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  • Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France by Christopher Semk
  • Katherine Ibbett
Christopher Semk. Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France BUCKNELL UP, 2017. 172 PP.

CHRISTOPHER SEMK'S ADMIRABLE NEW BOOK puts sacramental theology at the heart of an evolution in French neoclassical poetics, drawing on the test case of a set of seventeenth-century dramas about Christian Martyrdom. The sudden appearance and disappearance of these Martyr plays on the French stage is often read as an exploration of secular sovereignty and political power. In contrast, Semk's work seeks to account for the innovations of this theatrical mode by placing it firmly within the context of contemporary theological debates. If the seventeenth-century Jansenist Pierre Nicole worried that the writers of Martyr dramas made their leading roles rather more like ancient Roman heroes than saints, Semk suggests that such a jibe underestimates the rich and nuanced ways in which Martyr drama engaged theological questions. In so doing, he argues compellingly for the significance of religious belief to the elaboration of poetics in the French context.

Semk's account insists on the theater as a place where things happen: even before we get to his chapter on the actor-Martyr Genesius, he asks "not what Martyrological theater is, but rather what Martyrological theater does" (xviii). Questions about the place of belief and faith in the theatrical experiment permeate his work, and the most refreshing parts of the book, for this reader, come when a sense of faith's wondrous difficulties bolsters his investigations. Semk gives real insights into particular dramatic debates of the period, arguing persuasively that the test case of the Martyrological theater brought Aristotelian poetics up against its limits. But the real strength of the book is that it allows for a broader understanding of the place of the religious within a rapidly professionalizing theatrical scene.

Chapter 1 takes up a broad account of relations between church and stage in the period. In echoing today's debates about established religion, its title, "The Separation of Church and Stage," suggests something of what is at stake in taking religion seriously as a cultural matrix for the theater. Semk's opening pages are stirring. He begins with the most concrete of material evidence: a stone escutcheon representing the Passion that, for much of the seventeenth [End Page 171] century, stood over the doorway of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the leading theater of the day. Semk reads this sacred representation—a remnant of the time before the confraternity who owned the theater had been blocked from performing religious plays—as a "haunting" of the new-model French stage by an older and more openly sacred corpus. From this arresting beginning, he goes on to investigate the complex imbrications of the sacred and the theatrical. This allows him to explore a broader range of representations than those usually encountered in scholarly work on the theater; Semk takes seriously a range of plays from the French provinces—I was especially struck by the examples he draws from François d'Avre's 1668 Dipné, Infante d'Irlande, since one of the virtues of Semk's approach is that it allows us to think more about French theater's relations to non-French textual traditions. This chapter gives a firmly useful overview of seventeenth-century religious responses to the theater, both for and against it, and, most importantly, gives us a more complex picture of the role of faith and belief in debates about fictiveness and poetics.

Chapter 2 takes up the question of the place of spectacle within Martyrological theater. In accounting for the success of stories that privilege the Martyr's suffering body at a time when such bodies were largely excluded from the stage, Semk digs into a complex tradition of reading spectacle. Drawing on the Aristotelian tradition, he inquires into the relations between pathos and opsis, often taking issue with translators or scholars today who have not allowed for sufficient nuance in their understanding of that framework. Semk's careful work sets the context for a persuasive reading of the various staged accounts of the death of Saint Eustache, and...

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