Triatan L'Hermite, le Théatre Complet by Claude K. Abraham, Jerome W. Schweitzer, Jacqueline Van Baelen (review)

TRIATAN L'HERMITE, Le Theatre Complet, édition critique par Claude K. Abraham. Jerome W. Schweitzer, Jacqueline Van Baelen. University (Alabama): The University of Alabama Press, 1975. Preceded by Amédée Carriat's informative and inspirational preface, this hefty (894 page) tome is the first complete edition of Tristan's theatre since one produced, in a small number of fascicules, by Edmond Gérard between 1901 and 1907. It is also infinitely superior in the care with which the text was edited. And so, under one roof, so to speak, we finally find housed the following plays, some of which have rarely been studied because of their inaccessibility, and each preceded by an introduction and a bibliography of previous editions: La Mariane (1636), Panthée (1637), La Mort de Séneque (1643-1644), La Folie du Sage (1644-1645), La Mort de Chrispe (1644), La CéLimene (1652), Le Parasite (1652?), and Osman (1646-1647). Each play is also followed by a series of helpful notes. The editors have clearly worked assiduously to produce a book that belongs in every university library and in the collections of interested specialists, but not perhaps for the reason one has been conditioned to expect, when speaking of Tristan. He deserves to be read in and for his own poetic and, perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree, dramatic qualities than for his role as "Précurseur de Racine." The first forty years of the French seventeenth century have finally come into their own of late as a period recognized as being charged with extraordinary energy and possessed of considerable talent—especially poetic and narrative. It is to the credit of Professors Abraham, Schweitzer, and Van Baelen that they sensed the return to what has been condescendingly known as "preclassicism " and decided to furnish us with the collected theatre of one of its fascinating practitioners. RONALD W. TOBIN* *RONALD W. TOBIN is the Chairman ofthe Department of French and Italian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW173 ...