French Origins of English Tragedy (review)

Following his previous work in the field of early modern English drama and the influence of France (to which he refers frequently), Richard Hillman has produced a succinct but wide-ranging book exploring the correlation between 'diverse French discourses and particular aspects of English tragedy' (p. 12). He does not aim for a comprehensive overview, nor does he attempt to prove various English playwrights' familiarity with the French source material, but he settles instead on a variety of examples. The book starts with an examination of Pierre Matthieu's La Guisiade, a source for Shakespeare's Richard II, and considers the ways in which the figure of the tragic hero takes shape as it moves from French to English manifestations. The next chapter, with the characteristically prolix title 'Out of their Classical Depth: From Pathos to Bathos in Early English Tragedy; or, The Comedy of Terrors', takes in its stride those French writers for whom the religious troubles play a central role, such as Garnier, Du Bartas, Du Rosier, and Fleury, and applies them to a number of plays, including Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and Jonson's Sejanus. Confrontations between the hero as warrior and the femme fatale form the basis of the final chapter, with Du Bartas's poem La Judit playing a prominent role. Hillman makes the ingenious argument that the biblical encounter between Judith and Holofernes 'hovers intertextually in the background in two "warrior plays" by Shakespeare and Marlowe' (p. 63), Othello and Tamburlaine respectively. Although Hillman is generous in acknowledging studies by critics who have worked on early modern English self-definition, he almost completely ignores the very fine scholarship that has been devoted to French drama, making only a single brief reference to J. S. Street's French Sacred Drama from Bèze to Corneille (1983) and omitting Gillian Jondorf 's French Renaissance Tragedy (1990) altogether. Some readers may also baulk at having to pay £50 for a book with fewer than a hundred pages of text. Nonetheless, overall an important case is made for considering the French sources of English Renaissance drama.