goes on to reveal some interesting aspects, noticing for example that Lucrece and Tarquin are contrasting figures (Lucrece dying because of principles which she believes in, Tarquin presented as an unprincipled opportunist), and that Collatin and Brute are differentiated (Brute being more positive, vigorous, and optimistic). But, she concludes, Tanalyse des caracteres n'est pas assez profonde pour que les conflits psychologiques soient source de tragique; les personnages parlent beaucoup de la vertu, ou de Phonneur, mais ils ne s'interrogent pas sur la portee exacte et sur la valeur de ces principes'. This is a case of finding fault not because something in a work is done badly, but because it is not done at all. It is true that the characters in Lucrece do not question themselves or each other 'sur la portee exacte' of virtue or honour, and give no sign that they are undergoing psychological conflicts of any great complexity, but as Valery says, 'on ne peut exiger de quelqu'un que d'avoir accompli ce qu'il s'etait propose d'accomplir' (Valery, 1960,480). We can only guess at what Filleul had set himself to do, but if we look at what is in the play rather than what is missing from it, Lucrece may not seem such a disaster. It has, for instance, an interestingly and appropriately varied style (seen negatively by the modern editor: 'le style manque d'unite'), which ranges from furious imprecations and loud lamentations to contemplative musings and such gently melancholic music as this, on the commonplace theme of the brevity of life: Ainsi qu'un char qui fuit, la vie est passagere. On ne doit toutesfois sa belle fleur desfaire, Qui s'ouvre et se reclost

(111,471)

where 'la vie est passagere' forms at once a barrier and a bridge between the simile and the metaphor, which would otherwise collide. As for the allegedly thin characterisation, I think it is possible to demonstrate that with these few characters Filleul is working out a carefully executed pattern. First of all, the whole play is part of a larger pattern. The Theatres de Gaillon were written for a royal audience, and the theme informing the flattery is that under present management France is enjoying a return to the Golden Age. It might well be felt that the only suitable response to such a 100

Characterisation proposition is hollow laughter, but no doubt the queen mother and the sixteen-year-old king found this homage appropriate. The place of Lucrece within this scheme is presumably to show the 'age de fer', a time of private violence and public unrest, of tyranny and sedition. The reign of Charles IX, culminating six years later with the Massacre of St Bartholomew, might look to us like more of the same, but Filleul assures us in the prefatory poem 'A la Royne' that the birth of Catherine de Medicis (child of Mercury and Minerva, who took on human form as Lorenzo II de'Medici and his wife Madeleine de La Tour d'Auvergne) had made possible the advent of a new age of gold (Filleul, 1971, 4). Lucrece, however, is more than a mere show of depravity. Though its place in the Gaillon scheme is to show an evil age of iron contrasting with the joys of the 'age d'or', yet when we move closer and look at the moral organisation of the play itself, we see that it has also its own internal scheme, and that the disposition and delineation of the characters serve this scheme. In analysing how this works, I shall inevitably be considering aspects of language, but I am not looking primarily at style in the discussion that follows. Within the moral scheme of the play, each of the four principal characters has both a private and a public significance, although this is less fully worked out in the case of Collatin than for the other three (Tarquin, Lucrece, and Brute). Tarquin, on the public or political level, is the representative of a rotten monarchy, epitomising the decay into which Rome has fallen. Lucrece, on this level, represents aristocratic values which, when the Roman system is working at its best, make common cause with the people's wish for liberty. We see one side of this when Lucrece asserts her rank ('Collatin est du sang, et moi je suis princesse', 11,272), just after remarking that the injury she has suffered may initiate the liberation of Rome: NOURRICE

Mais que sert publier a tous ceste destresse? LUCRECE

Cela peut irriter contre luy la noblesse.

(11,267)

The completion of this idea comes at the end of the play when Collatin and Brute are prepared to lead a revolt, but that revolt 101

French Renaissance tragedy turns out to be popular, an 'esmeute soudaine', not a conspiracy of nobles but a large-scale armed uprising against the Tarquins. At the same time, if Tarquin stands for bad monarchy, and Lucrece for the aristocracy leading the people to freedom, they also operate on the level of personal morality (although the public and private orders are not entirely separable, as we shall see). Tarquin is the grabber, the spoiler, the man who regards his own desires as sufficient justification for his acts. Tarquin's rape of Lucrece violates many prohibitions - those imposed by marriage (his as well as hers), by the sanctity of another's house, by the loyalty due to a fellow-Roman and brother at arms, as well as the most fundamental ones imposed by her disgust and horror. None of these considerations, which influence the conduct of civilised men, restrains Tarquin. He is a wild man because a perfect egoist. Lucrece's reaction to the rape is commented on by Joukovsky, who suggests that Filleul makes Lucrece voice an unquestioned and very superficial notion of honour, 'une crainte primitive de la souillure, pour la patrie et pour la caste' (lxvi). I think it is more complex than that. It is not surprising if a woman who has been raped is shown as bitter and angry; but Lucrece also expresses the idea that something precious to herself and her husband has been destroyed. She calls it 'honneur' because that is the readily available word, but the linking of the pronouns referring to Lucrece and Collatin in the first half of line 230 suggests that 'honneur' here is closely connected with their marriage and with their love: 'Ainsi las! Collatin, le malheur d'une nuit / A de toy et de moy tout cest honneur destruit' (11,229-30). Rape has profaned her marriage and her love. Secondly, Lucrece's personal purity has been destroyed, and this is where the private and public worlds merge. In this connection there is an interesting speech by Lucrece in Act II (erroneously attributed to Thyrsis', who has crept in from the neighbouring pastoral). Lucrece rejects the comforting argument from her nurse that she is not guilty because Tarquin forced her: Tu essayes en vain, Nourrice, m'abuser, Cherchant si doucement mon malheur excuser. Que je vive dans Rome! ou la Vestale Rhee La mere de nos Dieux vifve fust enterree, Or que de son peche ce grand Mars fust auteur 102

(11,317)

Characterisation Joukovsky suggests that Filleul in the phrase 'la Vestale Rhee / La mere de nos Dieux' has made a crude error of identity, confusing Rhea Silvia, Vestal and mother of Romulus and Remus, with the goddess Rhea, wife of Cronus and mother of Zeus. It would seem difficult to confuse a figure as far back in the chronology of myth as the mother of Zeus with a priestess of the Roman hearth-goddess Vesta and daughter of a legendary king of Alba Longa (Numitor). It seems to me more likely that the 'Dieux' of line 320 are Romulus and Remus, deified founders of Rome and therefore 'nos Dieux', the gods of Rome. What is being expressed here, through an allusion to the legendary history of Rome, is an idealistic view of the level of personal purity and chastity that Rome expects of its citizens - here we see the personal and public aspects of morality coming together. Since Filleul was obviously familiar with Livy (main source for the story of Lucretia) it is quite possible that he also knew that the punishment, for a Vestal breaking her vows, of being 'vifve enterree' was supposed to have replaced an earlier punishment of being whipped to death; and that this revised form of punishment was believed to have been introduced by the fifth king of Rome, Tarquinius Priscus, ancestor of Lucretia's attacker. Like many of the allusions discussed in Chapter 1, this one is not indispensable for comprehension of the text; but if noticed, it reinforces the theme of decadence. Sexte Tarquin is the depraved descendant of the severe Tarquinius Priscus, and would be more capable of raping a Vestal than of upholding the traditional Roman virtues of purity and piety. This does not exhaust the account of the purposeful way in which the character of Lucrece is shaped. She is, for example, implicitly likened to Odysseus' wife Penelope in Tarquin's account of the night when a band of Romans went back to Rome from the siege of Ardea, and found that all their wives were frivolously enjoying themselves except Collatin's, who was sitting at home, working on a piece of embroidery with a patriotic theme and worrying about Collatin. The parallel with Penelope is suggestive. Penelope sat up at night to undo her day's weaving, since she had promised to accept one of her importunate suitors once she had finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law. Odysseus' return rescued her from this predicament and saved her from the suitors. Collatin, in contrast, imprudently invited Tarquin to intrude on 103

French Renaissance tragedy a scene of marital fidelity. Collatin, who should have been Lucrece's protector, betrayed her. Collatin and Brute have their parts to play, obviously, in the design of the play. For these parts to become clear we must understand the importance of the third act, which is otherwise a conspicuous weakness in the structure of the play ('un temps mort\ edition cited, lix). This is the act in which Collatin and Brute are on their way back to Rome. Although it is true that 'nothing happens' in this act, it is essential to the design of the play, and two important things emerge from it. One is that we see that if personal purity is Lucrece's prime value, patriotism is Collatin's: 'Car trop couardement cestui prise sa vie / Qui ne veut point mourir avecque sa patrie' (111,479). The other point has to do with vocabulary, and here we must first return to Act I and to Tarquin's monologue. As Joukovsky rightly says, Tarquin is one of those 'qui tentent la chance'. In his eyes, boldness is all, nobody admires virtue unless it is successful, and it is no good expecting it to get you anywhere. Apart from its jauntily amoral tone, what characterises Tarquin's speech is a great abundance of words to do with chance and 'heur'. In fourteen lines (9-22) the following occur: 'hazars incertains', 'fortune', 'heureusement', 'fortune', 'malheur', 'heur', 'heureux', 'heur', 'heureuses'. In Act III it is not Collatin (who colluded with Tarquin by giving him the 'chance' of seeing Lucrece and falling in love with her) but Brute who now turns out to be the main male opponent of Tarquin, manifesting this by using the same vocabulary to express an opposing philosophy. His first speech (111,449-70) picks up Tarquin's vocabulary - 'pas leger de Fortune', 'bon-heur', 'changement heureux' but he is saying the opposite, maintaining that if you believe in and practise virtue you can still hope, however dark the times. Brute is no cock-eyed optimist, and admits later that 'L'homme de jour en jour devient moins vertueux'; moreover the decay of virtue in Rome can be traced back to that very Tarquinius Priscus who dealt severely with misbehaving Vestals: 'Puis le Prisque Tarquin de la Grece aporta / La finesse dans Rome, et nos moeurs il gasta.' This is part of Brute's 48-line history of the kings of Rome (III, 505-52), and the mere presence of this apparent excursus in the middle of the play should alert us to the fact that we are not being invited to observe a simple family drama. 104

Characterisation Sexte Tarquin does not reappear in the play after the first act, but Lucrece acquires another 'opposite', stressed in the last moments of the play. This is Tulle', or Tullia. She was Tarquinius Superbus' second wife (previously married to his brother), and daughter of his predecessor Servius Tullius. Filleul tells us (1,99) how she drove her chariot over the body of her father, murdered by her husband, who then succeeded him as king. She is a 'fiendlike queen', as different as possible from Lucrece. Since this is already established in Act I, it is a sign of better times returning when the Chorus describes her flight in the last lines it speaks in the play: On voit l'espieu aux poins, aux portes les soldars, On voit les corselets luire sus les rempars. De flames et d'horreur desja la Ville est pleine, Et desja Tulle au bruit de l'esmeute soudaine, D'un pas aile de peur, devers le camp s'enfuit, Et ses mollets enfans plaintifve elle conduit. Sans un regret vengeur jamais qu'on ne la voye, Tousjours avec l'horreur Megere la costoye.

(V,913)

She has done nothing personally to harm Lucrece (except give birth to Sexte Tarquin), but the murder of Servius Tullius, to which she was a party, accelerated the decline of Rome. There are further links by which Tulle is attached to the play; the first is the mention of the Fury, Megere, associated in Act I with Tulle's marriage ('au lieu d'Hymenee / On y oyoit hurler Megere forcenee' 1,93), and now assigned to Tulle as companion for ever; the second is the phrase 'D'un pas aile de peur' (V, 917), which ironically echoes Tarquin's description of the man (like himself) 'qui va suyvant l'audace / D'un pas gayment aisle' (1,9). These symmetrical links between the first and the penultimate speeches of the play are striking, and seem unlikely to be accidental. The end of the play is interestingly handled. We might expect it to finish with a choric lament, like that which closes Porcie. Instead, the Chorus says little in the act, and the last speaker is Brute. Throughout the last act, Filleul brings into closer and closer relationship the 'private' and 'public' dimensions which constitute the moral space of the play. The preceding acts have created what is at once a causal chain and an oscillation between the two worlds: 105

French Renaissance tragedy private vice (Tullia) promotes public decadence (present state of Rome), which is fertile in private vice (Tarquin and the rape); punishment of the wrongdoing can become a setting to rights of the state. The last act keeps both themes going and in the end fases them. The narration of Lucrece's last moments shows that the love between Collatin and Lucrece has not been destroyed by the intrusion of violence - and Lucrece is aware of this and responsive to it: Collatin's arrival, his embrace, and his words of love have a reviving effect on her - and yet she kills herself, with neat and dramatic swiftness: Achevant ces propos, de l'aigu d'une lame, L'yvoire de son sein jusqu'au coeur ell' entame.

(V,879)

This suicide can be seen in a double perspective. First, it is tragic. Lucrece kills herself in spite of Collatin's love, his assurance that no blame attaches to her - and her death punishes Collatin for his folly in introducing Tarquin into his wife's bedroom. As Shakespeare says: Or why is Collatine the publisher Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown From thievish ears ...? {The Rape of Lucrece, 33) In the tragic universe, men must be punished for wrongs they did not intend. There is tragedy in the suicide of Lucrece, whereas there would be none in showing the punishment of Tarquin. But at the same time, Lucrece's death is one of the moments when the private and public planes are brought together. Suicide is the only answer to Lucrece's lost purity, but it is also a means of ensuring that the movement of cause and effect outlined above will be continued, for the 'propos' which Lucrece uttered immediately before stabbing herself were a solemn injunction that she must be revenged. Collatin will have to act, and with a telescoping of time-scale that destroys a surface level of 'time-keeping' vraisemblance, but makes the point dramatically, Collatin's call for help from the Roman people is answered instantaneously; scarcely are the words out of his mouth before the Chorus describes the Roman uprising and the flight of Tulle. But it is Brute, not Collatin, who has the last word. There are 106

Characterisation probably a number of reasons for this, some of them a matter of allusiveness. Brute (Lucius Junius Brutus) is credited with the main responsibility for ousting Tarquinius Superbus from Rome in 509 BC; he is regarded as the founder of the republic, and is said to have been elected to the first consulship. He later condemned his own sons to death when they joined a conspiracy to restore the Tarquins, and tradition held that he was killed in single combat with Sextus Tarquinius in 508 BC (Sextus Tarquinius lived till 496 BC but did not succeed in restoring the monarchy). Brute's prominent part in the founding and early defence of the Roman republic means that giving him the last words in the play emphasises its public side. He also belongs in this position not only as the symmetrical Opposite' of Tarquin, who opened the play, but as the man who has faith in moral values and believes that the pursuit of virtue will ultimately bring rewards. Yet in his last speech Brute does not voice exclusively his public role, but gives final expression to the private dimension as well. He binds himself by the most solemn oath (the words *je jure' occur four times) to root out the Tarquins (a public mission, in which he will succeed) and to kill Sexte Tarquin with Lucrece's suicide weapon (a private mission, in which he will fail - see above); and he then dedicates the last lines of the play to Lucrece, linking even in the last couplet the issues of private morality and public freedom: Et a feu et a sang Tarquin pourchasseray, Sa femme, ses enfans, sa maison et sa race, Jusqu'a tant par ma mort que son renom j'efface. Mais il faut du fouyer aller dresser le bois, Puis nous crirons Lucrece au tombeau par trois fois. Puis a la Chastete nous sacrerons sa cendre, Et puis il nous faudra la Liberte deffendre. (V, 934) Raymond Lebegue has said of this play that it is one of those 'tragedies oratoires et vides d'action. Lucrece, violee au premier entr'acte, se tue seulement au dernier; dans l'intervalle, elle debite de vehements discours. L'action est releguee dans la coulisse' (Lebegue, 1944, 41). It is true that the rape is not shown on stage (should we expect it to be?) but if we look for action in Lucrece in terms of a movement of ideas, of intellectual and moral forces, then the play is neither devoid of action nor the wrong shape. 107

French Renaissance tragedy I do not wish to make extravagant claims for this play or others like it. Yet I do believe that if we only put together what we think we know about the aims of humanist drama - didactic intention, rhetorical background, allusiveness of sixteenth-century poetry, and the rest of it - and apply this to the texts, we shall make sense of them. I have not given a full account of this play. I have said almost nothing, for instance, of the Chorus, whose very title suggests its relevance to the public theme, for by calling it 'Le Choeur des Romaines' (rather than 'Choeur de Romaines') Filleul makes it seem as if all the women of Rome take part in these laments for departed virtue and lost tranquillity. Nor have I looked more than glancingly at imagery. I have not commented on FilleuPs sometimes rather knotted word order and syntax. I have merely looked at characterisation and action, the two aspects of humanist tragedy which critics have most often found deficient, and argued that they are there, and that they work. Whether or not the dramatists of the sixteenth century seem clumsy and incompetent depends on what we look for in their plays. One question about FilleuPs Lucrece must, however, be dealt with here, for if it cannot be answered satisfactorily my whole reading of this play becomes suspect. I have argued that the public side of FilleuPs subject - dissolute monarchy, lascivious prince, decay of public morality - is as important in Lucrece as the depiction of private virtue attacked by a lecherous individual. But is it conceivable that a dramatist employed by a patron with close links with the royal family (the Cardinal de Bourbon was the brother of Antoine de Bourbon and of the Prince de Conde) should produce, to entertain the king and his mother, a play that ends in the overthrow by popular revolt of a corrupt monarchy? There are two answers to this. The first is that it is conceivable because Filleul did it. Even if the political side were not, as I have argued that it is, of equal weight with the personal, there is no escaping the fact, or rather the well-known tradition, that Brutus was the man who expelled the Tarquins and established republican government in Rome. However, the second answer leads on from this; for the inauguration of the Roman republic is not a subject that would shock a French monarch - on the contrary. Having turned away from the wrong direction represented by the Etruscan 108

Characterisation Tarquins, Rome as a republic continued ever stronger until it was metamorphosed into an Empire, celebrated by Virgil and mirrored in the French monarchy. But that is not all. For the rest of the answer, we must return to the overall framework of the Theatres de Gaillon, and remember that Lucrece represents an episode from the 'age de fer\ War, the Chorus tells us at the end of Act III, is an invention of the 'age de fer', along with other restless activities such as hunting, fishing, mining, and seafaring. At the end of Lucrece, both the suicide and the beginning of the armed revolt stress that we are still in that age of iron. Men are arming themselves with metal (Tespieu aux poins') and 'On voit les corselets luire sus les rempars', while Brute brandishes the dagger with which Lucrece killed herself. The first manifestation of the destruction of the old order is the spectacle of the City filled 'De flames et d'horreur'. The republic cannot inaugurate the new age of gold, even under the leadership of such a virtuous man as Brute, it can only embody an evolution into another phase of the age of iron. Watching this, the king and his mother need not feel that they are being told they are superfluous. On the contrary, if the best that public indignation and private virtue can do is to set Rome on fire, there is plainly room for a new, and better, order. The reading I have offered of Filleul's Lucrece is not implausible in the context of its first performance, and shows it to be a play where a serious theme is interestingly handled. Let us look in humanist tragedy for intellectual and moral coherence rather than psychological density, and characterisation as practised there need not disappoint us.

109

6 SHAPE

In discussing humanist tragedies I am not concerned with ranking them, but with pointing to merits in plays some of which I believe to have been undervalued. I shall continue to do that in this chapter, while returning to the question of 'tenor' and 'vehicle' which I raised in the Introduction (5). If humanist tragedies are intended to convey a 'message' - which it would perhaps be less tendentious to call the idee maitresse of a play - what means are used to present it, apart from the use of the Chorus for moralising or generalising, and sometimes for pronouncing explicit judgement, as discussed in Chapter 4? Some commentators have implied that the moral content of a play is located mainly or almost exclusively in the sententious passages (Willner, 1932; and there are suggestions of this idea, though much less crudely put, in Charpentier, 1979, 51). But since the sententious passages often take the form of stichomythic arguments, there has also been put forward a counter-argument that no consistent thesis or attitude can be perceived in a play where rival viewpoints are allowed to come into forceful and unresolved opposition (Griffiths, 1962). This latter argument is not very convincing, for even in stichomythic debates where the replies seem very evenly matched, it is usually quite obvious which side we are expected to be on (for example, against tyranny, and in favour of mercy to the vanquished), even though one of the effects of stichomythia is to ensure that both sides of a debate are aired. If we really cannot tell which side we are expected to regard as right, then either there is a failure of rhetoric (which may be as much our fault as the playwright's), or we are being shown a moot question or an insoluble dilemma (are we free, or the victims of fate? should a king try to be loved or feared?). Beyond this, however, it is surely clear that the idee maitresse of a humanist tragedy, whether that be political, philosophical, or morally 111

French Renaissance tragedy edifying, is not expressed exclusively in sententiae. The function and status of sententious writing vary with genre and period. In humanist tragedy, sententious lines were often marked typographically by guillemets. This gave them a special status in the printed text, although in the theatre they would have only their own sonority or gnomic quality to make them conspicuous. But even if these lines have a privileged status in the text, that does not mean that they alone are transmitting doctrina, or the tenor of the play. I have referred earlier (85) to the moralising lines, addressed to Creon, with which the Chorus concludes Garnier's Antigone: Vos pertes, vos malheurs, que vous avez soufferts «Procedent du mespris du grand Dieu des Enfers: «I1 le faut honorer, et tousjours avoir cure «De ne priver aucun du droict de sepulture. The lines are plainly authoritative, and the last two make a general, prescriptive statement ('II ... faut ... tousjours'), but equally authoritative, and surely as important in the moral scheme of the play, is the Chorus's earlier, non-sententious condemnation of Creon, 'Creon a vrayment tort..,' (IV,2146), which is expressed in specific, not general terms. Ideas can be presented by other means than maxims and sententiae. The discussion on characterisation in the previous chapter pointed to the way in which the dramatispersonae can be deployed to create a dialectic (for example, aristocratic honour combining with republican zeal to fight tyranny, in Filleul's Lucrece). In this chapter I shall look further at ways in which the humanist tragedians direct our thoughts and responses, and the first technique I shall consider is that of constructing the play round a central image or group of images. An example of this can be found in Jodelle's Didon sesacrifiant. In this play, 'image' in the sense of metaphor or even symbol overlaps with 'image' in the sense of pictures put into our minds by the evocation of the external world. Storm at sea is both metaphorical, representing the turmoil of human desire and suffering, and literal, threatening delay and danger to Enee's fleet. Stormy seas, and the sea-voyage, are the central images of the play and communicate its ideas. Didon both fears for Enee's safety if he sails from Carthage in a stormy season, and prays that his ships 112

Shape will be destroyed by tempests. Enee's departure for Italy is seen both as an act of pious obedience to divine command, and as foul treachery. The double perspective on storms and sea-voyages aptly displays the tragic impasse in which Enee is caught. The gods command him to sail to Italy, while love, gratitude, and pity urge him to stay in Carthage, and homesickness calls him back across the sea to Troy, the lost homeland. This predicament, and the lovers' responses to it, constitute the tenor of the play, and Jodelle controls our reactions to it by his handling of the images which are its vehicle.1 Similarly, in Montchrestien's Reine d'Escosse the beauty of the Reine d'Escosse has both literal and metaphorical force: it is mentioned as an aspect of her personal charm, as a prefiguration of the beauty of her soul in heaven, and (by her enemies) as contrasting with the ugliness of her wicked heart. The play falls into two sections, an English one (Acts I and II), where the Scottish queen's beauty is seen as misleading and dangerous, and a Scottish one (Acts III, IV, and V), where it is presented in neo-Platonic terms as a reflection of inner worth and beauty. The unresolved contradiction between the attitudes to the Scottish queen in the two parts of the tragedy makes the play puzzling: we cannot tell whom to believe, the tenor is not clear. In Jacques de La Taille's Alexandre, there is an analogous technique of building the play round a single image, and it works well. The image is that of Alexandre as a god. The idee maitresse here has to do with Alexandre's identity and his aspirations. Is he the son of Jupiter Ammon or not? Can a mortal attain immortality? What ambition is left for a world-conqueror? It could be said that metaphor provides the solution to Alexandre's problems. By dying heroically, in a way that is worthy of his reputation for courage and nobility, Alexandre crowns his life with 'une belle mort', and proves himself worthy of immortality in the sense of undying fame, which is a sort of metaphorical substitute for personal survival; the hero becomes an image, Alexandre is still alive for us, if not for himself, and so has proved and achieved his immortality and his divinity.2 The Sophonisbe of Nicolas de Montreux follows the usual argument of plays on this subject (see Axelrad, 1956): Syphax, king of the Masaesyles (a Numidian tribe), and his wife Sophonisba are 113

French Renaissance tragedy in captivity, Syphax in Roman hands, Sophonisba in those of Rome's ally Masinissa, king of Numidia. Masinissa falls in love with Sophonisba, who agrees to marry him if he promises not to hand her over to the Romans to be paraded in Scipio's triumph. To continue in Montreux's words, Massinisse, force d'obeir a Scipion et a la foy qu'il avoit donnee a Sophonisbe, execute Tun et l'autre. II ne rend aux Romains selon sa parole et la leur remet selon leur demande, car il envoye du poison a ceste royne que vertueusement elle avalle, eschangeant son servage a la mort tant que vifve elle ne vient en la puissance des Romains. In this play, Montreux seems to set up several interlocking and overlapping sets of images and recurring words, used sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically. As will be seen, they are images and words that are not unexpected in a play on this subject, but Montreux uses them in ways that make them particularly prominent; the structure and coherence of the play rest, in part, upon them. First, each act seems to be dominated by the idea of a liquid. In Act I, it is blood. In Act II, it is tears, although at one point this is transformed into the idea of medicine: SOPHONISBE

«Les pleurs sont des chetifs le remede ordinaire «Dont la douce liqueur allentit la misere, Ainsi qu'une liqueur la douleur que Ton sent En quelque lieu du corps par ce mal languissant.

(11,959)

At another point in this second act, tears lead to the introduction of the idea of poison, since according to the Nourrice, addressing the weeping Sophonisbe, tears can kill: Ne veux-tu point cesser, et ces larmes humides, En seront-elles done de tes ans homicides?

(II, 759)

In Acts III and IV, blood is again dominant as in Act I, but the idea of medicine also returns in each of these Acts. In Act III, 'conseiF is urged on Massinisse by Misipsa as preferable to violent action and bloodshed: Contez-nous vostre mal; s'il se peut secourir Par le divin conseil, nous pourrons le guarir. 114

Shape «Et l'esprit agite de fureur se console «Au bal industrieux d'une sage parole. «Le conseil guarist Tame ainsi que les liqueurs «Vont guarissant des corps les cruelles douleurs, Car c'est son medecin, et le salut de Tame Est le divin conseil dont la douceur le pasme.

(Ill, 1339)

In Act IV Curtius brings Sophonisbe the gift of poison from Massinisse, offering it with these words: ce don il te presente Qui peut faire mourir ta peine languissante, Appaiser ta douleur

(IV, 2203)

Sophonisbe responds to the gift with a long speech which opens: O present agreable, 6 douce medecine Qui guaris ma douleur et refais ma mine!

(IV, 2215)

This use of the idea of poison is on the border between literal and metaphorical, for unlike 'conseil', what Sophonisbe is being offered is indeed a liquid to be drunk, but the cure it promises is metaphorical, it is the panacea of death. In Act V there is a reprise of the motifs of blood (Tarmy le tiede sang', 2424; 'sanglante proye', 2444) and tears ('de mes pleurs la cristaline source', 2401) before the double motif of poison-medicine reappears to dominate the rest of the act, developed first, at some length, by Sophonisbe: O vaze bienheureux ou je contemple enclos Le repos de ma vie et l'ardeur de mon los, O breuvage sacre qui transissant ma vie Transit pareillement le mal qui m'injurie. O courtois Massinisse et digne d'estre roy, Puisque tu m'as garde immuable ta foy, Je t'aime, je t'honore, et pour don agreable Je re^ois de ta main ce poison secourable. O divine liqueur, en me faisant finir Tu ravis de mes maux le cruel souvenir. Tu me fais oublier et Cartage ruinee Et la peur d'estre a Rome en triomphe trainee. Tu me fais oublier le regret de tous ceux Qui sont morts au salut du pays malencontreux. Bref, tu me rens la vie et heureuse, contente En faisant trespasser ma vigueur languissante. 115

(V,2483)

French Renaissance tragedy The poison here has almost the characteristics of a magic potion, able to extinguish memory as well as relieve pain. The paradox of a poison which heals leads to the pointe in the last two lines just quoted, with the startling, oxymoronic linking of 'tu me rens la vie' and 'faisant trespasser'. In the last appearance of the drinkimage, the drink seems to have become death itself, although the wording is rather obscure. It occurs in the last speech of the play, and the speaker is Siphax: Les rois ne sont exempts de ce mortel breuvage. En l'avallant plustost, plus ils ont de courage.

(V,2773)

Alongside this set of connected images there is a disturbing group of references to drinking blood or eating flesh (shading off into more ordinary references to bloody hands, which link up with the blood/tears/medicine/poison group). 3 The notion of drinking blood occurs, for example, in Siphax's first speech in Act I, when he contemplates the fact that the gods seem to favour wickedness in kings: Pour regner il faut done forcer les saintes lois, Le sacre fondement de l'empire des rois? Faut done boire le sang ...?

(1,195)

In Act III the African Gelosses describes the Romans as 'Un barbare estranger qui cruel et mutin, / En sucgant nostre sang, vit de nostre butin' (III, 1423). In Act IV Siphax speaks of: Rome, cruelle Rome, ingrate, ambitieuse, Qui paist du sang royal son ame furieuse

(IV, 1927)

Sophonisbe in Act V compares 'Mars le cruel' to fire, and goes on: II devore le droit, et la sainte equite Sert de sanglante proye a sa rouge fierte. (V,2443) Gelosses' speech in Act III, quoted above, juxtaposes its bloodsucking image with the word 'butin'. This word, along with forms of the verb 'butiner', occurs nineteen times in the play, and there are also five uses of the word 'depouille', whose meaning overlaps with that of 'butin'. 'Butin' forms a third element in the patterning of Sophonisbe, The word is most often, in this play, used of people, and particularly of Sophonisbe, as in the two following examples, spoken by Massinisse and by Scipion's friend Lelius or Lelie: 116

Shape Qui a vaincu que nous, et pendant il faut rendre Ce que pour seul butin nous avons daigne prendre! Faut rendre Sophonisbe (III, 1441) Songe a nostre demande, et Sophonisbe rens Que pour juste butin aujourd'huy je pretens.

(Ill, 1699)

Because 'butin' is used of people, the idea of eating flesh is suggested again when 'butin' is found with verbs such as 'souller', as in Siphax's first speech: Rome, mere du crime et dont les fils cruels Ont pollu des grands dieux les celestes autels, Ont brise tout respect et pour loy plus exquise Suivy tant seulement leur vive convoitise, Soullant leur vive faim du butin des grans rois

(1,179)

Although both the 'butin' motif and the blood/tears/medicine/ poison group are precisely the sorts of words that Montreux could be expected to deploy abundantly, the playwright does seem to be using them in a particularly deliberate way (as well as with great poetic effectiveness), and two things point to this in addition to the frequency of the references. First, the juxtapositions, of which examples have been cited, create connections between the two groups. Secondly, the use of 'butin' and 'depouille' is continued after Sophonisbe's death. 'Depouille' then refers to her body, which has become the 'butin d'un tombeau mortuaire' (V,2786). In the same speech of Siphax in which this reference occurs, there is also the following: Ore morts, ore vifs, on nous trouve icy-bas Jouets de la fortune et butins du trespas.

(V,2771)

And this, which plunges from a general, commonplace observation on mutability (Testat incertain / Des choses de la terre') to a sharp reminder, for the reader or spectator, of personal mortality ('Que vous soyez butins d'un sepulcral tombeau'): O mortels, contemplez en mon sort inhumain L'infortune des rois et l'estat incertain Des choses de la terre. Ah, voyez qu'en peu d'heure II faut qu'avecque vous vostre puissance meure, Que vous soyez butins d'un sepulcral tombeau, Mesmes le plus souvent en vostre aage plus beau Comme Test Sophonisbe (V, 2823) 117

French Renaissance tragedy When Sophonisbe was alive, the word 'butin' was used about her and Siphax as victims of war, to be led in humiliating captivity as part of a Roman triumph. Now that she is dead, the use of the same word stresses the mortality we share with Sophonisbe: she has escaped a degrading life by choosing, in her 'aage plus beau', death which she would have had to come to sooner or later. There is no doubt that she has made the better choice, and even Scipion, who had been so insistent that she must walk in his triumph, admires and praises her death. Montreux's Sophonisbe is a play where a hunt for 'character', in the sense of psychological unity and vraisemblance, is particularly likely to lead to a dismissive view of the whole work. Scipion, for example, if looked at from this point of view, is a character who changes attitudes throughout the play. At first he represents the pomp and power of Rome. In keeping with this function, he tells Siphax that his wretchedness is merited, because Siphax broke a promise to the Romans, at Sophonisbe's urging. Yet when Siphax decides to commit suicide, Scipion tells him not to, offers arguments against suicide, urges him to be cheerful, encourages him to believe that he will regain his throne. Changing tone again, Scipion receives the news of Sophonisbe's suicide (which he has provoked) with expressions of admiration and respect. What makes these changes of attitude difficult to accommodate is that Scipion stands in a relationship of power to all the other characters, so that his words as well as being rhetorical explorations of various topics also determine the actions of others. However, what, if psychologically viewed, appear to be inconsistencies in the representation of Scipion probably arise from the fact that two views of Rome are being put forward in this play: there is Rome the civilising force, representing rational government and guaranteeing the future of Europe, but there is also Rome the heartless state machine, disregarding the sufferings of individuals. At different moments, Scipion embodies both sides of this duality. If we are not distracted by a misguided search for character, we can see in Sophonisbe not only moments of powerful poetic effect produced by details of expression, but also a strong coherence deriving from those connected images which express the play's themes; these themes, and their associated images, include war (blood) and the aftermath of war (tears); the ethics of conquest (Sophonisbe and Siphax as 118

Shape booty); death as preferable to slavery (the healing poison); the horrors committed by both sides in war (bloody hands). This technique of organising the play round one thematic image or several, often straddling the gap between metaphorical and 'real', is one aspect of structure, but it is not of course the only way in which humanist dramatists create coherence. Another aspect of structure is the choice and arrangement of the storyelements and the placing of key incidents and speeches. The playwright's decisions in this domain can play a considerable part in indicating how the play should be understood. In the choice of subject-matter, there is often more than one source to choose from, or more than one version of a myth. As a modern editor, Christopher Smith, points out (Montchrestien, 1972,18), the plot of Montchrestien's Hector derives from Dares the Phrygian's unadorned account of the fall of Troy, but a great deal in the play is Homeric, notably the stress on honour, and many aspects of language and style. To have used a Homeric plot would not only have invited direct comparison of Montchrestien's text with Homeric originals, but would have involved acknowledging the part played in human affairs by the Homeric gods. This would have produced a completely different * message' from the one Montchrestien transmits in this play, which offers, as Christopher Smith observes, 'an image of man as conceived by the stoics' (Montchrestien, 1972, 18), with a hero who aspires to fame and is determined to show courage and resolution in facing a hostile fate. But although he discards Homer's interfering and partisan gods, Montchrestien uses his heroic atmosphere and epic style; these give Hector a grandeur that a plainer style, like Dares', does not offer. Humanist dramatists also take liberties with their material. In a much-quoted passage at the end of the 'Argument' of Porcie, Gamier wrote, after listing his sources (Dio Cassius, Appian, Plutarch): 'Au reste je luy ay cousu une piece de fiction de la mort de la Nourrice, pour l'enveloper d'avantage en choses funebres et lamentables, et en ensanglanter la catastrophe.' This is often quoted with the implication that it reflects a mere taste for corpses and horror, but it is equally possible to see it as relating to the tenor of the play. The conclusion to which the play leads us is that the action of the tyrannicides, though honourably motivated, was 119

French Renaissance tragedy futile, and has led to a worse tyranny. This gloomy message is more effectively emphasised by two suicides at the end of the play than by one. Moreover the Nourrice is no mere 'figurant', but a prominent and eloquent character. In Act II (the first act in which Porcie and the Nourrice appear), Porcie's longest speech is eightyfour lines long, and it is followed, after a long choric intervention, by one of seventy-two lines from the Nourrice. In this speech the Nourrice meditates on the inconstancy of Fortune, and on the decline of Rome from a heroic, triumphant past into the disaster of civil war, so that she becomes strongly associated with the central theme of the play. In the last act, after Porcie's death, the Nourrice conducts the Chorus in a lament not only for Brute and Porcie but for the City; her final speech mentions Rome's enslavement under its Tyrans vaincueurs' and speaks of the 'infinis tourmens' which the future holds for the Roman women of the Chorus. Her suicide is the final pessimistic comment on Rome's unhappy state. The disposition, as well as the choice, of material affects our understanding and response. Jean de La Taille's Saul lefurieux illustrates this. Saul is mad when the play opens. In Act II his madness worsens: already murderous in Act I, he now becomes impious and hubristic, until, painfully and movingly, he recovers his lucidity. In Act III he consults the witch of Endor, who raises the spirit of Samuel for him. In Act IV he is abandoned by God, his sons are dead and his army in retreat; first he asks his squire to kill him, then, inspired by the thought of his sons who have died heroically on the battlefield, he goes off to try to rally his troops and 'acquerir la gloire en vendant cher [sa] vie' (IV, 1088). In Act V David hears of Saul's death, and mourns Saul and Jonathe. The longest act is Act III. Its length is appropriate to its importance in the scheme of the play, for consulting the witch of Endor marks a culmination in Saul's career. It is both his most desperate cry for help and his worst offence against his intransigent God and against God's grim prophet Samuel, whose spirit is raised by the witch. Saul has sinned through disobedience before. After defeating the Amalekites he spared their king, Agag ('pour estre ... humain' as Saul says; 'Plutost que de souiller dedans son sang vos mains' as his Escuyer says). He also saved some of the best of the Amalekites' cattle (in order to sacrifice them to God, according to the Bible narrative). God's instructions had been to 'slay both 120

Shape man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass' (1 Samuel 15:3). To spare the 'triste Roy Agag' out of compassion, or because of respect for his royal quality, might be a noble and admirable thing to do by human standards, but God, it is made clear in this play, does not tolerate the application of individual conscience where he has called for unquestioning obedience. As punishment for this offence, Saul has already suffered military setbacks and fits of madness. Saul is appalled that Israel should suffer for his offence; this sense of compassion and responsibility for the nation is one of the marks of a good monarch, as defined by sixteenth-century (and earlier) political writers, by contrast with the callousness and egoism of the tyrant. Yet it is this virtuous concern for his people that leads Saul to sin again. It is in order to get Samuel's advice and support in the dreadful predicament brought about by his act of compassion that Saul disobeys God again, this time by transgressing the ban on witches: SAUL Bref je s
Mais DIEU Pa defendu: mesme aiez souvenance D 'avoir meurtry tous ceux qui sgavoient ces secrets. (11,461) The irony of Saul's plight reaches its climax in this act, where the consequences of his earlier sin (which is recounted to us in terms that make it seem easily pardonable and indeed virtuous) lead him knowingly to sin again, and so anger God still further; the irony is that it is God's anger which has brought him to such a pitch of despair that he needs Samuel's help and goes to the witch - a thing that God has forbidden him to do. It is not only its central placing and length, and the eeriness and excitement of the calling of Samuel's spirit, which emphasise the importance of this act. There is also the fact that the Phitonisse, who appears only in this act, is the only female character in the play, which means that she is differentiated, distanced from the rest (Saul had a wife and daughters whom La Taille has chosen not to use). This is also the only act in which the Levites (who form the rather prosy Chorus) intervene in dialogue, so that in this respect, too, the third act differs from the others. The necromancy scene is not only a moment of high theatricality, 121

French Renaissance tragedy it is the simultaneous climax of Saul's wrongdoing and of his attempts to solve his problems. It is precisely the coincidence of the two that defeats him, demonstrating the rigour of God, the puniness of human judgement, and the dangers of self-reliance. As king of Israel, Saul is now destroyed. His restoration to a kind of grace is achieved through the only means left open to him heroic death. God's favour has already passed to David, but because Saul died on the battlefield, after fighting bravely for Israel, David is able in the final act to salute his courage and dedicate to him, as well as to Jonathe, the praise and lamentation of T h e Song of the Bow'. The third act of Garnier's Porcie offers a more austere example of this kind of shaping - austere because it lacks the theatricality of the necromancy scene. The important question posed by the play is whether tyrannicide is worthwhile, and this is introduced by Porcie in Act II: LA NOURRICE

Mais le Tyran vaincueur, incontinent destruit, De ses heureux combats n'emporta pas grand fruict. PORCIE

Pleust au grand Jupiter qu'il dominast encore, Nous n'aurions pas les maux qui nous tenaillent ore, Nous vivrions bien-heureux en repos souhaite, Sans perte seulement que de la liberte (II, 533) The perennial problem addressed by Garnier here is summed up in the last two lines, with their striking opposition of 'repos' and 'liberte'. The other important preparatory development in Act II comes just after the mid-act intervention of the Chorus; the Nourrice, following them, herself becomes Chorus-like, picking up the theme of the 'inconstante Deesse', fortune, which was developed by the Chorus in Act I, and establishing Rome as an exemplary, personified figure of majestic sadness: Quiconques voudra voir combien est tromperesse La faveur que depart 1' inconstante Deesse, Et combien follement nous tourmentons nos coeurs Apres la vanite de ces vaines grandeurs, Qui voudra voir combien les puissances mondaines Sujettes au destin balancent incertaines, Rome, te vienne voir ... 122

Shape Maintenant (6 chetive!) esteinte par les armes, Par l'homicide fer de tes propres gendarmes, Tu nages dans le sang de tes pauvres enfans Que n'aguere on voyoit marcher si triomphans! Tu souffres, pauvre Rome, helas! (II,403, 435) With this speech the Nourrice seems to become attached as much to Rome as to Porcie, and Rome becomes the central figure of the tragedy. The central scene in Act III is a confrontation between Octave (Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, later Augustus) and Antoine (the triumvir Marcus Antonius). The act is introduced, however, by the philosopher Aree (who appears only in the first two scenes of this act), as if to signal that what follows is not just a display of personalities but an exposition of ideas. These ideas are not divorced from the surrounding acts but related to them, for the meeting of Octave and Antoine shows how right Porcie is to feel that the tyrannicides killed in vain. Yet at the same time, although this connection between the acts exists, the complete change of personnel, and the mention of Brute's death (which it would be shocking to learn about in Porcie's absence if Porcie and her grief were meant to be our main preoccupation), make it clear that the connecting thread of the play is not one of surface story. What emerges from Act III is a clear opposition between Octave and Antoine. Octave is a tyrant, the worst possible successor to Julius Caesar; Antoine is a soldier, enormously proud of his successes but not sharing Octave's determination to go on killing until all possible opposition is quashed and all possible vengeance exacted. The contrast between them is summed up in the animal imagery each applies to himself, Octave likening himself to 'un Tygre ireux/Qui court opiniastre apres un Cerf peureux' (III, 837) and Antoine portraying himself as: Semblable au preux Lion, au Lion genereux, Qui ne daigne lever sa grande patte croche Qu'encontre un fier taureau ... Lors retournant vaincueur en son roc cavernier, S'il trouve a Pimpourveu quelque chien moutonnier, Qui tremblant et criant plat a ses pieds se couche, II passe plus avant, et piteux ne luy touche. (Ill, 1242, 1257) 123

French Renaissance tragedy The third triumvir, Lepide, is the pragmatist who sees when argument is futile; since Antoine will pursue neither the remaining supporters of the dead tyrannicides nor the young Pompey, Lepide changes the subject and proposes the division of the Roman empire between the three of them. This act, therefore, displays the multiple tyranny which has replaced that of Caesar, and the very unappealing motivations of the new men. It also foreshadows further civil war, since Octave and Antoine, although differentiated, sound too alike in their ambition for them to tolerate each other's partnership for long. Raymond Lebegue has traced sources for individual speeches in this scene (Gamier, 1973, 254-5), but the idea of a scene bringing the triumvirs together is Garnier's own. It has little to do with Porcie's personal grief and alarms, but a great deal to do with her political apprehensions. Like Act III of La Taille's Saul lefurieux, Act III of Porcie is differentiated from the surrounding acts by a change of characters - Aree, Octave, Antoine, Ventidie (Antoine's lieutenant), and Lepide appear only in this act. It is further differentiated by having its own Chorus: the choric ode ending Act III is spoken by a secondary Chorus, the 'Choeur de soudars'. The soldiers praise courage and patriotism, deplore civil war, and demand their wages (unpaid, disbanded armies were a scourge in France during the Wars of Religion). Having seen in Act III of Porcie how little hope there is for the restoration of either peace or freedom (let alone both), we return in the next act to the representatives of those who will suffer from this state of affairs: to Porcie, her Nourrice, and the Chorus of Roman women, who speak for the victims of war and for Rome herself. The change of Choruses is an example of another structural element which can be called into service to transmit the tenor of a play: the multiple Chorus. I have already discussed (in Chapter 4) the use of multiple Choruses in Garnier's Antigone from the point of view of Chorus-function. Let us consider it again here from the point of view of how it helps to shape and direct the play's themes. When a character is provided with a 'personal' Chorus, or when the main Chorus is more closely linked to one character than to the others, then that character is strengthened, supported, 124

Shape given more weight. It is striking, and appropriate, that in Antigone Antigone and Creon are opponents, yet both are given this support. The Chorus of old men supporting Creon seems to multiply him, and reinforce the impression of sober judgement and thoughtful, prudent concern for the welfare of the city. Antigone's Chorus of Theban girls emphasises not only her sex, but her youth and the pathos of her death (which she turns into tragedy by her suicide). The fact that Creon and Antigone each have a Chorus enables us to see their relationship not in terms of a strong tyrant oppressing a virtuous, and helpless, princess, but as an opposition between two sets of values: the values of stable government and impartial justice on one side, and of family pietas and apolitical ethical considerations on the other. The principal, 'impersonal' Chorus (assuming it is indeed this Chorus which delivers the ode on justice in Act IV of Antigone) is impartial; even in condemning Creon's action it acknowledges his respectable motive ('11 pense tesmoigner ... Qu'il fait justice egale', IV,2149), and thus backs up Creon's own declaration that he loved his nieces and was not (as Ismene suggests) glad to get rid of yet another of the troublesome children of Oedipus. Creon calls Antigone and Ismene 'Les pestes, que j'aimois plus cher que mes enfans' (IV, 1891). Similar effects can be seen in other plays with multiple Choruses. In Jodelle's Didon se sacrifiant, Didon and Enee, caught in a vice of tragic necessity, are each backed by a sympathetic Chorus. Didon is a queen, Enee a prince and leader, and the two Choruses provide each of them with the semblance of a court. In Montchrestien's Reine d'Escosse, the different nature of the two Choruses reflects the different positions of the two queens. The English queen's Chorus is a 'Choeur des Estats': male, authoritative, representing the collective wisdom of the queen's political advisers and councillors as well as loyal public opinion. The other Chorus is a 'Choeur des Suivantes de la Reine d'Escosse': female, powerless, emphasising the Scottish queen's own helplessness, and able only to protest and mourn. At the end of Act II, which is the end of the 'English' part of the play, there is a choric ode on the brevity of life ending with a couplet about the Scottish queen: «L'on veut bien decoler une Deesse humaine «Fille de la vertu et mere de l'amour. 125

(11,605)

French Renaissance tragedy Either the 'Choeur des Estats' (which has spent this act urging the English queen to execute the Scottish queen) has here stepped out of its politically committed role, or there is a neutral Chorus as well, although not mentioned among the 'Entreparleurs' (the 1604 edition has no list of 'Entreparleurs'); or such a neutral Chorus might conceivably be formed by the 'Choeur des suivantes' coming on stage at this point and joining the English Chorus to deliver, together, an ode which consists mostly of a commonplace meditation on mortality. With the departure, at the end of this ode, of the 'Choeur des Estats', the transition would have been effected between the moral spheres of England and Scotland, and the stage would be ready for the entrance of the Scottish queen and of Davison, who has come to announce the sentence of death. An effect similar to that achieved by a 'personal' Chorus, like those attending Garnier's Antigone or Montchrestien's Reine d'Escosse, can also be brought about by the disposition of secondary characters, sometimes little more than 'figurants' but often having a good deal to say. In Jean de La Taille's Saul lefurieux, Saul is accompanied by two Escuyers; the fact that they are designated thus, by function rather than by name, makes them seem almost choric, but unlike the semi-Chorus of 'Les Roynes' in Garnier's Les Juifves, the Escuyers speak separately. They are critical of Saul, but their presence emphasises the fact that it is God, not man, who has abandoned Saul; he keeps his kingly state and human dignity, and the Escuyers make this manifest. In contrast, Octave in Garnier's Porcie has no such support, either from Chorus or from subsidiary characters. The play contains two named Choruses, a 'Choeur de Rommaines' (or, in some variants of the editioprinceps, 'Choeur de filles'), appearing only in Act V, and thus associated with the death of Porcie, and a 'Choeur de soudars' associated with the triumvirs, but not used in Octave's first scene (the second scene of Act II) so that this Chorus seems to be more closely linked to Marc Antoine, and indeed their views and tone are similar. There is a third, unnamed Chorus which is used throughout the play except at the end of Act II (the triumvirs' act, concluded by the 'Choeur de soudars') and in Act V (where the Chorus is presumably the Roman women throughout, even though the designation is reduced to 'Choeur' in the lyric passages). 126

Shape Octave has no Chorus to support him, and the disposition of secondary characters enhances this isolation. Porcie has her Nourrice, Marc Antoine has his 'lieutenant' or 'Mareschal de camp' Ventidie, but the character with whom Octave is shown in dialogue before the arrival of the other triumvirs is the philosopher Aree, who is not a loyal supporter of Octave, as the Nourrice and Ventidie are of their principals, but an opponent of Octave's views. Aree is opposed to war, in favour of clemency, disapproves of vengeance. Octave is alone and in the wrong, and structurally this isolation is conveyed by the arrangement of Choruses and subordinate characters. Similar comments could be made about Les Juifves. Nothing can weaken the power of Nabuchodonosor, but our sense of his abusive use of that power is heightened by his isolation. Even his subordinates (Nabuzardan and the Prevost de l'hostel) disagree with him or disapprove of him, and his queen warns him of the dangers he is inviting by his hubris. Amital, in contrast, has two groups who side with her and share her feelings: the 'Choeur des Juifves' and the unusual semi-Chorus of the Jewish queens. The king who can command armies cannot command support, but only obedience. In contrast, the defeated queen is shown leading, supporting, and being supported by her fellow-captives, and winning sympathy even from Nabuchodonosor's queen. Later tragedians continue to use the four techniques outlined in this chapter for directing the responses of reader or spectator. Thematic images, such as those of the Trojan war in Andromaque, light and dark in Phedre, blood and metal in A thalie, are a powerful element in Racine's fusion of poetic and dramatic forces, and call up complex responses: the Trojan war is both heroic past and indelible nightmare vision, darkness prevails both in the cool, inviting forest and in the labyrinth, blood is blood of kinship, of murder, and of Temple sacrifice. Selection and adaptation of source-material is most noticeable when substantial changes have been made: the survival of Astyanax, the invention of Aricie and Eriphile clearly affect our reactions to Andromaque, to Hippolyte, to Iphigenie. Similarly, parallels to the way Act III of Saul le furieux is set in relief by change of scene, and the introduction of a new character, can be found in Racine's or Corneille's timing of key encounters between major characters (Andromaque and 127

French Renaissance tragedy Pyrrhus, Titus and Berenice, Pauline and Polyeucte, Cleopatre and Rodogune), the delayed introduction of Aricie, the placing of the news of Thesee's return, or the way in which characters in any wellmade tragedy take turns in dominating the stage. The grouping or isolating of characters is also exploited by later writers. Bajazet has no confidant except his lover and the devious Acomat; Britannicus has none but his lover and Narcisse, who is an enemy; Berenice has a confidant, but Titus has a retinue as well. From the intervening period, La Calprenede's first play, La Mort de Mitridate (1636), strikingly opposes Mitridate and his traitor son, Pharnace. Mitridate's 'team' consists of his wife (so loyal that she arms and goes out to fight at his side), his daughters, his daughter-in-law, and the commander of his cavalry. Mitridate is always accompanied by one or more of these, and in the last act, in a final demonstration of solidarity, the women commit suicide with him, on stage. Pharnace is usually shown with his Roman 'ally' Emile (who is really his master), or cutting a despicable figure in encounters with his father or his wife (loyal to Mitridate). At the end of the play Pharnace is brought in by his Roman keeper to see the bodies of his family. Now his isolation is complete; the family has maintained its unity and excluded him for ever. He can only be a spectator of this extraordinary tableau, and he already knows that his victory is a sham: Mitridate is dead, but Pharnace is worse off than Mitridate, a slave, a marionette, a shadow. The visual contrast between the grouped dead and the isolated survivor points us towards the perception that defeat can be noble, heroic, 'solidaire', and even triumphant, and that victory may turn out to be lonely, shameful, and frightening. Many structural devices, then, are common to humanist and later dramatists. One device considered here, however, is renounced by the successors of the humanist dramatists, and that is the Chorus. I looked in Chapter 4 at the importance of what the Chorus says in humanist drama, and how it says it. In this chapter I have been more concerned with the presence of the Chorus as an element in the pattern of the play. What emerges particularly strongly from this consideration of structure is the extremely rich and flexible use made by some of the humanist dramatists of multiple Choruses. They play a part in the intellectual design not only by the content and tone of their utterances, but by the way 128

Shape they support some characters and isolate others. The use of multiple Choruses is a technique, developed from a few precedents in Seneca (Agamemnon, Hercules Oetaeus, Octavia), which in several sixteenth-century tragedies becomes a very useful means of communicating ideas and directing the sympathy and judgement of reader or spectator.

129

7 PLEASURES

I do not mean to suggest, by the title of this chapter, that those aspects of humanist tragedy I have considered in earlier chapters do not give pleasure. In those chapters, however, I have been mainly concerned with showing the resources of the humanist dramatists and the use they made of them; in this final chapter I shall discuss the experience which results, for readers and spectators, from what these playwrights did with their materials. Nowadays, we are very unlikely to be spectators of humanist tragedy - attempts to try the plays out in the theatre in this century have been few and far between. Nevertheless, as readers, we always have the freedom to be spectators of an imagined performance. Even at the time of their composition, many of these plays probably had more readers than spectators. I mentioned in the Introduction the problems of trying to read 'historically', that is, trying to read with the eyes and mind of a sixteenth-century reader. We can never entirely shed our own assumptions and preconceptions, and we can never know how close we are getting to those of an earlier age; yet to be aware, as we read, of the response which a contemporary reader might have had to the text is likely to increase our own responsiveness, and this awareness itself can be a source of pleasure. In the discussion that follows I shall be describing pleasures which I believe to be available to a modern reader, while at times pointing out differences of information or outlook, between sixteenth-century and modern readers, which may mean that some of the experiences offered by humanist tragedy were more readily accessible to a sixteenthcentury reader than they are to a modern one. The first aspect I shall consider is theatricality. Although it has long been accepted that humanist tragedy was acted, therefore actable, it is clear that many critics consider these plays better suited to the study than to the stage. One scholar who is refreshingly 131

French Renaissance tragedy willing to consider the theatrical quality of humanist tragedy is Frangoise Charpentier; to her, even aspects of the texts which to some readers suggest a neglect of the practical demands of the theatre are confirmation of the secondary status of the printed text and the primacy of performance. Quite often, for example, humanist playwrights or their printers fail to list the characters at the beginning of a scene. Donald Stone Jr comments on such a failure in his edition of Montreux's Sophonisbe: 'Le fait que les noms de tous les personnages d'un acte n'apparaissent qu'au commencement de l'acte rend encore plus indechiffrables les aspects problematiques de la mise-en-scene' (Montreux, 1976, 37). Charpentier's reaction to such deficiencies is ingenious and positive: [Dans les pieces imprimees du XVIeme siecle] le decoupage par scenes n'est pas precise, le nombre des acteurs en presence non plus, ni leurs entrees, ni leurs sorties, ni eventuellement la presence muette d'un personnage ou d'un choeur. Une telle pauvrete dedications pourrait fort bien laisser supposer que le livre n'est que le support, la memorisation de quelque chose qui a ete vu, et dont tout l'aspect visuel se passe de descriptions trop minutieuses. (Charpentier, 1981, 573) The text, Charpentier suggests (576), is a 'programme-souvenir'. This intriguing argument might appear overstated, but it is carefully supported, in a strong case for the theatricality of the plays of Montchrestien, by an analysis of clues in the text to such things as setting, off-stage extensions of the setting, movement, objects (armour, chains), appearance, costume, and 'props'. Such analysis is useful because we lack detailed information about the staging of humanist tragedy. Often these plays were performed in schools or colleges, probably with fairly modest resources. Some performances were at Court or in great houses, and Raymond Lebegue discovered the accounts for a Court performance of Saint-Gelais's adapted translation of Trissino's Sophonisba, staged in 1556 with Mary Stuart (aged thirteen) as Sophonisba, which seems to have made lavish use of sumptuous cloth for stage-decoration and costumes (Lebegue, 1946). If we know little about the performances, what we know about the reactions to them comes mainly from the pieces liminaires which friends wrote enthusiastically for each other's works, and these are 132

Pleasures of course invariably eulogistic, perhaps extravagantly so. Until more of these plays are tried out again on stage, we can only imagine our own reactions to an imagined performance. As soon as we read these plays with performance in mind, many aspects of their theatricality become apparent. One that would seem appropriate to consider first is the wealth of startling entrances or scene-openings. The opening of Saiil le furieux has already been mentioned (Chapter 2, 40; Chapter 6, 120). The play starts with Saiil hallucinating: Las mon Dieu qu'est-ce cy? que voy-je mes soldarts? Quell' eclipse obscurcit le ciel de toutes parts? D'ou vient desja la nuict, et ces torches flambantes Que je voy dans la mer encontre val tombantes? Tu n'as encor, Soleil, paracheve ton tour, Pourquoy doncques pers tu ta lumiere en plain jour?

(1,1)

As soon as we begin to think about theatrical effect, the impression produced by Saul's speech is changed. When we 'merely' read, we see, in our mind's eye, the darkness of Saul's hallucination; if we visualise performance, we are conscious of the contrast between that hallucination and stage-reality, with Saiil seeing darkness while the spectator sees light. Equally startling scene-openings can be found in Gamier, and the beginning of Act II of Les Juifves is a famous example. Act I consists of prayer and preaching from the Prophete, followed by a choric ode on original sin, the loss of Eden, and the flood. This biblical meditation does nothing to prepare us for the irruption of Nabuchodonosor at the beginning of Act II, with the most splendidly hubristic tyrant-speech in the whole of humanist theatre. It is a particularly clever touch that the Prophete rebuked the Jews for having worshipped an idol - a lifeless image with eyes, ears, and nose but unable to see, hear, or breathe - and now we are confronted with this other false god ('Je suis l'unique Dieu de la terre ou nous sommes'), no lifeless block but a living tyrant, into whose terrible power the Jews' neglect of the true God has brought them, and whose boast is that whereas Jupiter, the only god he acknowledges, can command only inanimate forces (weather and the heavenly bodies), Nabuchodonosor can command men, and indeed commands all the races of the known world. 133

French Renaissance tragedy Later in the same act of Les Juifves, the entry of the Assyrian queen offers another example of theatrical contrast. After a scene of prayer and mourning between Amital and the Chorus in which they lament the 'cuisants malheurs' which beset them and pray for God's mercy, the queen's entrance brings a complete change of tone. Unlike the Jewish women, she is happy, rejoicing in the Assyrian victory; she greets the morning sun serenely, in a speech which contrasts at every point with the preceding scene. Even the invocatory form she uses ('O beau Soleil luisant' II, 567) seems to be in deliberate contrast to 'O seigneur nostre Dieu', used by Amital a moment before (11,541), and thus suggests Assyrian paganism. Similarly, the stress on the beauty of the sunshine, and of the scenes which it illuminates, strikes an un-biblical note, for though there are plenty of references in the Old Testament to features of landscape (mountains, valleys, rivers, deserts, plants, animals), there is nothing resembling the queen's lyrical delight in her 'belles campagnes'. The first entrance of Garnier's Hippolyte has an effect rather like that of the Assyrian queen in Les Juifves. It follows the speech by the Ombre d'Egee, the ghost of Hippolyte's grandfather, analysed in Chapter 1 (22). In the hands of some humanist dramatists, this speech by the ghost would have constituted the whole of the first act, followed by a choric ode and thus losing the striking effect of the sharp contrast between the ghost and the athletic young man. The ghost's speech includes, towards the end, a catalogue of torments of the great malefactors who are punished in Hades, and Hippolyte's first words seem to drive away this vision of hell and damnation (though the shadows soon gather again as Hippolyte goes on to describe the bad dream from which he has just woken): Ja l'Aurore se leve, et Phebus qui la suit, Vermeil, fait recacher les flambeaux de la nuict. Ja ses beaux limonniers commencent a respandre Le jour aux animaux, qui ne font que l'attendre.

(1,143)

Mention of the Ombre d'Egee brings in another consideration: theatricality can be achieved by the presence on stage of characters who are, because of who or what they are, impressive or frightening. Egee's ghost is one of these. We need not suppose any elaborate visual cues to his ghostliness: Hamlet's father's ghost 134

Pleasures is described as looking just as he did in life - what makes him frightening is that he is known to be dead. Egee's ghost makes his status plain with his first words, 'Je sors de PAcheron' (1,1). The appearance of this ghost has both classical and un-classical connotations. An educated sixteenth-century audience would know that in a classical context ghosts appeared only to give serious warnings or advice, and that is what Egee's ghost has come to do, although he gives the warning not to the man who needs it (Hippolyte) but to the audience. However, classical ghosts, though they could occasionally be met with by special elaborate arrangements (Odysseus' ceremonies and sacrifice, Aeneas' visit to the Underworld), usually appeared only in a dream, dreamed by the person in need of the warning. When Egee's ghost appears on stage to the audience, rather than in a dream to Thesee or Hippolyte, the recognition of a classical convention (ghosts give warning of dreadful events) is made to combine with a less learned reaction (fear of the walking dead). Equally alarming is the opening of Garnier's Porcie. The first figure to appear is Megere, one of the Furies. Again she gives the 'flavour' of her identity rapidly in the opening lines: Des Enfers tenebreux les gouffres homicides N'ont encore soule leurs cruautez avides: Encore mi-deserts les champs Tenariens Demandent a Pluton de nouveaux citoyens. Toy, qui armas le Gendre encontre le Beau-pere, Toy, Phorreur des humains, execrable Megere, Qui portes dans le sein la rage et les fureurs: Toy, toy, qui peux combler tout ce monde d'horreurs, Embrase de rechef la guerriere poitrine, Et le sang genereux de ceste gent Latine. (1,1) Several things may assist the spectator in perceiving Megere as awesome, terrible, and frightening. The text implies that she carries a torch, when she addresses the other Furies thus: Vous, les Dires d'Enfer, vous, mes deux autres Sceurs, Qui portez comme moy les flambeaux punisseurs (1,31) and she also refers several times to the Furies' snaky heads and to the whips they carry. For the sumptuously costumed Court performance of Saint-Gelais's Sophonisba at Blois in 1556 135

French Renaissance tragedy (mentioned above, 132), in which several of the royal children took part, and for which Raymond Lebegue found the accounts in the Archives Nationales, Jan Antoine de Baif had provided additional material in the form of an 'entremets' which was a monologue by Megere (not included in the printed text of 1559, but published by Marty-Laveaux, 1883, Slatkine reprint 1965). Masks are mentioned in the accounts, so it seems likely that Megere would have worn one, and 3 VA aunes (about 4 yards) of white satin were supplied to make her snaky hair (Lebegue, 1946, 141). Gamier may well have intended his Megere to have similar accessories to make her alarming and impressive, but even without them, the appropriate reaction is stimulated by the energy and ferocity of Megere's speech. The passage just quoted is typical of the speech in its vocabulary of horror and frenzy ('cruautez', 'horreur', 'execrable', 'rage', 'fureurs'), and an even more powerful element is the evocation of a sort of holiday in hell, so that the other Furies can join Megere in urging the Romans to kill each other (1,31-66). Lebegue (Gamier, 1973,247) notes that the source of this passage is Seneca's Medea, 745-9. In that passage, however, Medea calls on the dead (Ixion, Tantalus, the Danaids) to leave their punishments and attend the new wedding of Jason: 'supplicis, animae, remissis currite ad thalamos novos' (743). Gamier has not only greatly expanded his model but transformed it into a more sinister picture, summoning not ghosts but the tormenting Furies themselves, to inflict on the Romans suffering as great as that usually endured by the legendary criminals in hell. Baif's Megere appeared quite late in Saint-Gelais's Sophonisba, immediately before the fourth choric interlude. However impressive she was with her 'serpentins' locks of white satin, Garnier's Megere has perhaps an advantage over her in appearing at the beginning of the play when the audience is expectant and uncertain. As well as startling figures appearing on stage, startling events also take place there, including those which later standards of vraisemblance or bienseance preclude. In La Peruse's Medee Tu'enfant, Medee kills her children on stage; in Jacques de La Taille's Alexandre, the hero dies of poisoning, and his wife's grandmother Sigambre by suicide, both on stage. There are many other examples. The prohibition of death, and particularly violent death, on the stage in the French classical theatre of the seventeenth 136

Pleasures century has given the reader of French tragedy a kind oi pudeur about it, so that its inclusion in humanist tragedy seems a little primitive or crude. Yet few would regard the last act of Othello or King Lear as crude, because we view these plays within the framework of a different set of conventions. In sixteenth-century stage conditions, the stage deaths are unlikely to have offered a very strong illusion of reality, but they could still be shocking and moving because of the quality of the act represented, however stylised or sketchy the representation. Another form of excitement is generated when suspense is created, and there are many cases of this. Two examples from the plays of Jean de La Taille will show two different relationships between expectation and surprise in the creation of stage suspense. In La Famine there is suspense in the scene where the surviving sons and grandsons of Saiil are found concealed in the tombs of their ancestors, including that of Saiil. The classical model for this scene would be well known to many sixteenth-century readers: it is the second episode of Seneca's Troades, where Andromache, warned by the dead Hector in a dream, hides Astyanax in Hector's tomb; the hiding-place is found by Ulysses with the help of a ruse. The parallel between Seneca's text and La Taille's is close, particularly at the climax of the scene, when in both plays the desperate mothers swear a misleading oath that the missing children are 'inter extinctos' (among the dead) or 'ja mis en sepulture / Avecques leurs ayeux', an assurance that is only momentarily accepted at face value by the searchers. But even though the parallel is so close that the outcome of La Taille's scene must be known to anyone who has read Seneca, the scene still generates excitement with its pitting of cool intelligence against desperate grief, and moreover La Taille has renewed the scene in ways that make it something more than a simple transposition of Seneca into the biblical mode. Not only are there seven children involved rather than one, and two mothers - Rezefe, the widow of Saiil, and Merobe his daughter, though Merobe withdraws before the climactic encounter with Joabe - but the reasons why the children must die are presented more fully. The Greeks wanted Astyanax dead because they were afraid he would grow up to be a second Hector and start a new Trojan war in which Greeks would die. In La Famine, David reluctantly accepts the Gabaonites' demand 137

French Renaissance tragedy that the children be killed because this seems to offer the only hope of rescuing his people from starvation, not a future danger but a present scourge. A spectator who recognised the source of La Taille's scene would know what the outcome was going to be, but would also find that the scene required a somewhat different division of sympathy from its model, a shift of focus which subtly renews the scene's power to create suspense. In Jean de La Taille's earlier play, Saill le furieux, there is suspense in Act IV as to whether Saul will die on stage. Here, familiarity with the source (the end of the first book of Samuel) helps to create suspense precisely because La Taille diverges from the Bible narrative. Here is the story as it appears in the King James Bible: And the battle went sore against Saul, and the archers hit him; and he was sore wounded of the archers. Then said Saul unto his armourbearer, Draw thy sword, and thrust me through therewith; lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me through, and abuse me. But his armourbearer would not; for he was sore afraid. Therefore Saul took a sword, and fell upon it. And when his armourbearer saw that Saul was dead, he fell likewise upon his sword, and died with him. (1 Samuel 31:3) The second book of Samuel opens with a different account of the death of Saul: a young Amalekite soldier comes to David and describes how he killed Saul, at Saul's own request, and 'because I was sure that he could not live after that he was fallen' (2 Samuel 1:10). David has the young man killed because he has, by his own admission, 'slain the Lord's anointed'. As the modern editors of La Taille remark, 'to assume that the Amalekite was a liar was the traditional way of reconciling' these two versions of Saul's death (La Taille, 1972,198), and La Taille accordingly makes the soldier change his story, though that does not save him. But the dramatist has also complicated matters slightly by reorganising the biblical material. In the Bible, we are first told of Saul's suicide, after his armourbearer's refusal to kill him, then we hear of the Amalekite's claim that he killed him. In La Taille, the Amalekite soldier brings Saul's crown to David in Act V, and when he finds that David instead of being grateful is horrified by his sacrilege, he quickly changes his story and says that Saul killed himself. However, in 138

Pleasures Act IV we had already witnessed the equivalent of the armourbearer being asked to kill Saul, when Saul asked his Premier Escuyer to kill him; La Taille then diverges from the biblical narrative, for when the Escuyer refuses the request, and offers edifying remarks about Fortune, fame, and courage, Saul's response is not to kill himself, but to re-enter the battle: Bien bien puis que si fort de m'occire tu feins, J'emploiray contre Achis et contre moy mes mains: Je vas rallier gens et leur donner courage, Je vas sur Tennemy faire encor quelque charge: Je ne veux abbaissant ma haute majeste, Eviter le trespas qui prefix m'a este: Je veux done vaillamment mourir pour la patrie, Je veux m'acquerir gloire en vendant cher ma vie, Car aiant furieux maint ennemy froisse, Ma main, et non mes pieds (si je reste force) Me fera son devoir. (IV, 1081)

Obviously, this hints at suicide ('J'emploiray ... contre moy mes mains'; 'Ma main ... Me fera son devoir'), but instead of an immediate suicide after the Escuyer's refusal to kill him, we have a heroic resolve by Saul, and the promise of a brave end, reinforced by the Second Escuyer's words a few lines later: O Roy tu monstres bien ton cueur estre heroique De prevenir ta mort pour la chose publique, Sans la vouloir fuir: 6 Prince vrayment fort, Qui vas en la battaille, ou tu sgais qu'est ta mort! Ceux qui vont en la guerre esperant la victoire Meritent moins que luy et d'honneur et de gloire, Lequel s^achant mourir contre le Palestin, Court neantmoins hardy au devant du Destin. (IV, 1099) The departure from a narrative familiar to most of La Taille's contemporaries (if not to all modern readers) creates surprise and tension, and then leaves us guessing; suspense is created which is not resolved until, after the Amalekite soldier's two contradictory narratives, the Second Escuyer returns from the battlefield to confirm that Saul killed himself, after fighting bravely and being severely wounded (V, 1378). As well as scenes which are compelling because of the enactment 139

French Renaissance tragedy or expectation of extraordinary events, there are scenes which display forceful or moving encounters. Sixteenth-century dramatists have been taxed with failing to provide such 'scenes a faire', and they do sometimes seem to miss opportunities which a later dramatist would seize; but there are passages where we see the clash of 'the fell incensed points of mighty opposites', like the scene of the quarrel between Nabuchodonosor and Sedecie {Les Juifves, IV, 1361-1504); other encounters are moving because of the emotional charge which they carry, like the scenes between Enee and Didon in Jodelle's Didon se sacrifiant. Enee's tragic role in this play has already been discussed (Chapter 6,113); Didon's part could easily be merely pathetic, but escapes this by her oscillation between grief and anger and also by her complete integration into the pattern of images (storm, voyage, flight) which runs through the play and links the worlds of metaphor and action. Another source of theatrical excitement comes from conflict or tension not between characters but between ideas, or planes of feeling. The practice of public disputation ensured for humanist dramatists a competent (if restricted) audience skilled in following lengthy spoken argument and debate, and modern readers may be less adept at this (and modern spectators would be even less so at least the printed word is retrievable and readers can choose their pace). Here the notion of theatrical excitement coincides with that of the dramatic, in that conflict between ideas, principles, or values may form the dramatic core of a play. In Saul lefuriewc, Saul's admirable, but inadequate, human values are in conflict with God's purpose. In theatrical terms, this conflict reaches its climax in the encounter between Saul and the spirit of Samuel, where rhetorical repetition emphasises the futility of Saul's quest: SAUL Les Prophetes et DIEU, le Ciel, la Terre, et l'Air, Conjurants contre moy, je t'ay fait appeller. SAMUEL Si DIEU, la Terre, et l'Air conjurent ton dommage, Pourquoy me cherches tu? (111,749)

The scene in which these lines are spoken is perhaps the most theatrical in the play, surpassing even the opening scene of Saul's madness; Saul, who has already aroused our interest and our pity, 140

Pleasures is here joined by two mysterious and alarming figures, the Phitonisse (as the witch of Endor becomes in La Taille's classicising mode) and the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel. But if the central theme of the play is here given its most theatrically exciting and spectacular expression, dramatically that theme is present throughout, and nowhere more powerfully than in a speech of Saul's, only nine lines long, in Act II: «O que sa Providence est cachee aux humains! Pour estre done humain j'esprouve sa cholere, Et pour estre cruel il m'est done debonnaire! He Sire, Sire, las! fault il done qu'un vainqueur Plustost que de pitie use fier de rigueur, Et que sans regarder qu'une telle fortune Est aussi bien a luy qu'a ses vaincus commune, Egorge tant de gents? vault il pas mieux avoir Esgard a quelque honneur, qu'a nostre grand pouvoir? (II, 312) This speech is very quiet compared to the exchange between Saul and Samuel in Act III, but it has dramatic force because of its presentation of conflict and paradox. The paradox is that Saul is being punished for behaving well; the conflict is between his noble values (which are those often urged in vain upon the kings and commanders of humanist tragedy - compassion for the defeated, recognition that your own good fortune may not last, acceptance of the constraints of honour) and the one virtue he has not practised obedience to God. There is a kind of dramatic irony in Saul's use of the ambiguous word 'humain'; he means 'humane', but we know that it is because he is 'human', that is to say sinful and disobedient, that he has incurred God's anger. The syntax in this speech is quite complex, and perhaps even a contemporary would have found it easier to absorb by eye than by ear; the conjunction que is used six times in the six lines beginning at 315 ('He Sire, Sire, las! ...'), and this tangle of subordination helps to convey Saul's struggling bewilderment, along with the use of rhetorical questions, and the contrast between 'fault il' and 'vault il pas mieux', between what God requires and what Saul regards as right. Highly theatrical scenes are usually also dramatic, but quieter, less showy scenes such as this one can embody equally successfully the dramatic issues being worked out in a play. 141

French Renaissance tragedy Frangoise Charpentier says: 'Un beau style a lui seul ne suffit pas a faire un bon theatre; et a la limite, qu'un mauvais style puisse faire du bon theatre n'est pas une proposition insoutenable' (Charpentier, 1981, 580), and one can think of illustrations of this latter proposition. Jacques de La Taille's Alexandre is not impressive in style; Jean de La Taille's Saul lefurieux is uneven the choric odes are rather flat and dull, the final lament by David does not do justice to its biblical model. Yet both these plays are interesting from other points of view, including that of theatricality. In Saul lefurieux, the scene where the witch of Endor calls up the spirit of Samuel is a particularly fine example of a passage where linguistic and visual elements work together to create excitement and awe. But even if Charpentier is right in her guarded assessment of the merits of 'beau style', it is surely nevertheless true that a great deal of the effect produced by a play must come from its language; and it is when 'beaux vers' are used in the service of theatrical effect, and not as an end in themselves, that they can work most powerfully upon our feelings and our imagination. Clearly, Renaissance audiences (like Renaissance congregations) were more practised than we are at listening to very long speeches. Even Shakespeare, writing for a more mixed audience than the French humanists, composed plays which modern directors regularly shorten, and individual speeches of considerable length and theoretical content (Ulysses' 'degree' speech in Troilus and Cressida is over sixty lines long). Probably few modern listeners would not grow restless during the longest speeches of the humanist tragedy, and most would feel that to open a play with a speech of 186 lines (La Taille's La Famine) or even 114 lines (Montreux's Sophonisbe) is to make great demands on the goodwill of the audience. On the other hand one feature of this use of very long speeches is that the moment of changing speakers becomes a potential point of strong interest. The character who delivers a long tirade has occupied the stage so commandingly that the change of speakers is like the change between movements in a sonata, or even like a change of decor. After the long speech by Scipion which opens Montreux's Sophonisbe, there is a sharp change, from a tone of solemn self-congratulation and glorification of Rome to the lament of defeated Siphax, and Siphax's first lines (which are 142

Pleasures 'entre guillemets' for the edification of the reader) are delicately plangent, creating complicated patterns round the sounds [e] [OR] [CKR] [CR] [yR] and [UR]: «O vain de la fortune et l'heur et le secours! «O vain de nos malheurs le perdurable cours! «O banie des estats la mortelle asseurance, «Et vraye du destin l'ordinaire inconstance.

(1,115)

This is not a striking entrance as discussed above (Nabuchodonosor, Hippolyte, the Assyrian queen), but an entry into speech (since presumably Siphax has listened to Scipion before breaking into his lament), with a similarly powerful contrast of diction and change of mood. Such swings of mood, conveyed through stylistic variety, give pleasure and interest. Another source of linguistic pleasure is patterning, demonstrated on a small scale in Siphax's speech quoted above, with its deployment of assonances, but developed by some writers on a much larger scale. Stichomythia is a form of patterning which is still used, though more sparingly, in seventeenth-century tragedy. Like any rhetorical technique, it can become stale and mechanical, but many humanist dramatists use it with skill, achieving effects of vigorous opposition or insoluble disagreement. Here is part of a long exchange between Priam and Hector from Montchrestien's Hector (Montchrestien, 1972): HECTOR

«L'heur n'abandonne guere un resolu courage. PRIAM

«Lors que plus il nous flatte il tourne le visage. HECTOR

«L'ordinaire des Dieux c'est d'aider aux meilleurs.

725

PRIAM

«A tous bons et mauvais ils versent des malheurs. HECTOR

Faisons ce qu'il faut faire et leur laissons le reste. PRIAM

Mais ne tentons aussi leur courroux manifeste. HECTOR

«Leur courroux n'est a craindre en faisant son devoir. 143

French Renaissance tragedy PRIAM

«I1 est a craindre aussi ne faisant leur vouloir.

730

HECTOR

«C'est d'eux que vient l'ardeur qui bout en nos gens-d'armes. PRIAM

«D'eux vient aussi la peur qui se mesle aux alarmes. HECTOR

«Ce n'est a nous mortels de sonder leur secret. PRIAM

Us le font trop cognoistre et c'est a mon regret. HECTOR

Rien ne nous prognostique une mes-avanture.

735

PRIAM

Mais tout si tu vois clair du malheur nous augure. HECTOR

«Deffendre sa patrie est un auspice heureux. PRIAM

«Et la perdre est un acte infame et douloureux. HECTOR

«Ne la sert-il pas bien qui pour elle s'expose? PRIAM

«Mais il la sert bien mal quand il peut plus grand'chose. 740 HECTOR

Et que peut d'avantage un homme de valeur? PRIAM

Vivre pour Tamour d'elle en un temps de malheur.

(11,723)

The regularity of this passage needs little comment, except to point out that it is Hector, the younger and more eager man, who initiates each couplet and each new subject; the older, wiser, but weaker Priam caps, corrects, and contradicts (even this basic pattern is slightly modified at line 729 when Hector picks up a word ('courroux') from Priam's preceding line). Less obvious than the regular patterning is the variety within that patterning. For example, there is a balance between lines which are sententious (and duly marked with guillemets) and those which are more directly linked with the specific dramatic situation. Also, while the basic pattern dictates that the first line makes a statement and the 144

Pleasures second contradicts or modifies it, this changes in each of the last two couplets of the extract quoted, where the initial statement is replaced by a question, to which the second line provides an unwelcome answer. Further scope for variation is to be found in the nature of the verbal or thematic link between the two lines of a couplet. Sometimes a conjunction or an adverb indicates the direction of the reply ('Mais' in lines 728, 736, 740; 'aussi' in lines 730, 732; 'Et' in line 738). Sometimes the second line echoes the first strongly while transforming its meaning, as happens in lines 729 and 730, where 'n'est a craindre' is echoed by 'est a craindre' and 'faisant son devoir' is balanced by 'ne faisant leur vouloir', the shift of 'ne' to the second hemistich emphasising that a positive and moral human action ('faisant son devoir') can be an offence to the capricious gods if it does not coincide with their will ('ne faisant leur vouloir'). Sometimes the link consists only of a word or phrase: 'd'eux que vient' (731), 'D'eux vient' (732), or of a pair of words contrasting in meaning: 'secret' (733), 'cognoistre' (734); 'Rien' (735), 'Mais tout' (736). Sometimes such verbal links are absent or tenuous: in the first three couplets quoted, the paired lines are linked only (apart from their rhymes) by pronouns ('L'heur' picked up by 'il'; 'Dieux' picked up by 'ils' and 'leur') and by the presence in lines 727 and 728 of imperative verbs in the first person plural. Such flexibility and variety within the patterning means that the stichomythia does not become tedious; at the same time the patterning is strong enough, and the tone sufficiently sententious, to set off by contrast Priam's unexpected half-line of sorrow and pain, 'et c'est a mon regret' (734), and give it great affective force. There are other ways of varying the patterns of single-line dialogue, for example it can have three speakers instead of two. In the second scene of Jodelle's Cleopatre captive there is a passage of stichomythia in which Cleopatre's lines are answered alternately by Eras and Charmium. This pattern is sustained for eighteen lines, with the lines spoken by Eras and Charmium always beginning with the same word or words as the preceding line from Cleopatre (the rhetorical figure of anaphora). Thus the extreme stylisation of anaphora plays against the unexpected presence of three voices in the stichomythia; the effect would be particularly pleasing in the theatre if the three voices differed noticeably from each other in 145

French Renaissance tragedy pitch or timbre. Montreux, in Act II of Sophonisbe, uses a similar pattern of the principal being answered alternately by two attendants, when Sophonisbe's Nourrice and Dacee, her Dame d'honneur, try to lighten Sophonisbe's gloomy view of her situation. In this passage there are occasional couplets where anaphora or other forms of repetition (including anadiplosis, in which the beginning of a line repeats the sound at the end of the preceding line) create echo effects between the lines, as here, where the device serves to link into one unit three lines from three different speakers: NOURRICE

Quand ce bien n'adviendra, vous serez tousjours roine. SOPHONISBE

Celuy ne regne pas qui est serf de la peine. DACEE

Quelle peine vous tient captive entre ses mains?

(II, 1007)

There are also some sententious lines (not marked with guillemets, even though these are used elsewhere in the text). Such relatively sparing use of conspicuous rhetorical figures gives this passage of stichomythia a less formal air than usual, and this impression is reinforced by the fact that there are four moments, in the course of the fifty-five lines concerned, when the stichomythic pattern is disrupted to allow Sophonisbe or the Nourrice to make a longer reply, up to three lines long. Similar flexibility is found in a scene in Act III between Massinisse, Gelosses (friend and subject of Massinisse), and Misipsa (Gelosses' son). Here there is slightly more use of anaphora, a similar sprinkling of sententious lines (unmarked), and again a frequent relaxation of the stichomythic pattern into longer exchanges. Sometimes these longer utterances are themselves given strong symmetry, as in this exchange of twoline speeches between Misipsa and Gelosses: MISIPSA

Non, non, ne croyons pas Rome si miserable Que ne pouvoir sans nous se rendre redoutable. GELOSSES

Non, non, ne pensons pas si foible nostre main Que ne pouvoir regner sans le peuple Romain. 146

(Ill, 1637)

Pleasures There is a pleasing tension here between similarity and difference. The opening syllables of both lines of Misipsa's couplet are echoed in Gelosses' reply, but difference is introduced by the substitution of 'pensons' for 'croyons' and by the transposing of the references to 'nous' and to 'Rome' (the first couplet has 'Rome' in the first line and 'nous' in the second, while Gelosses' reply has 'nostre main' in the first line and 'le peuple Romain' in the second, there being a shift in both cases from noun or pronoun to adjective). In those parts of the scene where the single-line stichomythic model is adhered to, the rhetorical effects are less conspicuous. Above all, what keeps this scene free of the more mechanical effects of stichomythia is that there is no pattern in the sequence of the three speakers. Since Massinisse is a more important figure in the economy of the play than either of the others (who appear only in this scene) we might expect him to be given the sort of prominence given to Cleopatre and Sophonisbe in the scenes mentioned above. Instead, in 70 lines of mainly stichomythic dialogue, Massinisse, with 21 lines in fifteen speeches, has a slightly more substantial role in this part of the scene than Gelosses (15 lines in thirteen speeches), but is heard considerably less than Misipsa (34 lines in twenty-four speeches). There are various possible explanations of this, including the fact that Massinisse opens this scene with a speech of 130 lines. It should be added that a certain degree of symmetry reappears when we notice that Gelosses argues on the same side as Massinisse, against Misipsa; but the effect created by the flexible structure of the scene is that of a debate among equals, where the outcome is uncertain and the participants are open to each other's arguments. Blocks of stichomythia can also form part of larger patterns, as in Act II of Garnier's Porcie where, in a scene between Porcie and her Nourrice, five passages of slightly irregular stichomythia are interspersed between groups of longer speeches, giving the whole scene a varied and unpredictable rhythm. Longer speeches themselves display patterning. Here is a 30-line speech from Act II of Charles Toutain's Agamemnon, in which Clytemnestre's Nourrice warns her mistress of the wickedness and danger of her plot to murder Agamemnon:

147

French Renaissance tragedy Modere cet ardeur, et toimeme t'arrete: Voi que grand est le cas que ton audace aprete: De la cruelle Asie il arrive vainqueur, Et tire quand et soi, de l'Europe vengeur, Les Pergames captifs, et la bande serville, Qui le suit ja Ion tans des la Troienne ville. Tu veus cil traitrement, 6 folle, r'acuillir Qu'oncq' Achille ne peut par armes assaillir, Combien que refrogne sa main il eut armee: Non le meilleur Ajax, dont Tame suprimee De rage et de fureur sa mort precipitoit: Non Hector, seul qui Grecs, et guerres arretoit: Non 1'archer seur Paris, et Memnon PAetiope: Non Zanthe deborde par la pert-ame trope: Non Simois roulant son eau rouge de sang: Non Cigne le negeal a Neptun' le fils blanc: Non Tenfance de Thrace a Rhese obeissante, Ni de fleches et d'arc l'Amazone effroiante. Done la mort a cetui tu veus apareiller? Et d'un meurtre mechant les autels maculer? D'un si horrible fait la Grece vengeresse Paisible se taira? propose toi, maitresse, Les armes et chevaus, et Peffroiable mer Qui veit de tant de naus ses vagues opprimer. Mets toi devant les ieus la campaigne abreuvee De gros ruisseaus de sang, et la Grece arrivee Sus la tour Dardanie, et les destins caches, Mortellement sus Troie et Priam trebuches. Retien done le courrous de ton ire intensee, Et r'apaise le feu de ta trouble pensee.1

295

300

305

310

315

320

Two ways of analysing this speech come readily to mind. First, it is a piece of deliberative rhetoric, intended to dissuade its stage-audience (Clytemnestre) from a certain course of action. Accordingly it can be divided into exordium (opening, 291-2), narratio (the exposition of pertinent events, 293-6), confirmatio (the arguments to support the speaker's point of view, 297-308), confutatio or refutatio (the dismissal of the opposing point of view, 309-12), demonstrate (a description that seems to place its object before the hearers' eyes, 312-18), which augments the

confirmatio, and conclusio or peroratio (the artistic finish to a speech, 319-20). Alternatively, since Toutain's play is a translation 148

Pleasures of Seneca's Agamemnon, we could examine it alongside the Senecan text. Either of these forms of analysis could have occurred to an educated Frenchman at the time of the play's appearance (1557), since the acquisition of the knowledge required (of rhetoric, and of Latin) formed the staple educational diet for boys. When we come to look at the patterning of the speech, we are indirectly using both Seneca (since the text is a translation) and rhetoric (since Seneca's speech, at lines 219-29 of the Agamemnon, is rhetorically structured). As readers and imaginary listeners, however, we need not be conscious of these influences in order to notice and enjoy elements of design in the speech such as the cluster of imperatives at beginning and end ('Modere', 't'arrete' and 'Voi' at the beginning, 'propose toi\ 'Mets toi', 'Retien' and 'r'apaise' at the end); the mention of the city of Troy at beginning and end (lines 296 and 318); the emphatic use of anaphora in the central section (lines 300 and 302-7), building up an impressive list of great heroes who, though great, could not defeat Agamemnon; the use of figures such as alliteration (in lines 291,310; combined with zeugma in line 302; combined with assonance in line 305). Choric passages, of course, have the further patterning of lyric metres to provide yet more variety and pleasure for the reader's ear. Most readers of humanist tragedy would pick out for special praise, in this category, the choric odes in Garnier's Les Juifves, arid I would add that the lament at the end of Porcie also makes very fine use of its gently rocking metre (quatrains in which 5-syllable and 6-syllable lines alternate, with rimes croisees, all masculine). Perhaps no-one outdoes Garnier in delicately elegiac writing for the Chorus (although Montchrestien surely rivals him), but others certainly exploit patterning for different effects; thus Jodelle uses assonance, repetition, and paronomasia (word-play) in the choric ode which closes Act I of Cleopatre captive, and this strong patterning seems entirely appropriate to the theme of constant inconstancy: Tant n'estoit variable Un Prothee en son temps, Et tant n'est point muable La course de nos vents: Tant de fois ne se change Thetis, et tant de fois 149

French Renaissance tragedy L'inconstant ne se range Sous ses diverses loix, Que nostre heur, en peu d'heure En malheur retourne, Sans que rien nous demeure, Proye au vent est donne.

(1,317)

But if the humanist dramatists understood the value of patterning some of them also knew how to make use of simplicity. Jodelle's Enee makes two long speeches in Act II of Didon sesacrifiant, of ninety-six and eighty-two lines.2 In both these speeches, he reaches some high points of solemnity, expressed in lofty and elaborate language; but in both speeches, also, there are moments when in bleakly simple terms he states his case to Didon. In the middle of the first speech, he defends himself: Mais quant a ce depart dont je suis accuse, Je te respons en bref: Je n'ay jamais use De feintise, ou de ruse en rien dissimulee, A fin que l'entreprise a tes yeux fust celee.

(11,701)

In the second speech, two lines marked by sententiousness and paronomasia ('fait'/'feu') are followed by two lines where although there is repetition ('sens') the effect is of almost colloquial simplicity and extreme directness: Amour, non a son fait, mais a son feu regarde, Et le danger le prend quand moins il y prend garde. Si tel amour tu sens, je le sens tel aussi, Qu'encores volontiers je m'oublirois ici. (11,821) Although simple, these last two lines are full of implications about reciprocity in love, and about love as forgetfulness of self and as shaper of the will. The symmetry of line 823 is expressive, as is the heavier, slower pace imposed by the longer words of 824. Lastly, it is plain that the humanist dramatists appreciated the value of concrete language. Sometimes they used it for horror, in representing scenes of war or torture; often for pathos; sometimes to express desire. Well-known examples of all these uses of the concrete could be cited from Garnier, but here, instead, is another extract from Jodelle's Didon sesacrifiant. The first of Enee's two long speeches in Act II contains a passage where Enee expresses his longing for Troy: 150

Pleasures Si les arrests du Ciel vouloient qu'a mon plaisir Je filasse ma vie, et me laissoient choisir Telle qu'il me plairoit, au moins une demeure Qui gardast que du tout le nom Troyen ne meure; Si je tenois moymesme a mon souci le frain, 725 Je ne choisirois pas ce rivage lointain; Je bastirois encor sur les restes de Troye, Je bastirois encor ce que les Dieux en proye Donnerent a Vulcan, et de nom et de biens Je tascherois vanger les mines des miens. 730 Les temples, les maisons, et les palais superbes De Priam et des siens, se vangeroyent des herbes Qui les couvrent desja; nos fleuves, qui tant d'os Heurtent dedans leurs fons, s'enfleroient de mon los; Moymesme, d'un tel art que Phebus et Neptune, 735 De Pergames nouveaux j 'enclorrois ma fortune. This is not a passage where concrete language is used densely, as in Garnier's battlefield scenes, with their enumeration of terrifying and disgusting sights, sounds, and smells, to shock and disturb. Jodelle achieves his effect here by suggestive combinations of concrete, abstract, and metaphorical. Two undeveloped metaphors (filer sa vie and tenir lefrairi) lead into the delicate play of suggestion, the second of these metaphors having greater visual power than the first, since the image of Enee restraining a horse is more appropriate to his sex, rank, and occupation than the more domestic image implied by filer. Line 727 (' Je bastirois encor sur les restes de Troye') is on one reading entirely concrete and literal Enee is talking about rebuilding the sacked city; yet bastir can have meanings beyond the literal. Fortunes and reputations can be built, as well as palaces, temples, and city-walls. Enee has already spoken of one abstraction he wishes to restore, giving it force with another brief metaphor, in speaking of his desire to ensure 'que du tout le nom Troyen ne meure'. Rebuilding Troy would put it back on the map; rebuilding its fortune and its reputation would give it a place once more in the annals of history. The linking of concrete and non-concrete continues with the reference to the burning of Troy, 'ce que les Dieux en proye / Donnerent a Vulcan'. What is burned can be said to have been offered to Vulcan, the god of fire, but the conventional expression is also a reminder of the active participation and intervention of gods in the Trojan war. Vulcan 151

French Renaissance tragedy made the armour which led, indirectly, to the death of Hector (Patroclus went out to fight wearing it, when Achilles would not leave his tent, and was killed by Hector; Achilles avenged Patroclus' death by killing Hector and dragging his body round the walls of the city behind a chariot). The phrase 'les mines des miens' (730) is again both concrete and abstract, suggesting the ruins of the city but also the losses and bereavements suffered by Trojan families. The ruins of the city are then evoked with the addition of a precise detail, the grass that has now grown over them. This carries conviction, and yet for Enee it is an imaginative vision, not a literal memory, since he escaped from Troy during the sacking of the city and has not seen it since. The grass is an enemy: if the buildings rose again they would be revenging themselves upon it ('se vangeroyent des herbes', 732), and this rather contrived idea gains force from recollections of the importance of revenge as a motive both in the cause and in the conduct of the Trojan war. Two more examples occur of this equilibrium between concrete and figurative language. The first refers to the rivers of Troy, Simois and Scamander, which meet in the Trojan plain: 'nos fleuves, qui tant d'os / Heurtent dedans leurs fons, s'enfleroient de mon los'. The tangible quality of the first part of the phrase is increased by the strongly physical verb 'Heurtent', prominently placed after its object and at the beginning of a line; the contrast between that and the figurative second half is pointed by the placing of 'os' and 'los' at the rhyming position. At the same time, the first phrase leads us to expect that 's'enfleroient' will also be literal, and have a concrete complement, so that the image of a swollen river is irresistibly suggested before we discover the abstraction, 'mon los', which follows it. A similar shift occurs in the last two lines quoted. 'Pergames' (from Pergama, plural of Pergamum, the name of the Trojan citadel) is a poetic name for the city of Troy itself, and 'd'un tel art que Phebus et Neptune' is a reference to the mythical building of Troy by Apollo and Poseidon. Enee's words therefore conjure up once again the image of the literal rebuilding of a city; but as with 's'enfleroient', the apparently concrete verb 'j'enclorrois' leads to an abstract object, 'ma fortune'. Other techniques in this passage also contribute to its effect of yearning and nostalgia, notably the number of verbs in the 152

Pleasures subjunctive and conditional moods (particularly the three conditionals in lines 726-8), but it is the subtle use of concrete vocabulary here, constantly dissolving into the abstract and the figurative, that lends to the image of the ruined city a blurred and fragile quality which is delicately haunting. I do not believe that language was an end in itself for the humanist playwrights; but it is central to the transmission of those idees maitresses which, in my opinion, give humanist tragedies their intellectual and moral coherence, it is a powerful auxiliary to the creation of theatrical effects, and it is a prime source of pleasure for the reader.

153

APPENDIX: THE TRAGEDIANS

This appendix gives an idea of the place of tragedy in the life and output of the writers of sixteenth-century tragedies mentioned in this book by indicating the other works known to have been written by them and, where this is known or applicable, mentioning their profession. The writers are listed alphabetically, and their dates of birth and death are given where these are known. Dates of publication of the plays are given in the first section of the bibliography. Beze, Theodore de (1519-1605) Studied law and was also a distinguished classicist. Converted to Protestantism, he left France for Switzerland in 1548, and became Professor of Greek at Lausanne the following year. Was Calvin's representative in France, and later succeeded him as head of the Church in Geneva. Before Abraham sacrifiant Beze had published a volume of Latin verse (Poemata, 1548) for whose licentious character he was later criticised. His voluminous later output was mostly on religious and legal subjects, for example Latin verse paraphrases of the Psalms (1566,1579), the Histoire ecclesiastique des eglises reformees au royaume de France (1580), and Du Droit des magistrats sur leurs suiets (1574). He also wrote a satire, Epistola magistri Benedicti Passavantii (1553), directed at Pierre Lizet, who had written against the reformed religion. Bounin, Gabriel (1535? - ?)

Studied and practised law, served as a deputy at the Estates-General of Blois in 1576, and then joined the household of Francois due d'Alen^on, later due d'Anjou, the youngest son of Henri II. His first publication was a translation of Aristotle's Oeconomica (1544) 155

Appendix which was for many years attributed to Estienne de la Boetie. He wrote liminary pieces (in French and Latin) for Scevole de SainteMarthe's edition of Jean de La Peruse's works (1556), and his own tragedy La Soltane was accompanied by a pastoral poem addressed to Madame de Chateauroux (1561). Most of his other works are political in scope. They include prose pamphlets such as a loyal Harangue au roy, a la wine, et aux hommes frangois sur Ventretenement et reconciliation de la Paix... (1565), poesies de circonstance such as Les Joies et allegresses... which celebrates the Paix de Monsieur, marking the end of the fifth Civil War in 1576, and a morality-like short verse play, Tragediesur la defaite, et occision de la Piaffe et de la Picquoree (1579) in which the Trois Estats help the King to banish Mars and restore Paix and Justice. He also published collections of verse in French and Latin, and a legal treatise, his latest known publication, Traite sur les cessions et banquerouttes (1586). Buchanan, George (1506-82) This Scottish humanist taught Montaigne at the College de Guyenne in Bordeaux, and later taught at the College de Boncourt in Paris. He made Latin translations of the Medea and A Icestis of Euripides (c. 1539), as well as writing his own two Latin tragedies Baptistes sive calumnia and Jephthes sive votum. He was also a notable writer of Latin verse. Having returned to Scotland in 1560, from 1570 to 1578 he was tutor to the future James VI and I. His numerous pedagogical and historical works include a history of Scotland, Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582). Filleul, Nicolas (1537?-after 1589?)

Probably a priest, as he is listed among 'aumoniers servants' of the royal household in 1584. As well as the tragedy Lucrece and the pastoral Les Ombres, both performed at the Chateau de Gaillon before the Court in 1566, Filleul wrote another tragedy, Achille, which was performed at the College d'Harcourt in Paris in 1563. He may have written other plays (La Croix du Maine mentions 'plusieurs autres tragedies et comedies latines et fran^oises') but if so, these are lost, and the only other works surviving are pieces 156

The tragedians de circonstance written for the Queen (1568), and for Henri de Valois (the future Henri III) when he was elected to the Polish throne (1573). Gamier, Robert (1544?-90)

Studied and practised law. His theatre (seven tragedies and a tragicomedy) constitutes the largest part of his literary output, but he also wrote some lyric poetry (e.g. a poem on the death of Ronsard) and a hymn, Hymne de la monarchies as well as the poems with which, as a student, he won prizes at the Jeuxfloraux of Toulouse. He may also have written a book of love poetry (Plaintes amoureuses); if so, it is lost. Grevin, Jacques (15387-70?) Studied at College de Boncourt in Paris under George Buchanan and Marc-Antoine Muret, and was probably present at the production there of Jodelle's Cleopatre captive in 1553. Then studied and practised medicine. Grevin's first publications were pieces de circonstance (1558) marking various public events, and these were followed by a book of poetry, Olimpe (1560), containing odes, pastoral, and sonnets (satirical as well as amorous). As well as his tragedy Cesar, Grevin wrote two comedies, Les Ebahis and La Tresoriere, and a piece called Les Veaux which he refers to as 'jeux satyriques'. His other works include some polemical pamphlets directed at Ronsard, a volume on anatomy based on Vesalius (1564), an adaptation of the Dutch scholar Jean Wier's work on witchcraft (1567), and, in the same year, another volume of verse. Jodelle, Etienne (1532-73) Brilliant student at the College de Boncourt, and unsuccessful courtier. His tragedy Cleopatre captive and comedy Eugene were both performed before the King during the winter of 1552-3, while he was still a student. His other tragedy, Didon se sacrifiant, was probably written later. Many of his writings were lost, according to his sixteenth-century editor Charles de La Mothe, but a considerable volume of non-dramatic poetry survives, particularly love poetry and contr'amour poems, displaying great technical variety. 157

Appendix La Peruse, Jean Bastier de (1529-54) Studied at the College de Boncourt; friendly with Ronsard and named as a member of the first Pleiade. Both the tragedy La Medee and La Peruse's other poetic works were published posthumously, the first edition being prepared by Scevole de Sainte-Marthe. La Taille, Jacques de (1542-62) More than ten years after Jacques de La Taille's premature death (from plague) while a student in Paris, a selection of his works was published by his older brother Jean, along with the older man's own work. As well as the two tragedies chosen for publication (Daire and Alexandre), Jacques is said to have written four other tragedies and one or two comedies. The posthumously published selections also include some non-dramatic verse, and an essay recommending the reform of French prosody by the development of quantitative verse in French on the Greek and Latin model (La Maniere defaire des vers enfrangois, comme en grec et en latin). La Taille, Jean de (1533? -1608?) Studied law in Paris and Orleans. Fought for eight years in the Wars of Religion, at first in the royal army, later on the Protestant side (he was of Protestant family). As well as his two tragedies (Saill lefurieux and La Famine, ou les Gabeonites), he wrote two prose comedies: Le Negromant, which is translated from Ariosto, and Les Corrivaux, which is original. As a preface to Saul lefurieux he published an essay De I'Art de la tragedie which gives a useful statement of humanist dramatic theory. He also wrote nondramatic verse, notably two long poems, Le Courtisan retire (on the evils of court life) and Le Prince necessaire, an adaptation of Machiavelli, textually very close but intellectually radically changed (this was not published in La Taille's lifetime).

158

The tragedians Montchrestien, Antoine de (1575? -1621)

Orphaned young, he had an adventurous life, and a violent death in the Huguenot rebellion of 1621. He was born in Normandy and studied at Caen, where his first play (Sophonisbe) was published; later volumes were produced in Rouen. As well as his six tragedies, Montchrestien wrote a pastoral play (Bergerie, 1601) in prose and verse, a long poem Susane ou la chastete(1601) about Susanna and the elders, and a Traicte de I'economie politique (1615) which discusses economic policy, protectionism, and free trade. Montreux, Nicolas de (1561? -1608)

Little is known about his life except from his own writings (he published under a pseudonym, Ollenix de Montsacre, which forms an approximate anagram of his own name). He was a priest, and supported the Ligue. His literary output was large and varied and included tragedies adapted from Roman history (Sophonisbe), Greek history {Tragediedujeune Cyrus, from Xenophon, 1581), and Ariosto; a prose adaptation from Amadis de Gaule; comedies; a pastoral play imitated from Spanish (Les Bergeries de Juliette, 1585); long encomiastic poems to the due de Guise, the due de Mercoeur, and (after Mercoeur at last acknowledged Henri IV in 1598) the King; a volume of autobiographical sonnets, Les Regrets (1591); and the first novel in French imitated from Heliodorus (L'QEuvre de la Chastete, 1595-9). Saint-Gelais, Mellin de (1487-1558) Nephew (or possibly son) of the rhetoriqueur poet, priest, and courtier Octavien de Saint-Gelais. Humanist, musician, royal chaplain, and keeper of the royal library at Fontainebleau. He wrote a good deal of light verse for court consumption, and was one of the first to use the sonnet form in French. He was responsive to Italian influence, having spent some time in Italy, and his tragedy Sophonisbe is adapted from the Italian of Trissino.

159

Appendix Toutain, Charles (15367-90?) Seems to have studied law in Paris and then in Poitiers, and later to have become a magistrate (lieutenant-general de la vicomtede Falaise). When he published his tragedy of Agamemnon in 1557 it was accompanied by deux livres de chants de philosophie et d'amour; there are five philosophical poems and fourteen amorous ones (one of the chants de philosophie is printed as an appendix to Trevor Peach's edition of the Agamemnon; there is as yet no modern edition of the rest of Toutain's poetry). His other publications include a legal work, on Norman property law, half in French and half in Latin (1577) and a curious book LesMartiales du Roy au chasteau d'Alaix... Vers de toutes les harmonies des langues grammatiques et vulgaires (1581) which consists of two long poems in quantitative alexandrines, dedicated to Henri III. His last known work, Lunae luces et labores (1584), like some of his earlier poetry, reflects the influence of the tolerant internationalism of the orientalist and occultist Guillaume Postel, with whom Toutain was probably friendly.

160

NOTES

Introduction

1 Brief information about the authors of French Renaissance tragedy, and their other works, will be found in the Appendix The tragedians' (155-60). 1 Allusiveness 1 The poem is usually attributed to John Lyly (15547-1606), but appeared first in the posthumous 1632 edition of Lyly's Campaspe not in the first edition of 1584 (called Alexander, Campaspe and Diogenes),

so may be by another hand. 2 For quotations from Racine, the edition cited is that of the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1950, ed. Raymond Picard, Paris. However, as this has no line-numbers, these have been added from the Integrate edition, 1962, pref. Pierre Clarac. 3 I follow Conington in taking the tears to be 'the tears of Dido, as represented by Anna' (Virgil, 1863, Vol.11, 299). 2 Exposition 1 Gamier's Antigone was performed in Paris in 1944 and 1945, his Hippolyte in 1983, but I know of no modern production of La Troade. 2 Of the modern editions of this play, that prepared by Enea Balmas (1968), as part of his complete edition of Jodelle's works, is not faithful to the punctuation of the original and has no line-numbers. I therefore quote from the edition by Kathleen M. Hall (1979). 4

The Chorus

1 This seems to have been the name given to the play in La Peruse's manuscript: see James A. Coleman's edition (La Peruse, 1985, 95, n.46). In the early editions, the play is called La Medee.

161

Notes to pages 113-50 6

Shape

I have given a fuller discussion of the use of imagery in this play elsewhere: see Jondorf, 1978. For fuller discussion see Jondorf, 1982 (La Reine d'Escosse) and Jondorf, 1987 (Alexandre). Richard Griffiths mentions 'brutalisation of the tyrant' by means of this sort of image in Les Juifves (Griffiths, 1986, 75, 81). 7

Pleasures

The passage is quoted from the edition by Trevor Peach (Toutain, 1988), but line 306 is hypermetric in this edition, although not included among the 'vers faux' listed by the editor; to correct the hypermetry I have followed, for line 306, the text of Michel Dassonville (Toutain, 1986), where the 'e' of 'Neptune' is suppressed. Dassonville's text, on the other hand, has a hypometric line 297 because in tidying up the erratic spelling of the 1557 edition, the editor has replaced 'r'acuillir' by 'accueillir', thus causing 'folle' to elide and losing a syllable. The edition of Didon se sacrifiant given by Donald Stone Jr in Four Renaissance Tragedies (1966) is photographically reproduced from the 1583 edition of Jodelle's works (with line-numbers added). The only other modern edition is that by Enea Balmas (Jodelle, 1968) and I have quoted from this text. Unfortunately, it has no line-numbers, but I have given line-numbers, rather than page-references to Balmas's edition, since I assume that a line-numbered edition will soon be available in the collection now being published under the direction of Enea Balmas and Michel Dassonville (Theatre francais de la Renaissance, see note at the beginning of my bibliography), and many libraries have Donald Stone's Four Renaissance Tragedies.

162

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED

I

Sixteenth-century plays

Modern editions are listed, but date of first publication is given in square brackets at the end of each listing. Where more than one edition is listed, an asterisk indicates the one from which quotations have been taken. A serial publication under the general editorship of Enea Balmas and Michel Dassonville has begun to provide critical editions of all French Renaissance tragedies and comedies. The publication is under the joint imprint of Leo S. Olschki (Florence) and the Presses Universitaires de France (Paris). The overall title is Theatrefrancais de la Renaissance and the first series, to contain 5 volumes, is La Tragedie a Vepoque d'Henrill et de Charles IX. In the list below, the letters 'TFR' followed by series and volume number, appearing after the name of the editor and before place of publication, indicate an edition forming part of this new collection. Beze, Theodore de. 1986. Abraham sacrifiant. Ed. Patrizia de Capitani. TFR 1:1. Florence. [1550] Bounin, Gabriel. 1977. *LaSoltane. Ed. Michael Heath. Textes litteraires 27. Exeter. [1561] 1986. La Sultane. Ed. Michel Dassonville. TFR 1:1. Florence. Buchanan, George. 1966. Jephthes sive votum, translated by Florent Chrestien as Jephte ou le Voeu, reprinted in Four Renaissance Tragedies, see under that title below. [Jephthes sive votum: c. 1540; Jephte ou le Voeu: 1567] Filleul, Nicolas. 1971. Les Theatres de Gaillon. Ed. Francoise Joukovsky. Geneva. [1566] Achille. Ed. J.O. Moses. TFR 1:2. Florence. Four Renaissance Tragedies. 1966. (Contains texts of: George Buchanan, Jephthes sive votum, in Chrestien's French version; Theodore de Beze, Abraham sacrifiant; Etienne Jodelle, Didon sesacrifiant; Jean de La Taille, Saul le furieux.) Introduction and glossary, Donald Stone, Jr. Harvard. Gamier, Robert. 1923. Porcie, Cornelie, Marc-Antoine, Hippolyte. Ed. Lucien Pinvert. Paris. 163

List of works cited and consulted 1952. La Troade, Antigone. Ed. Raymond Lebegue. Paris. 1972. Les Juifves, tragedie de Robert Gamier. (A Scolar facsimile of the Paris edition of 1583.) Introduction by Alison Saunders. Menston, West Yorks. 1973. *Porcie, Cornelie. Ed. Raymond Lebegue. Paris. 1974. *Marc Antoine, Hippolyte. Ed. Raymond Lebegue. Paris. 1975a. *Les Juifves, Bradamante, poesies diverses. Ed. Raymond Lebegue. Paris. 1975b. Two tragedies: 'Hippolyte'and 'Marc Antoine'. Ed. Christine M. Hill and Mary G. Morrison. London. 1977. Les Juifves. Ed. Keith Cameron. Exeter. [Porcie: 1568; Hippolyte: 1573; Cornelie: 1574; Marc Antoine: 1578; La Troade: 1579; Antigone: 1580; Bradamante: 1582; Les Juifves: 1583]

Grevin, Jacques. 1922. ^Theatre complet etpoesies choisies. Ed. Lucien Pinvert. Paris. 1971. Cesar. Ed. Ellen S. Ginsberg. Geneva. 1974. Cesar de Jacques Grevin. Ed. Jeffrey Foster. Paris. 1989. Cesar. Ed. Mariangela Mazzocchi Doglio. TFR 1:2. Florence. [Cesar and Grevin's two comedies first published 1561] Jodelle, Etienne. 1965-8. *CEuvres completes. Ed. EneaBalmas. 2 vols. Paris. 1979. *Cleopatre captive. Ed. Kathleen M. Hall. Textes litteraires 35. Exeter. 1986. Cleopatre captive. Ed. Enea Balmas. TFR 1:1. Florence. [Cleopatre captive performed 1552 or 1553; this play and Didon se sacrifiant (date unknown but probably later than Cleopatre captive) published posthumously in 1574] La Peruse, Jean de. 1985. *La Medee. Ed. James A. Coleman. Textes litteraires 56. Exeter. [1556 (posthumous publication)] 1986. Medee. Ed. Michel Dassonville. TFR 1:1. Florence. La Taille, Jacques de. 1975. Alexandre. Ed. Christopher N. Smith. Textes litteraires 18. Exeter. [1573 (posthumous publication)] La Taille, Jean de. 1968. Saul lefurieux; La Famine, ou les Gabeonites. Ed. Elliott Forsyth. Paris. 1972. ^Dramatic Works. Ed. Kathleen M. Hall and C.N. Smith. London. [Saiil lefurieux: 1572; La Famine, ou les Gabeonites: 1573] Montchrestien, Antoine de. 1939. Aman. Ed. G. O. Seiver. Philadelphia. 1943. LesLacenes. Ed. G.E. Calkins. Philadelphia. 1963. David. Ed. Lancaster E. Dabney. Austin, Texas. 1972. *Two Tragedies: 'Hector'and 'LaReined'Escosse*. Ed. C.N. Smith. London. 164

List of works cited and consulted 1975a. La Reine d'Escosse. Ed. A. Maynor Hardee. Milan. 1975b. La Reine d'Escosse. Ed. J.D. Crivelli. Paris. [Sophonisbe: 1596; L'Escossoise, Les Lacenes, David, Aman, and revised version of Sophonisbe: 1601; Hector and revised versions of all earlier plays, with change of name from L'Escossoise to La Reine d'Escosse: 1604] Montreux, Nicolas de. 1976. La Sophonisbe. Ed. Donald Stone, Jr. Geneva. [1601] Saint-Gelais, Mellin de. 1986. Sophonisba. Ed. Luigia Zilli. TFR 1:1. Florence. [1560] Theatre etpropagande aux debuts de la Reforme: six pieces polemiques du RecueilLa Valliere. 1986. Ed. Jonathan Beck. Geneva. Toutain, Charles. 1986. Agamemnon. Ed. Michel Dassonville. TFR 1:1. Florence. [1557] 1988. *La Tragedied'Agamemnon. Ed. Trevor Peach. Textes litteraires 66. Exeter. II

Other literary works

Baif, Jan Antoine de. 1965. Euuresen rime. Ed. Charles Marty-Laveaux. 5 vols. Geneva. (Slatkine photographic reprint of the edition of Paris, 1881-90.) Baudelaire, Charles. 1961. GEuvrescompletes. Ed. Y.-G. LeDantecand Claude Pichois. (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.) Paris. Catullus, [s.d.] Carmina. Ed. Robertson Collis. Oxford. Corneille, Pierre. 1963. CEuvres completes. Ed. Andre Stegmann. (Collection L'Integrale.) Paris. Horace. 1986. Q. Horati Flacci Opera. Ed. E.C. Wickham and H. W. Garrod. First publ. 1901. Oxford. Housman, A.E. 1988. Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Harmondsworth. Lamartine, Alphonsede. 1963. CEuvres poetiques completes. Ed. M.-F. Guyard. (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.) Paris. Ovid. 1982. P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoseon Libri XV. Ed. D.E. Bosselaar, revised B. A. van Proosdij. Leiden. Petrarca, Francesca. 1954. // Canzoniere. Ed. Dino Provenzal. Milan. Racine, Jean. 1950. CEuvres completes. Ed. Raymond Picard. 2 vols. (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.) Paris. 1962. CEuvres completes. Pref. Pierre Clarac. (Collection L'Integrale.) Paris. 1977. Andromaque. Ed. R.C. Knight and H.T. Barnwell. Geneva. 165

List of works cited and consulted Sappho. 1963. Poems and fragments in Lyra graeca, Vol.1. Ed. J.M. Edmonds. (Loeb Classical Library.) London. Seneca. 1961. Tragedies. Ed. Leon Herrmann. 2 vols. 2nd edn. Paris. Theatredu XVIIe siecle. Vol. 1,1975. Vol. II, 1986. Ed. Jacques Scherer. (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.) Paris. Virgil. 1863-71. Opera. Ed. John Conington. 3 vols. London.

Ill

Critical works

Axelrad, A. Jose. 1956. Le Theme de Sophonisbe dans les principales tragedies de la litterature occidental (France, Angleterre, Allemagne). Lille. Bohm, K. 1902. Beitrdge zurKenntnis desEinflusses Seneca's auf die in der Zeit von 1552 bis 1562 erschienenen franzosischen Tragodien. Munich. Charpentier, Francoise. 1979. Pour une lecture de la tragedie humaniste: Jodelle, Gamier, Montchrestien. Saint-Etienne. 1981. Les Debuts de la tragedie hero'ique: Antoine de Montchrestien (1575-1621). Forsyth, Elliott. 1962. La Tragedie frangaise de Jodelle a Corneille (1553-1640): le theme de la vengeance. Paris. France, Peter. 1965. Racine's Rhetoric. Oxford. 1972. Rhetoric and Truth in France. Descartes to Diderot. Oxford. Fumaroli, Marc, 1980. L 'Age de I'eloquence: rhetoriqueetKres literaria' de la Renaissance au seuil de I'epoque classique. Geneva. Gras, Maurice. 1965. Robert Garnier, son art et sa methode. Geneva. Griffiths, Richard. 1962. 'Les sentences et le "but moral" dans les tragedies de Montchrestien', Revue des sciences humaines, 105: 5-14. 1970. TheDramatic Technique of Antoine de Montchrestien: Rhetoric and Style in French Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford. 1986. Garnier: fLes Juifves'. London. Guyard, Marius-Francois. 1959. 'La survivance du style et des formes classiques dans la poesie de Lamartine', in Stil- undFormprobleme in der Literatur. Vortrdge des VII Kongresses der International Vereinigung fur moderne Sprachen und Literaturen (FILLM), ed. Paul Bockmann, 331-9. Heidelberg. Holyoake, John. 1987. A Critical Study of the Tragedies of Robert Garnier (1545-90). American University Studies, Series 2: Romance Languages and Literature, Vol.57. New York. Howe, Alan. 1986. 'La Taille's Saul: A Play of Two Halves', French Studies Bulletin, 19:3-5.

166

List of works cited and consulted Jondorf, Gillian. 1969. Robert Garnier and the Themes of Political Tragedy in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge. 1978. 'Doctrine and image in Jodelle's Didon se sacrifiant\ French Studies, 32:257-74. 1982. 'Beauty and coherence in Montchrestien and Corneille', in The Equilibrium of Wit. Essays in honour of Odette de Mourgues, ed. Dorothy Gabe Coleman and Peter J. Bayley, 117-34. Lexington, Kentucky. 1987. ' "An aimless rhetoric"? Theme and structure in Jacques de La Taille's Alexandra, French Studies, 41:267-82. Kibedi Varga, A. 1970. Rhetorique et litterature: etudes de structures classiques. Paris. La Croix du Maine, Francois Grude de. 1584. Premier volume de la Bibliotheque du Sieur de la Croix-du-Maine. Paris. Lagarde, Andre and Laurent Michard. 1985. XVIIe siecle. Les grands auteurs franqais du programme. Anthologie et histoire litteraire. Paris. Lanson, Gustave. 1920. Esquisse d'une histoire de la tragedie en France. New York. Lawton, H. W. 1949. Handbook ofFrench Renaissance Dramatic Theory. Manchester. Lazard, Madeleine. 1980. Le Theatre en France au XVIe siecle. Paris. Lebegue, Raymond. 1929. La Tragedie religieuse en France: les debuts (1514-1573). Paris. 1944. La Tragedie frangaise de la Renaissance. Brussels. 1946. 'La representation d'une tragedie a la cour des Valois'. Comptes rendus de VAcademie des Inscriptions et belles-lettres, 138-44. 1977-8. Etudes sur le theatre franqais. 2 vols. Paris. 1979. fLes Juives' de Robert Garnier. 3rd edn, revised. Paris. Loukovitch, K. 1933. L'Evolution de la tragedie religieuse classique en France. Paris. Maulnier, Thierry. 1939. Introduction a la poesie franqaise. Paris. Mouflard, Marie-Madeleine. 1961-4. Robert Garnier, 1545-1590. 3 vols. La Ferte-Bernard. Mourgues, Odette de. 1968. 'L'Hippolyte de Garnier et VHippolytus de Seneque', in The French Renaissance and its Heritage. Essays in honour of Alan M. Boase, ed. D.R. Haggis and others, 191-202. London. Mueller, Martin. 1980. Children of Oedipus, and Other Essays on the Imitation of Greek Tragedy, 1550-1800. Toronto. Peach, T. 1985. 'Oddities and Ironies in Garnier's Les Juifves\ French Studies Bulletin, 14:3-6. 167

List of works cited and consulted 1986-7. 'More on Les Juifves: the function of the Chorus', French Studies Bulletin, 21:3-6. Roaten, Darnell. 1960. Structural Forms in the French Theater, 15001700. Philadelphia. Sakharoff, Micheline. 1967. Le Heros, sa liberte et son efficacite de Gamier a Rotrou. Paris. Sonnino. Lee A. 1968. A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric. London. Stone, Donald, Jr. 1974. French Humanist Tragedy: A Reassessment. Manchester. Street, J.S. 1983. French Sacred Drama from Beze to Corneille. Cambridge. Turner, G.W. 1973. Stylistics. Harmondsworth. Valery, Paul. 1960. OEuvres, Vol.11. Ed. J. Hytier. (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.) Paris. Willner, Kurt. 1932. Montchrestiens Tragodien und die stoische Lebensweisheit. Berlin. Zamparelli, Thomas L. 1978. The Theater of Claude Billard: A Study in Post-Renaissance Dramatic Esthetics. Tulane Studies in Romance Languages and Literature 9. New Orleans.

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INDEX

Aegeus, 22, 74-5 Alexander the Great, 5, 58, 79 alliteration, 10, 149 ambiguity, 7 3 - 4 anadiplosis, 146 anaphora, 76, 145, 146, 149 Anouilh, Jean, Antigone, 86 Anthology, Greek, 9 antithesis, 50 Antonius, Marcus (Mark Antony, triumvir), 61, 123 Appian, 119 assonance, 24, 149 Axelrad, A. Jose, 113 Baif, Jan Antoine de, 1, 136 Balmas, Enea, 6, 41, 161, 162 Baudelaire, Charles, 10-11 Beck, Jonathan, 7 Berenice, lover of Titus, 19 Berenice, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes, 19, 28 Bible, 6, 11, 1 4 , 5 6 - 8 , 7 1 , 8 0 Daniel, 58 Genesis, 24 Isaiah, 57 Jeremiah, 56, 57 Nahum, 58 Psalms, 56, 57 Revelation, 24 1 Samuel, 120-1, 138 2 Samuel, 85, 138 Bohm, Karl, 1 Bounin, Gabriel, 155 La Soltane, 34, 46 Bourbon, Charles de, Cardinal and Archbishop of Rouen, 98, 108 Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 11 Brutus, Lucius Junius (founder of Roman Republic), 15, 107 Brutus, Marcus Junius (tyrannicide), 91

Buchanan, George, 156 Jephthes sive votum, 80 Caesar, Gaius Julius, 90, 93, 124 Callimachus, 19 captatio benevolentiae, 14 Cassius Longinus, Gaius (tyrannicide), 91 Catherine de Medicis, 98, 101 Cato Uticensis, Marcus Porcius (Cato the Younger), 90, 92 Catullus, 12, 13, 19-20 Chantelouve, Francois de, 5 Charles IX, 98, 101 Charpentier, Francoise, 1, 2, 6, 39, 65, 111, 132, 142 XOpo5i§tioKata)<;, 37 Cicero, 26 Coleman, James A., 162 Coligny, Gaspard de, 4 conclusio, 148 confidant, 69, 128 confirmation 148 confutation 148 Conington, John, 161 Corneille, Pierre, 1, 2, 3, 4, 29, 46, 52, 68, 97, 127-8 expositions, 31-3 Le Cid, 31, 52-4; sententiae in, 68 Cinna, 62, 97 Horace, 31, 69 Medee, 31-2; dedication, 68 Polyeucte, 55-6, 97, 128 Pulcherie, 32 Rodogune, 31, 128 Surena, 32-3 Theodore, 33, 37, 42, 46 correctio, 36 Crassus Dives, Marcus Licinius (triumvir), 90, 93 Crassus, Publius Licinius (son of the triumvir), 93

169

Index Dares the Phrygian, 119 Darwinism, 2 Dassonville, Michel, 162 Delille, Jacques, 12 demonstration 148 DioCassius, 119 dispositio, 5, 14 Dryden, John, 20, 59 Du Bellay, Joachim, 92

Genoude, Eugene, 11 Goethe, J.W. von, 97 Grevin, Jacques, 157 Cesar, 34, 46 Griffiths, Richard M., 1, 3, 6, 65, 70, 111, 162 Guyard, M.-F., 12 Hall, Kathleen M., 6, 161 Hardee, A. Maynor, 1 Holl, Fritz, 1 Holyoake, John, 38 Homer, 27, 56, 71, 119 Horace, 12, 13, 14, 28, 71, 92, 99 Housman, A.E., 9-10

Eliot, T.S., 86 ellipsis, 50, 51 Ellison, Ralph, 97 elocutio, 5, 14 Euripides, 23, 27, 69, 71 exordium, 148

imagery as means of conveying themes, 112-19 interrogatio, 50, 51 inventio, 5, 14 Ionesco, Eugene, 93

familiaritas, 46, 76 Filleul, Nicolas, 156 Achille, 99 La Lucrece, 5, 65; characters used to convey ideas, 98-109 Les Ombres, 99 France, Peter, 4 Freud, Sigmund, 95, 98 Fumaroli, Marc, 4 Gamier, Robert, 1, 2, 3, 6, 26, 149, 151, 157 modern productions of plays, 161 'public voice', 56-63 use of 'jactance', 61-3 Antigone, 65, 66, 99, 112; use of Chorus, 69, 79-85, 124-5 Cornelie, 58, 88; characterisation, 93-4 Hippolyte, 37, 42, 65; allusiveness, 22-4, 27, 28; theatricality, 134-5 LesJuifves, 6-7, 36, 61, 70, 99, 126; contaminatio, 24, 58, 70; isolation of Nabuchodonosor, 127; pattern of guilt and retribution, 98; the Prophete, 56-8; theatricality, 133-4, 140 Marc Antoine, 58-63 Porcie, 37, 58, 65, 88-93, 105, 119-20, 122-4, 147; 'Argument', 119; isolation of Octave, 126-7; theatricality, 135 La Troade, 7, 38; exposition, 35-7; use of Chorus, 69

Jodelle, Etienne, 1, 3, 6, 157, 161 Cleopatre captive, 37, 65, 149-50; exposition, 41-3; stichomythia, 145 Didon se sacrifiant, 140, 150-3; imagery, 112-13, 140; use of multiple Choruses, 125 Joukovsky, Francoise, 99, 103, 104 Kahnt, Paul, 1 KibediVerga, A . , 4 , 14 q, 37, 85 La Calprenede, Gauthier de Costes de, La Mort de Mitridate, 128 Lagarde, Andre, 87 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 11 'LeLac', 12-14,21 Lanson, Gustave, 1 La Peruse, Jean de, 158 Medee Tu'enfant, 38-40; use of Chorus in, 71-7; violence on stage, 136 La Rochefoucauld, Francois, due de, 95 La Taille, Jacques de, 158 Alexandre, 66, 142; allusiveness, 28; deaths on stage, 136; imagery in, 113; use of Chorus in, 77-9

170

Index LaTaille, Jean de, 158 De VArt de la tragedie, 60 La Famine, 137, 142 Saul le furieux, 85, 120-2, 140-1, 142; characterisation in, 87; contaminatio, 24; exposition, 40; role of Escuyers in, 126; suspense in, 138-9; theatricality, 121, 133, 140-1 Lebegue, Raymond, 1, 6, 87, 92, 107, 124, 132, 136 Livy, 103 Lucan, 92 Lyly, John, 161

Pharsalus, 90 Picard, Raymond, 20 Pinvert, Lucien, 92 Pleiade, 1, 9 Plutarch, 27, 56, 58, 59, 119 Pompeius Magnus, Gnaeus (Pompey the Great), 90, 93 Pompeius, Sextus (younger son of Pompey the Great), 124 Propertius, 99 prosopopoeia, 45 pseudo-Seneca, Octavia, 58, 85, 129 Pythagoras, 12

Marot, Clement, 83 Marty-Laveaux, Charles, 136 Massacre of St Bartholomew, 4, 5, 101 Maulnier, Thierry, 2, 6 metamorphosis, 58, 82 Metellus Pius Scipio, Quintus Caecilius, 93 Minotaur, 28, 58 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 28 Montchrestien, Antoine de, 1, 2, 3, 149, 159 'choeur personnalise', 65 Hector, 119; stichomythia, 143-5 La Reine d'Escosse, 1; allusiveness, 24-7; imagery, 113; use of multiple Choruses, 125-6 Montreux, Nicolas de, 159 Sophonisbe, 85, 132, 142-3; character of Scipion, 118; exposition, 34—5; imagery, 113-19; stichomythia, 146-7 moralites potemiques, 7 Mourgues, Odette de, 6, 38

Racine, Jean, 1, 2, 3, 14, 29, 54, 70, 97-8, 127-8 characterisation, 87, 93, 94-6 imagery, 127 rhetoric, 46-52, 54 Alexandre le Grand, 46; exposition, 29-30 Andromaque, 1, 46-9, 5 0 - 1 , 98, 99, 127; exposition, 30, 31 Athalie, 70, 98, 99 Bajazet, 66-7, 70, 98, 128 Be're'nice, 23, 70, 79, 99; allusiveness, 15-20; exposition, 30,31 Britannicus, 70, 98, 128 Iphige'nie, 49-50, 52, 98 Mithridate, 98 Phedre, 46, 5 1 - 2 , 70, 94-5, 98; exposition 3 0 - 1 ; Preface, 67, 95; 'recit de Theramene', 92 Regulus, Marcus Attilius, 15 Reuter, Otto, 1 Rhea, 103 Rhea Silvia, 103 rhetoric, 3 - 5 , 43, 45-63 passim, 96, 111, 148 Rigal, Eugene, 1 Romulus and Remus, 103 Ronsard, Pierre de, 11

narratio, 148 Octavianus, Gaius Julius Caesar (later Augustus), 60, 61, 123 Ovid, 10-11, 12, 13-14 paronomasia, 149, 150 Pascal, Blaise, 51 Peach, Trevor, 70, 162 Penelope (wife of Odysseus), 103 peroratio, 148 Petrarch, 11, 14

Saint Gelais, Mellin de, 159 Sophonisba, 1, 132, 135-6 Sakharoff, Micheline, 2 Sappho, 10 Sceve, Maurice, 11 Scipio Africanus Major, Publius Cornelius, 34, 114

171

Index Seneca, 26, 60, 92, 129 Agamemnon, 23, 129, 149 Hercules Oetaeus, 85, 129 Hippolytus, 23 Medea, 38-9, 71, 136 Octavia, see pseudo-Seneca Oedipus, 81, 82 Phoenissae, 79 Thyestes, 6, 23 rroaflfes, 69, 137 sententia, 46, 68, 111-12 Shakespeare, 3, 11, 61 King Lear, 137 Macbeth, 27 Midsummer Night's Dream, 34 O//K?//O, 137

/tope ofLucrece, 106 Troilus and Cressida, 142 Smith, Christopher N., 3, 6, 119 Sophocles, 27 Antigone, 79 Oedipus Coloneus, 71 Sophonisba, 113-14 Statius, 79 Stegmann, Andre, 33

stichomythia, 42, 70, 94, 111, 143-7 Stone, Donald, Jr, 1, 4, 6, 132, 162 Street, John, 1 Suetonius, 19 suspense, 137-9 theatricality, 131-41 Tibullus, 99 Tolkien, J.R.R., 97 Torquatus, Titus Manlius Imperiosus, 15 Toutain, Charles, 160 Agamemnon, 147-9 Trissino, Gian Giorgio, 132 Valery, Paul, 7, 100 Viau, Theophile de, 21 Virgil, 14, 99 Aeneid, 15-20 Voltaire, 12 Willner, Kurt, 4, 111 Zamparelli, T.L., 3 zeugma, 149

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Cambridge Studies in French General editor: MALCOLM BOWIE Also in the series J.M. COCKING Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and his Art LEO BERSANI The Death of Stephane Mallarme MARIAN HOBSON The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France LEO SPITZER Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature, translated and edited by David Bellos NORMAN BRYSON Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix ANN MOSS Poetry and Fable: Studies in Mythological Narrative in Sixteenth-Century France RHIANNON GOLDTHORPE Sartre: Literature and Theory DIANA KNIGHT Flaubert's Characters: The Language of Illusion ANDREW MARTIN The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne GEOFFREY BENNINGTON Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying Down the Law in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction PENNY FLORENCE Mallarme, Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, and Flaubert NAOMI SEGAL The Unintended Reader: Feminism and Manon Lescaut CLIVE SCOTT A Question of Syllables: Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Verse

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STIRLING HAIG Flaubert and the Gift of Speech: Dialogue and Discourse in Four 'Modern'Novels NATHANIEL WING The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarme MITCHELL GREENBERG Corneille, Classicism, and the Ruses of Symmetry HOWARD DAVIES Sartre and 'Les Temps Modernes' ROBERT GREER COHN Mallarme's Prose Poems: A Critical Study CELIA BRITTON Claude Simon: Writing the Visible DAVID SCOTT Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France ANN JEFFERSON Reading Realism in Stendhal DALIA JUDOVITZ Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity RICHARD D. E. BURTON Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity MICHAEL MORIARTY Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France JOHN FORRESTER The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida JEROME SCHWARTZ Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion DAVID BAGULEY Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision LESLIE HILL Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words F. W. LEAKEY Baudelaire: Collected Essays, 1953-1988 SARAH KAY Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry

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