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Reviewed by:
  • Le Personnage historique de théâtre de 1789 à nos joursed. by Ariane Ferry
  • Logan J. Connors
Le Personnage historique de théâtre de 1789 à nos jours. Édité par A rianeF erry. ( Rencontres, 89.) Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014. 491 pp.

Ariane Ferry’s volume of essays shows that the historical past is a popular and fruitful theme in contemporary and modern drama. With twenty-five contributions from European and North American theatre experts, Ferry’s collection covers an admirable amount of intellectual and geographical ground. Despite the glaring contextual differences among chapters (in what other book can we read about Charles IX, Franklin Roosevelt, and Cleopatra?), the volume remains remarkably sound; each author ultimately proves Ferry’s thesis that modern playwrights deploy historical characters in an attempt to ‘interroger le présent’ (p. 9). Overall, the collection is coherent, but its structure and sequencing is daunting and, at times, unnecessarily complex. It includes two major parts with several subsections. Some sections have just one essay; some have four. [End Page 565]The collection begins with a short Introduction by Ferry before moving on to Daniel Mortier’s masterful essay, ‘La Fabrique du personnage historique’, which serves as a sort of second introduction. The following section, ‘Réécritures du personnage historique’, includes a series of chapters on specific historical figures, such as Christopher Columbus, Francisco Pizarro, Mary Stuart, and Philip II. Moving from the figure to the form, the next section — perhaps the volume’s most theoretically bold — shows the evolution of historical characters in particular dramatic genres (melodrama, tragedy) and repertoires (the Comédie-Française, the Opéra-Comique). The last section of Part One focuses on specific actors and on the interpretive changes to acting catalysed by the presence of ‘historical reality’ on stage. Of particular note is Éric Avocat’s fascinating essay on the contested rhetorical and semiotic functions of acting during the French Revolution. Chantal Foucrier’s intriguing essay on the interstices of history, myth, and legend launches Part Two of the collection. The next two sections then work in tandem: the first shows how and why playwrights sought to create historical heroes (Roosevelt, for example); the second attempts to demystify several heroes of the European collective imagination (Napoleon, for example). The final section interrogates three specific contexts that link historical theatre to commemoration: nineteenth-century colonialism, twentieth-century Spanish politics, and post-war Germany. Ferry, Foucrier, and Mortier’s collaborative conclusion summarizes skilfully the main theoretical arguments in this truly catholic collection of essays. As with most volumes of conference proceedings, Ferry’s book is a hodgepodge that will draw a variety of readers with disparate research questions. What separates Ferry’s volume from the pack is the book’s outstanding indexes. In addition to providing an extensive bibliography of both general and cited works, Ferry and her team have worked meticulously to index all of the historical figures mentioned in the book (from Adenauer to Wellington) and all of the cited playwrights and scholars (from Abirached to Zuckmayer). This effort to help future students and scholars navigate the book is commendable, thereby making Ferry’s book a comprehensive and detailed starting point for any research on historical drama in the modern era.

Logan J. Connors
Bucknell University

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