Abraham sacrifiant. Tragedie Françoise (review)

Marguerite Soulié and Jean-Dominique Beaudin here offer a fair and balanced edition of what is generally held as the first French tragedy, Théodore de Bèze's Abraham sacrifiant (1550). In their introduction, the editors stress Bèze's simplicity, both in his Calvinist return to the unglossed Biblical text and in his rejection of inspired stylistic flourishes à la Ronsard. Yet this simplicity is coupled, they are keen to demonstrate, with a natural grasp of theatre and a drive towards dramatic inventiveness. As opposed to two possible sources, the anonymous Mistere du Viel Testament from 1539 and Jérôme Zingler's Isacii Immolatio (1547), for example, Bèze takes the innovative step of focusing on the sacrifice, and the 'conflit intérieur' (p. 13) it produces, as its key element rather than integrating it into a broader narrative of Abraham's life. As the editors put it, 'Théodore de Bèze, en resserrant les éléments essentiels du drame, a fait preuve d'un sens dramatique évident', returning to the original Bible account in true Reformation fashion to seize the heart of the story (p. 14). Likewise, they suggest, his play is well suited to the demands of its apparent origins in student theatre, with its briefness, its sententious language, and its need for only 'un décor assez sommaire' (p. 9). According to the editors, while Bèze deliberately spurns an allegorical approach to his subject matter and homes in on Abraham's internal conflict, the play also ultimately mobilizes 'la vérité psychologique . . . au service d'un enseignement théologique' (p. 80 n. 175). This effect is achieved in part by the figure of Satan, whose dramatic role (as indirect instigator of doubts in the unsuspecting Abraham, who is throughout the play unaware of his presence) the editors helpfully discuss. One feels, though, that this complex interrelation between the psychological, the theological and the dramatic raised by Satan is never systematically addressed or satisfactorily resolved in this edition, and deserves further exploration. Indeed, in some respects this problem is symptomatic of the edition as a whole, whose often fair and thought-provoking content comes across in an unhelpfully fragmentary and unsystematic fashion. For example, while the main introduction ends with a handy glossary of some key Calvinist terms ('grâce', 'éléction', 'vocation' and so forth), it — like much of the introduction — appears somewhat desultory and haphazard in its structure. The final entry on 'Satan' (unalphabetically) ends the glossary, and hence the main body of the introduction, with a rather facile remark on how Satan's monkish attire in the play reflects the Calvinist attack on the monastic vocation. While this point is certainly uncontentious, it also rather counteracts the more nuanced discussion of Satan's role in the play earlier on, where the editors persuasively argue that 'le rôle de Satan dépasse la polémique anti-catholique' (p. 17). The devil, in this edition, is very much in the detail; with a little more attention to synthesizing these disparate details into a more coherent introduction, this could have been a very successful edition.