Théâtre complet: édition critique by Théodore de Banville (review)

Given the rapid disappearance of Banville’s once popular plays from French theatres after a brief revival around 1923, his centenary year, it is unsurprising that the first critical edition of his complete theatre has taken so long to appear. Preceded only by incomplete collections published in the 1870s and 1880s, these three volumes provide a welcome complement to Champion’s excellent recent editions of Banville’s complete verse and selected critical writings, by the same editors. Featured here are all sixteen plays written between 1852 and 1890, many only one-act long, alongside seven saynètes either unperformed or previously unpublished. The tone is strikingly light and lyrical throughout, with playful repartee and an effervescent humour located as much in language as in character or situation. The time travel comedy Le Feuilleton d’Aristophane (1852) and pastiches of Molière — Le Beau Léandre (1856), Les Fourberies de Nérine (1864) — showcase Banville’s talent for the witty dialogue that also sparkles in his mythological plays Diane au bois (1863), La Pomme (1865) — with costumes designed by Gustave Moreau — and Hymnis (1879), where the gods cavort with the energy of Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers. While, as the editors observe, Diane au bois was a profound influence on Mallarmé’s Faune, with which it shares many similarities, it is hard not to hear also his Hérodiade in the eponymous heroine’s refusal of love, ‘son cœur […] vêtu d’un triple diamant’ (I, 233). Mallarmé also greatly admired Le Forgeron (1887), in which Venus chooses Vulcain as her husband, a serious celebration of creativity and a hymn to the power of art. Banville’s passion for Greek and Roman Antiquity surfaces in Déïdamia (1876), in which Achilles chooses the defence of his people — and certain death — over his family; La Perle (1877), a rewriting of the famous scene between Anthony and Cleopatra; Socrate et sa femme (1885), which hurls the philosopher into a violent, farcical scène de ménage; and Ésope (1893), in which the fabulist turns his back on the love of the slave Rhodope. Riquet à la houppe (1884) and Le Baiser (1887) offer playful variants on the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, exploring the relationship between outward appearances and essence, between beauty and truth. The impressive critical apparatus includes detailed notes on the genesis of each work, multiple draft versions and prose sketches, information on costumes and decor, and contextualizes the plays in relation to playwrights ranging from Latin and Greek authors to Racine, Corneille, Molière, Voltaire, and Shakespeare, while situating them within nineteenth-century thought such as Charles Fourier on utopias and René Ménard on myth. The most fascinating material is found in hundreds of pages of reviews of each play across multiple runs from 1850 to 1950, including several by Gautier, Mendès, Verhaeren, and even Léon Blum, who in 1918 ranked Banville alongside Baudelaire and Verlaine in France’s poetic pantheon. From the hyperbolically enthusiastic — all sixteen plays find countless reviewers keen to pronounce them masterpieces — to the most scathingly dismissive, these reviews reveal much about the literary press and its role in shaping aesthetic value, showing how the media image of Banville was constructed, and illuminating the hierarchial relationship between Parisian theatres, from the Comédie-Française to the cafés-concerts, and the talents of actors from the legendary Coquelin brothers to the second and third tiers. Banville’s theatre is worlds away from the historical drama, gritty realism, or tear-jerk melodrama that dominated the Parisian stage in the nineteenth century. Reviewers unanimously observe that he has little interest in the complexities of plot or depth of characterization, since it is language that is foregrounded here...