Records of Early French Drama in Parisian Notary Registers

Records of Early French Drama in Parisian Notary Registers Stephen K. Wright In recent years, considerable progress has been made in the collection, publication, and evaluation of early European performance records. The recovery of documentary material describing civic and religious spectacles of many kinds has led theater historians to define their field in much broader terms than ever before. Consequently, medieval and renaissance drama is no longer conceived of as a more or less haphazard assortment of autonomous literary texts. In light of new archival discoveries, theater historians are increasingly inclined to discuss public processions, plays, interludes, and various other ceremonies and entertainments in terms of the non-literary features that conditioned them—that is to say, in terms of pragmatic stagecraft (including music, costume, backdrops, props, and special effects), cast selection and supervision, financial sponsorship , crowd management, and various forms of local competition for textual ownership and organizational control. In short, the early theater has come to be regarded as a complex institution that directly affected (and was in turn affected by) a wide range of mutually interconnected economic, social, political, intellectual, and religious forces. The new understanding of theater history in the broader context of social and economic history has been especially productive in the case of English and German drama due to the efforts of the Malone Society, the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, and the pioneering work of Bernd Neumann. 1 In France, however, relatively little attention has been devoted to the recovery of documentary evidence. It has STEPHEN K. WRIGHT is Associate Professor of English at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of The Vengeance of Our Lord: Medieval Dramatizations of the Destruction of Jerusalem (1989) and various essays on early English, French, German, Latin, and Swedish drama. 232 Stephen K. Wright233 now been over a century since the publication of Louis Petit de Julleville's survey of performance records and playbooks, a monumental work that still provides the most comprehensive and reliable foundation for studies of the patronage relationships, performance practices, and reception history of the French mystères.2 Gustave Cohen's studies of records associated with the Mons Passion play of 1501 and other late medieval mystères, the research of Jacques Chocheyras on the theatrical traditions of Savoy and Dauphiné, and Graham Runnalls' analysis of the traditions of Montferrand have supplemented the work of Petit de Julleville, but much remains to be done.3 Systematic archival research of the type undertaken by Neumann in Germany and the REED editors in Great Britain would almost certainly yield valuable results in France as well. As a case in point, one need only turn to Ernest Coyecque's collection of documents culled from the registers of several sixteenth-century Parisian notaries.4 This massive compilation of records offers fascinating glimpses into the everyday life of the city and its inhabitants, and has thus proved to be a valuable quarry for social historians. The work includes several entries of considerable interest to students of early French drama as well, and yet—with the exception of two documents relating to a play of St. Christopher—its value has gone unappreciated by theater historians. The purpose of this article is to identify and examine these materials in order to see what they have to tell us about dramatic productions and theatrical companies in and around early sixteenth-century Paris. The Play of St. John the Baptist (Paris, 1529). The earliest document to be considered was notarized by Pierre Crozon on 9 August 1529 (Coyecque, I, 222; No. 1097). In a single convoluted sentence, it records the terms of a contract between Guillaume Duchemin, a Parisian baker, and Gilles Borel, a lawyer of the same city. The contract stipulates that Borel agreed to sell to Duchemin "a mystery play for actors, to be used for performing the Life of St. John the Baptist, such as the purchaser has seen and has already performed." The price was set at ten gold ecus au soleil to be paid in advance in addition to further delayed payments totalling 60 livres tournois; the latter sum could be paid off in installments of 100 sous tournois (the equivalent...