Challenges to Traditional Authority: Plays by French Women Authors, 1650–1700 by Françoise Pascal et al. (review)

This volume, part of "The Other Voice" series now located at the University of Toronto and published in collaboration with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, continues Perry Gethner's longterm scholarly project to make available the work of early modern French women playwrights, both in modern French editions and in English translation, to modern readers. Plays by Françoise Pascal and Marie-Catherine Desjardins (Mme de Villedieu) were already available in his earlier translated collection, The Lunatic Lover and Other Plays by French Women Playwrights of the 17^th and 18^th Centuries (1994); in this volume, he includes two new plays: Endymion, a "machine" play by Pascal, and Nitetis, another play by Villedieu. He also includes Genseric, a historical tragedy by Antoinette Deshoulières, and a selection by Catherine Durand of so-called proverb comedies, short playlets illustrating well-known proverbs. As Gethner points out, the number of tragedies written by women in the period is small; he counts nine in total, including two tragi-comedies, but argues that the corpus is important because five were staged professionally in Paris, two were later revived, and one may have had an unusually long and successful first run (based on the usual period of time between the play's production and its appearance in print). None was published separately in more than one edition, although the plays by Villedieu and Deshoulières were included in posthumous collections of their complete works.

As Gethner notes at the outset, much of the introductory material for this volume is adapted from the introductions to his multi-volume French anthology, Femmes dramaturges en France (1650–1750): pièces choisies; and additional information is available on the website "Théâtre de femmes de l'Ancien Régime," which includes useful bibliographical information and brief summaries of plays, and extends into the nineteenth century. He does an adequate job of contextualizing the tragedies represented here by describing French neo-classical tragedy; the debates about the rules of time, place, and action; bienséance (decorum) and verisimilitude (probability); and the shift from tragedies based primarily on classical antiquity to biblical themes and "the glorious deaths of Christian martyrs" (11).

Gethner argues that these women playwrights represent their subjects in proto-feminist ways by debunking traditional male heroism, depicting female rulers more positively than their male counterparts, and portraying "genuine friendship" between women (14); however, without direct reference to plays by male writers, such generalizations are dubious. He is on firmer ground when he shows the changes made in a source by a particular playwright, such as Pascal's treatment of Jean Ogier de Gombauld's novel, Endymion. Gethner also claims that Richelieu's support of the theater, drama's growing prestige, and the prominence of women encouraged by salon culture account for the increased number of plays by women in the second half of the seventeenth century.

On comedy, Gethner's introduction is less helpful. He describes examples of one-act comedies by Pascal and others that take up the "foibles of delusional members of salon society" (16) without acknowledging examples of the genre by their male counterparts, from Molière's Les précieuses ridicules to Corneille's popular comedies of the 1620s and 1630s, only two of which have ever been translated—the anomalous L'illusion comique that Tony Kushner recently adapted as The Illusion, and Le menteur or The Liar that recently had a successful run in New York. The volume ends with several "proverb comedies," but their inclusion raises a number of issues. They were initially published as appendices to a novel by Henriette-Julie de Murat by her friend and collaborator, Catherine Durand. Though reference is made to parlor games not unlike charades...