Théâtre complet, I: 'Idoménée', 'Atrée et Thyeste', 'Électre', 'Rhadamisthe et Zénobie', 'Xercès' by Prosper Jolyot De Crébillon (review)

Crébillon's tragedies can apparently damage one's health. A frequently reported anecdote tells of Boileau on his deathbed complaining that listening to just two scenes of Rhadamiste et Zénobie would be enough to kill him off. Crébillon's reputation has suffered in part owing to a deterministic view of literary history, according to which sclerosis, decadence, and decline are inevitable after Corneille's and Racine's triumphs in the narrow categories of classicism. Since Crébillon's works are usually assessed according to the classical norm, he risks being denigrated as, in Voltaire's words, a 'Racine ivre' (p. 25). It is not just his critics who marginalized him, however; the playwright himself stated in 1709 that 'Racine avait pris le Ciel, Corneille la Terre, il ne me restait que l'Enfer' (p. 159). This is undoubtedly a claim for originality on Crébillon's part, but it does position him as an aberrant playwright (albeit a rather glamorous one). Crébillon's creativity and legacy are now being reassessed — see, for instance, Nicholas Dion's study Entre les larmes et l'effroi: la tragédie classique française, 1677-1726 (Classiques Garnier, 2012) — and the present, very welcome scholarly edition of five of his nine tragedies gives us the opportunity to consider his original contribution to French drama. The plays in this volume were written between 1705 and 1715, the year of Xercès's failure; that period also saw the great successes of Rhadamiste et Zénobie and Électre. In addition, the volume includes the preface to the 1750 edition of Crébillon's complete works, in which he defends his depiction of violent love. Magali Soulatges's presentation of the plays is of a very high standard. Particularly effective are the footnotes in which she identifies the echoes of, and allusions to, other tragedies; in so doing she demonstrates his close proximity to the dramatic tradition that he simultaneously disrupts through an emphasis on excess, complexity, and horror (infanticide is a recurrent theme). Indeed the Crébillon presented here is a playwright who both submits to a dominant aesthetic model and attempts to create drama free from those references. His virtuoso command of the alexandrine is counterbalanced, for instance, by the dismantling of the classical conception of the hero, pushed to the limits of mimesis, which serves to limit the drama's cathartic potential. In the preface to Atrée et Thyeste Crébillon acknowledges his tendency to present the spectator with violence and 'images intéressantes' (p. 164). Soulatges argues that, by privileging affect and empathy over taste and reason, Crébillon not only evacuates his plays of any moral purpose but implies that man's tragic condition can never be elucidated. This excellent volume will be of interest to all those studying or working on early modern French theatre.