L'Écriture du spectacle: les didascalies dans le théâtre européen aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (review)

Véronique Lochert has produced a richly documented, interdisciplinary, multi-dimensional work of vast proportions. A book about stage directions in the written form of early modern European drama, L'Écriture du spectacle might, initially, seem to have a very precisely delimited subject. But one of the fascinations of Lochert's topic is exactly its unfathomability. Who are stage directions for? Variously, readers, directors, actors, censors. Their destinataires change according to historical period, country, printer, dramatist, prevailing aesthetic. And what are stage directions? We think of them as the italicized words in printed drama. But they have taken many forms. They have been the non-italicized words in printed drama when it was usual to italicize characters' speeches. They appear in the words spoken by characters and are known as implicit stage directions. They have been the words in red ink (the rubrics) in some manuscripts. They have been footnotes and marginal notes. And when the tradition is not (as it is in most early editions of Shakespeare) to mark character exits with the stage direction 'exit' or 'exeunt' but to indicate the start of a new scene on the page with a new list of characters present, scene divisions themselves become a kind of stage direction, as, arguably, do lists of dramatis personae and, where they exist, arguments (plot summaries, sometimes printed at the start of plays or acts of plays). Lochert casts her net wide, not only in the interpretation of her subject, but also in her broad chronological and geographical sweep: despite the title, she ranges from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century and she is equally conversant with English, French, Italian, and Spanish drama. She divides her material into five parts. The first is a historical and theoretical survey, which throws into prominence the recurrent tension between word- and spectacle-based approaches to the dramatic text. The second looks specifically at how stage directions can help actors, whilst the third is about readers. The fourth looks at the different ways in which stage directions have been presented typographically and stylistically. The fifth turns to the interaction between explicit and implicit stage directions. If stage directions, as we know them, have become much more abundant since the eighteenth century, Lochert's book admirably reveals their intriguingly complex roles in early modern dramatic writing. One reason she offers for their increasing success is the opportunity for tyranny they can offer the dramatist. As Voltaire so bullyingly said: 'Quelque mauvais que soit mon ouvrage, il m'appartient: les comédiens doivent le réciter comme je l'ai fait et non comme ils veulent.'