Recueil des sotties françaises, I ed. by Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Jelle Koopmans et Katell Lavéant (review)

This is the first of three volumes intended as a comprehensive, critical collection of known French sotties, a comical theatrical form that — according to the editors — has been undeservedly neglected, as modern scholars have been forced to rely on a disparate and uneven body of work available through partial and antiquated editions (one of them over a century old). The editors have undertaken to reorganize the original texts into a coherent set, uniform both in content and form. They have accomplished the first objective by excluding works that do not belong to the genre, such as farces, moralités, and monologues, which were incorporated into older editions. Given the ambiguities surrounding the term sottie and the unresolved issue of its context, whether theatrical or festive or both, the editors have followed a structural criterion for inclusion of a piece: the presence of a handful of characters, identified only by number or by a symbolic name, who meet in response to a summons by a dignitary to whom they are subject; a tenuous plot occasioned by a request for news that may (or may not) disguise an allusion to current events; a rapid and frequently obscure dialogue in split verses on the subject of playacting, or censure, or some useless activities that occupy the characters. The result is seventy pieces distributed among three volumes, and organized roughly by geographical origin. Volume i includes seven sotties of the collection so-called of the British Museum (actually at the British Library), seventeen from a late collection printed in Lyon between 1560 and 1610, and two isolated ones from Geneva, dated from the early 1520s. Volumes ii and iii will be dedicated, respectively, to the Norman and Parisian corpus and will include a total of forty-four pieces. The editors strive towards standardization of form among the disparate texts through consistent use of accents, apostrophes, cedillas, and punctuation whenever feasible, and with the practice of modern capitalization and separation of words. Apart from its tighter organization, this work represents two further improvements over past editions. First, in addition to a general introduction, one specific to the volume, and then one for every collection, each individual sottie is preceded by its own extensive introduction, which includes background (both for the original manuscript(s) and later printed collections), analysis of characters, text, and plot, and discussion of its staging and costumes, which should be helpful for theatrical specialists. Second, the editors have refrained from hasty conclusions as to the date of composition and origin of some pieces, opting to share openly their own perplexity with their readers rather than mislead them into conclusions based on mere conjecture (an unfortunate practice of early editors). Lastly, they have ostensibly aimed at delivering a body of work that will be useful as practical reference, and its functional character is reflected in its format: despite comprising over 600 pages, complete with a vast bibliography and a succinct but adequate glossary, this is a light, compact, and highly readable volume.