Théâtre de femmes de l’Ancien Régime ed. by Aurore Evain, Perry Gethner, and Henriette Goldwyn (review)

This collection of eighteenth-century plays is the fourth volume in a five-volume series that aims to bring to light a wide variety of plays published by women playwrights in the Old Regime and make them available to students, professors, and scholars interested in theater or women’s studies. This volume makes an important contribution to French literary studies since many of these works are not readily available in libraries or online. The editors have gone to great lengths to standardize these texts and to make them more comprehensible to the modern reader. They added a glossary for words that no longer have the same meaning and modernized spelling and punctuation. Furthermore, they added stage directions and notes on the versification to make it possible for these plays to be performed or read aloud.

The introduction effectively situates women playwrights within the larger trends of eighteenth-century theater and emphasizes the various means by which they gained access to this theatrical world. The works by the seven female playwrights featured in this volume, both professional and amateur, reflect the diverse genres and venues made available to women playwrights in eighteenth-century France. Mademoiselle Monicault’s Le Dédain Affecté (1724), a comedy that finds its roots in the nouvelle comédie marivaudienne, and Hélène-Virginie Riccoboni’s Le Naufrage (1726) were both performed at the Théâtre-Italien. Madame de Staal-Delaunay’s L’Engouement (1747), a delightful comedy that gives a brutally honest depiction of the haute société, is a shining example of the kinds of plays performed in the théâtres de société—theaters in private residences that allowed playwrights the freedom to disregard the rules of decorum. In Les Amazones, performed at the Comédie-Française in 1749, Anne-Marie du Boccage exploits the traditionally “masculine” tragedy in verse for her dramatization of the myth of the Amazons—female warriors who inhabited an all-female society. Françoise de Graffigny’s works, which occupy the largest portion of the volume, were performed for both public as well as private audiences: Ziman et Zenise, a one-act comedy composed in 1747, was performed by the children of the Archduke François-Étienne in Schönbrunn in 1749; Phaza, a one-act comedy about a girl raised as a boy by a fairy, was performed in 1753 at the Count of Clermont’s théâtre de société in Berny; and Cénie, her “pièce nouvelle,” had a successful run at the Comédie-Française in 1750. Madame de Montesson’s first play, Marianne ou L’Orpheline (1766), based on Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne, capitalized on the new popular trend of adapting the French novel for the stage.

In the introduction and prefaces to the plays, the editors effectively draw attention to the proto-feminist themes highlighted in many of these plays. Françoise-Albine Benoist’s original comedy, La Supercherie Réciproque (1768), announces the revolutionary ideals of Figaro by calling into question the inequalities of class and sex. Les Amazones, a rare example of an eighteenth-century play that examines the theme of the femme forte, explores the place of female power in society. Many of these plays, such as Le Naufrage, Marianne, and Ziman et Zenise emphasize the theme of female friendship and solidarity. Le Naufrage gives emphasis to the theme of female emancipation through the character Silvia, who, despite her victimization, manages to take initiative and change the course of events in her own life. Cénie explores the theme of female disempowerment within the context of marriage, reflecting Graffigny’s skepticism towards an institution that privileges men.

As the editors highlight in their preface, eighteenth-century women playwrights approached the woman question in a variety of...