Moralité à six personnages: BnF ms. fr. 25467 (review)

In 1988 Joël Blanchard produced an enlightening edition of the Moralité à cincq personnages (see French Studies, 44 (1990), 444). Twenty years on, his edition of an equally difficult satirical play, from the same manuscript, is no less valuable. Blanchard demonstrates that the Moralité 6 attacks inappropriate social climbing, through a plot arc of exemplary fall and redemption that mobilizes the key juridical notions of Auctorité and Puissance. Linking the play to the Moralité 5, he argues that its political messages refer specifically to the governmental corruption and favouritism associated with Louis XI, and plausibly suggests that its composition broadly coincided with the États Généraux of 1484. More tentatively, Blanchard ascribes the Moralité 6 to Henri Baude on the grounds that it evinces a blend of formal expertise, wide-ranging cultural knowledge, and practical stagecraft. Though inevitably speculative, the attribution is entirely cogent. The elliptically allusive character of the Moralité 6 makes interpretation hazardous, and is exacerbated by scribal habits and errors; Blanchard gives a useful account of the manuscript's graphic characteristics, while his notes elucidate the text's many obscure or frankly incomprehensible passages in ingenious and convincing fashion. Textual lacunae, wrongly ordered verses, mistranscriptions, compressed syntax, and technical (e.g. astrological) lexis are carefully unpicked; while avoiding overly neat resolutions, Blanchard never shies away from the play's manifold challenges. There are a few minor lapses in the handling of versification: that of vv. 376-85 is not correctly described, hiatus is not regularly indicated (e.g. v. 431), and a number of hypo- or hypermetric lines are not signalled (e.g. vv. 263, 450, 513, 981). But the manuscript's unreliability makes it extremely difficult to identify the play's constantly shifting verse forms, and Blanchard has been as successful as anyone might hope in this respect. The Glossary is economical and reliable and meshes effectively with Blanchard's notes. Some relatively unusual terms and graphies might also have been included, for example chevetaine (v. 357), encherra (v. 477), mandi¨ens (v. 1050). In the Index of proper names, a simple set of typographical conventions helpfully distinguishes between different types of name (anthroponyms, toponyms, institutions, works, personifications). While the apparatus necessarily concentrates on local textual difficulties, theatrical and ideological dimensions are also considered. Blanchard's Introduction closes with some illuminating reflections on the use of space and objects on stage, while the relevance of historical contexts and political concepts is consistently brought out. This is an important contribution to recent discussions of theatre's role in creating an urban 'public sphere' in medieval France, such as Carol Symes's A Common Stage (2007) and the collection Le Théâtre polémique français 1450-1550 (2008); it is also an admirable philological enterprise in its own right.