La Poétique by Hippolyte Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière (review)

It is a curious shame that France’s first full-length vernacular treatise on tragedy should have been left out of print for so long. La Mesnardière’s Poétique (1639) has been republished only once since the seventeenth century, in the Slatkine Reprints edition of 1972. In this respect, Jean-Marc Civardi’s new critical edition of the Poétique forms part of a most welcome resurgence of scholarly interest in seventeenth-century dramatic theory, alongside Hélène Baby’s excellent edition of the abbé d’Aubignac’s La Pratique du théâtre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001) and Bénédicte Louvat and Marc Escola’s handy paperback edition of Corneille’s Trois discours sur le poème dramatique (Paris: Flammarion, 1999). Though perhaps neither as rich nor as intellectually complex as these two later works, La Mesnardière’s Poétique certainly stands as a landmark; indeed, in Civardi’s words, its status as France’s first great poetics of theatre is precisely ‘ce qui fait l’intérêt de l’ouvrage’ (p. 21). Approaching the text from various perspectives (biographical, theoretical, thematic), Civardi’s Introduction situates La Mesnardière’s work within two principal contexts: the long tradition of commentary on Aristotle and ancient writers (not least by Castelvetro, La Mesnardière’s repeated critical target) and the more immediate intellectual and cultural environment of the 1630s and 1640s. As Civardi admits, the edition does not set out to explore La Mesnardière’s relationship to — and possible influence on — later theoreticians and practitioners such as d’Aubignac, Corneille, and Racine (p. 72); I, for one, hope that this edition will prompt further exploration in this area. Nevertheless, Civardi does stake out in broad terms the shifts in taste over the century that might have resulted in La Mesnardière’s somewhat diminished reputation in subsequent generations. As he suggests, while La Mesnardière certainly paves the way for ‘classical’ theatre, writing for educated amateurs such as ‘les honnêtes gens de Paris et de la cour’ (p. 28), his theories themselves lack the refined and easy-going urbanity prized by his successors: ‘La grande génération de 1660 ménagera le goût, le je ne sais quoi, le plaire, certaines pointes, le sublime; La Mesnardière s’en tient à la raison, à la doctrine, aux règles, au bon sens, jusqu’à l’étroitesse et à la monotonie’ (p. 13). Yet, as Civardi’s helpful discussion about passion, compassion, and rhetoric suggests, La Mesnardière’s devotion to reason and rationality is neither as thorough nor as dry as it might first appear. In this respect it is perhaps a shame that Civardi has nothing to say in his Introduction or his (otherwise copious and well-informed) footnotes about La Mesnardière’s wonderfully paradoxical claim that ‘un poème n’est point raisonnable s’il n’enchante et s’il n’éblouit la raison de ses auditeurs’ (p. 216). On the whole, though, this is an excellent edition, and should help to rehabilitate an author and thinker who has been consigned for too long to the footnotes of literary history.