La Néphélococugie; ou, La Nuée des cocus \-\- Première adaptation des 'Oiseaux' d'Aristophane en français (review)

Pierre Le Loyer was described by his nineteenth-century editor Gustave Brunet as 'un des plus singuliers de ces écrivains à idées bizarres, à conceptions étranges, qui furent assez communs au seizième siècle'. This play, a comedy modelled after Aristophanes' Birds, is perhaps one of his less bizarre works. As this edition amply demonstrates, it is a lively reworking of the Greek original, cleverly adapted to appeal to a contemporary audience. Its chief innovation is the introduction of the 'cocu' motif — the play's protagonists are both 'cuckolds' and 'cuckoos' — which Le Loyer makes central to his plot. This offers the author ample opportunity to exercise his wit and to weave new dramatic elements — and obscene jokes — into the action. This is the first modern edition of the work, the sole edition after Le Loyer's lifetime being the unsatisfactory — and difficult to find — text prepared by Brunet. The play is important as a rare example of a French reworking of a Greek comedy by an author with a relatively full understanding of Greek language and theatrical convention. The main interest of the text surely resides in Le Loyer's innovative engagement with the Greek text, which he knew in the original. The editors quite rightly concentrate their efforts on this aspect, the introduction and notes offering a detailed and insightful comparison of the two works. The notes provide a necessary corrective to previous scholarship, which underestimated the complexity of the relationship between Le Loyer's text and its model. Little attention is paid, however, to the contexts that informed the writing of the play. The changes Le Loyer makes in his version — for example, to the procession of characters that come to importune the birds in their new city — are clearly meant to reflect contemporary concerns. However, the editors are no doubt right to suggest in the introduction that the satirical elements for the most part have no specific target and are not politically charged. Much of the social humour is derived from Rabelais and from Tahureau — the two authors appear frequently in the footnotes. The notes display considerable erudition (the typo on p. 15 placing the poet Ausonius in the pre-Christian era is a rare slip) in identifying Le Loyer's sources and allusions, which are mostly to Latin works, but also to the likes of Homer, Hesiod and Plato. The fifty-two-page Introduction supplies a wealth of technical information. It does not assume familiarity with the Aristophanes play — which would not have been widely known even among Le Loyer's sixteenth-century readership — furnishing a plot synopsis and very useful summary of the conventions, character types and metrical structures of Greek comedy. There follows a more detailed comparison of the two works; some of this information is repeated in the notes and in the two appended concordance tables. The Glossary helps with the slang terms, idioms and puns Le Loyer puts into the mouths of his characters, although the language only occasionally approaches the Rabelaisian exuberance it strives to imitate.