Comédies larmoyantes by Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée (review)

La Chaussée is better than his reputation, and, despite the defects, his plays are quite readable. An adept versifier, he manages at his best to create vivid characters, touching situations, and amusing social satire, while providing a window onto the changing values and tastes of his era. Having a modern edition of his nine tearful comedies (the innovative part of his output) is thus clearly worthwhile. Maria Grazia Porcelli’s general introduction is excellent. It begins with a helpful overview of the contemporary debates about the legitimacy of what was recognized as a new dramatic genre, intermediate between comedy and tragedy and linked in its emotional appeal to the novel. Following a biographical sketch of La Chaussée, with emphasis on his other writings, she examines the innovative aspects of his dramaturgy. The new centrality of pathos affects not just the ideology (bourgeois insistence on family stability and financial prudence; Enlightenment optimism), but also the basic structural components of a play: expositions, which now permeate the play and are often autobiographical narrations, excite sympathy for the victims’ misfortunes; denouements, spread out over multiple scenes, give less emphasis to the union of the young lovers and more to the reconstitution of a dispersed family or to the conversion of a flawed character. Even the romanesque plots are central to the playwright’s vision: the protagonists, damaged socially, economically, and psychologically by undeserved calamities in the past, must be willing to share their sorrows so that the prior injustices can be rectified. Each play is prefaced with a brief analysis and performance history. Porcelli also includes the polemical comedy La Chaussée composed to accompany his first major play, a dedicatory poem that he wrote for the king, the reviews that the Mercure de France devoted to his five most popular plays, published commentaries on four of the plays (by the Abbé Prévost, Luigi Riccoboni, Janvier de Flainville, and an anonymous writer), and D’Alembert’s éloge of La Chaussée that was part of a collection of tributes to members of the Académie. This wealth of supplementary material contributes to our understanding of how contemporaries reacted to the tearful comedies, even if the Mercure’s articles mainly consist of overly detailed plot synopses. Unfortunately, the textual preparation in this edition is seriously deficient. Significant typographical errors abound in both the plays and the appendices; insufficient attention is paid to accent marks; the editor occasionally forgets to modernize the spelling; the spacing of lines of verse divided between multiple characters is often ignored or done incorrectly; there are a few missing lines. Even the line numbering is off in nearly every play. The linguistic and other glosses are helpful, but more are needed. The catalogue of maxims derived from the comedies, arranged by subject, is poorly executed and arguably unnecessary. A more detailed study of La Chaussée’s moral and social views, without all the quotations, would have better illuminated the topic.