Pausanias, tragédie (1668) (review)

First acted in November 1668, a year almost to the day after Andromaque, Quinault's Pausanias cannot have failed to evoke for its earliest audiences the notions that modern critics refer to by the terms 'palimpsest' and 'intertextuality'. For his penultimate play provides a plotline whose similarities with Racine's tragedy are as striking as its differences. Moreover, it was performed in the same theatre by the same company, using the same actors — with the exception of Montfleury, who had died shortly after playing Oreste — in the corresponding major roles. Indeed, as William Brooks explains, it was Floridor and his troupe who had commissioned this adaptation of Andromaque in an effort to revive the fortunes of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Besides discussing the genesis and initial reception of Quinault's play and its adaptation of source material, Brooks's informative Introduction also examines in detail the handling of characterization, dramatic structure, the political and love interests, and poetic style, and it constantly draws attention to another layer of intertextuality: the relationship between the treatment of these matters in Pausanias and in the remainder of Quinault's theatre. Brooks's study lays emphasis particularly on the primacy of plot over thematics and on the dramatist's desire to appeal to a wide audience. Edmund Campion carefully reproduces the text of the one seventeenth-century edition to have appeared in France, Guillaume de Luyne's 1669 duodecimo. The editing is discrete: while correcting obvious slips and uncapitalizing many nouns, Campion aims to make as few amendments as possible to the original. His respect for the latter does, however, highlight the problems that beset the modern editor with regard to punctuation that is unconventional or incoherent. The irritating tendency of de Luyne's edition to omit end-of-sentence punctuation at the ends of lines is sometimes, though by no means always, remedied here; while, within the lines, on numerous occasions (many, but certainly not all, of which are listed on p. 53) no punctuation is provided between sentences or major clauses. Of course, it has become a tenet of modern editorial orthodoxy to justify non-intervention on the grounds that the original punctuation may reflect a playwright's system of indicating actors' pauses. But what if, as is acknowledged here, the sense requires a pause even when punctuation is absent? What if the author is not noted for supervising the printing of his text? What if, as often seems the case in the seventeenth century, the originator of such errors and deviations is less probably the author than the printer? These are questions which need addressing by modern editors. In the meantime, it is a pity that the decisions made for Pausanias sometimes result in the readability of the text being impaired, because this volume nonetheless provides a welcome and useful edition of a hitherto inaccessible work, and it will help students and specialists of seventeenth-century French theatre to achieve a more complete understanding of Quinault's art, which this tragedy shows to be in harmony with the tastes of its public.