French Origins of English Tragedy (review)

The modest length of Richard Hillman’s French Origins of English Tragedy deceives with regard to the erudition it reveals, all the more noteworthy for a transnational approach to early modern English drama. For despite the more than three decades since the publication of Anne Lake Prescott’s landmark French Poets and the English Renaissance (to which Hillman’s title graciously alludes), studies still overwhelmingly omit more than token consideration of the French contributions to this formative period in English literature. Scholars tend to regard England as functioning mainly within its national boundaries, when even such emerging concepts as nationhood owe a great deal to their somewhat prior formulations across the Channel. Of course, part of the responsibility for this state of affairs lies with specialists of the French Renaissance, who likewise see rather modern national borders in a time and place that barely supported them and largely ignore the first major external recognition, appropriation, and rewriting of the first major literary effort to conceive the French nation as a unity. Anglo-French Renaissance studies is an all too slowly emerging field, especially now in times of austerity when academic departments tighten their borders in attempts to secure resources, retreating, for both intellectual and political reasons, into conveniently available versions of these borders, which usually run along national and linguistic lines.

French Origins of English Tragedy showcases its author’s equal grounding in both French and English studies: a fully bilingual comparatist, Hillman taught for many years in bilingual Canada before moving to the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance at the Université François-Rabelais in Tours. With this book he offers observations on the Anglo-French Renaissance that make clear the imperative of bringing its study into greater prominence. In the introduction he explains that during the century of his focus, “the English, like the French, still found it difficult to conceive of themselves without taking the other/Other into account. Conversely, to look across the Channel was also invariably to see oneself, as in a mirror, but to see oneself constantly in flux, evanescent, receding from the secure hold afforded by fixed ideas and comforting stereotypes” (1–2). Here Hillman notes that for this reason, in his Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Politics of France (2002), he borrowed Lacanian ideas on subjectivity as “a background metaphor for national self-definition” (2); yet he does not pursue this theoretical point, and in fact makes very few statements on approach or methodology that are not of a practical thrust—mainly, the very important fact of transnationalism in early modern France and England, which the book explicates as much as it responds to.

Although I have questions, to which I will return below, concerning the shortage of methodological explanation, namely in the choice of particular texts, this book is a very practical one, “useful,” as the expression goes, for its defense and illustration of the deep and wide resonance of French material in England. As justification for presupposing this intertextuality, Hillman remarks, “My working assumption has been that if a text had been printed, whenever and wherever, it might have been accessible to any literate person for reading, while at a few points I have evoked the possibility of personal networks, typically constituted on political and/or religious lines, through which manuscripts may have circulated. These principles are widely accepted as applying within national and linguistic boundaries. Scholarship has not been in the habit, however, of redrawing those boundaries to include both sides of the Channel” (2). Thus Hillman announces this book as his second full-length contribution to Anglo-French Renaissance studies.

Hillman works with fairly rough thematic divisions, corresponding to his three main chapters. In chapter 2, “On the Generic Cusp: Richard II, La Guisiade, and the Invention of Tragic Heroes,” he considers how the tragic hero takes shape in migrating from its French to its English instantiations. Here he foregrounds his examination of the hero later in the book, stating that he puts...