Un théâtre de l’épreuve: tragédies huguenotes en marge des guerres de religion en France, 1550–1573 by Ruth Stawarz-Luginbühl (review)

This is a clever, thoughtful, and very detailed study of a corpus of nine plays written during the run-up to the Wars of Religion. Two of the plays, dating from 1561, have not been reprinted since the sixteenth century: the Tragi-comedie of A. de La Croix (pseudonym of Antoine de La Roche Chandieu) and La Desconfiture de Goliath by Joachim de Coignac (both available at BnF–Gallica). The others are better known: Jean de la Taille’s two tragedies Saül le furieux and La Famine, Théodore de Bèze’s Abraham sacrifiant, Louis Des Masures’s trilogy on David, and André de Rivaudeau’s Aman. The study is essentially nine monographs in one, with a lengthy Introduction in which Ruth Stawarz-Luginbühl justifies her choice of works and outlines her central thesis that the plays, all on biblical subjects, are linked by a common theme, indicated by the title of the work. The theme is ‘temptation’, in the sense of a test of faith, when the protagonist has to confront an apparent rupture of his (all the protagonists are male) contract with God. This echoes the experience of Protestants in France before the Wars of Religion: suffering such persecution, they might find themselves so shaken in their faith that they come to doubt their own election. Stawarz-Luginbühl also proposes to answer the question of how, if the suffering protagonist is to emerge from despair into a state of renewed faith, the intervention of God can be conveyed within a literary framework (humanist dramaturgy) that does not admit ‘le merveilleux chrétien’ (p. 17), and a Protestant theological context that forbids any visible representation of God. Drawing on wide and deep reading, the author examines the plays very closely and makes many interesting observations, but occasionally the argument seems strained, particularly in the case of Saül le furieux. To make this play fit the mould, Stawarz-Luginbühl has to persuade us that Saül’s options remain open until late in the play, which in turn requires us to accept that the Esprit de Samuël conjured by the Phitonisse is not a genuine manifestation but a ‘ruse du Malin’ (p. 237). It is true that the powers invoked by the witch to call up Samuel are ungodly, but nothing else in the text, or in the biblical narrative, appears to cast doubt on the genuineness of the apparition. The argument that the figure of Samuel, if meant to carry authority, would have appeared as a protatic character seems weak, given how closely La Taille follows the chronology of the biblical narrative; thus the spirit of Samuel cannot appear until summoned by the witch. Those working on sixteenth-century Protestant theatre will do well to consult this book, and will gain much from it, but perhaps they need not subscribe to every argument the author proposes.