Guilty Pleasures: Theatre, Piety, and Immorality in 17th-Century France ed. by Joseph Harris and Julia Prest (review)

Although the playwrights Corneille, Racine, and Molière have become synonymous with the glory of France's Grand Siècle, we forget how controversial going to the theater could be in the seventeenth century, akin to getting caught watching internet porn or texting a naked selfie today. As Harris and Prest note in their introduction, theater in pre-Enlightenment France was an illicit entertainment. Despite its popularity, spectators were conscious of indulging in shady behavior—the guilty pleasure of the volume's title—condemned by moral authorities. In the ten essays gathered here, scholars from the United States, France, and Great Britain analyze the arguments, vocabulary, and moral stance adopted by playwrights and their critics who reflected on the power of theatrical illusion, an art form dependent on drawing in spectators and forging a complicity between them and the action onstage. Central to the volume is the notion that "anti-theatricalists" (religious critics who condemned the theater as poison for the soul) were more nuanced and insightful in describing the effects of theater on spectators than were the partisans of the genre, who mostly relied on the force of theatrical pleasure to speak for itself. This is an odd claim, especially since Harris has already devoted attention to the intricate theories of spectatorship in Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (OUP, 2014), where he pored over the complexity of pro-theatrical arguments from the likes of d'Aubignac and Corneille. The claim is repeated both in the introduction and in Harris's essay,"Playing with Fire? Bernard Lamy and the Pleasures of Identification" (25). This Yale volume is best read, then, after or alongside Inventing the Spectator, as a coda, for here the reader will find only a terse eight-page introduction that lays out too swiftly the context and stakes of the quarrels against theater starting in the 1660s, with few footnotes and no bibliography. For instance, we are told that by the time Rousseau pens the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), he will no longer couch his critique of theater in religious terms, such as those of Bossuet, Nicole, and Lamy, theologians who figure prominently in the essays, but no explanation is given for how Rousseau's secularized anti-theatrical arguments recuperate or echo the earlier ones. Each essay broaches a different angle regarding the perils of theatrical experience from the debate around Molière's L'école des femmes (cf. Prest with an informative analysis of the female spectator) to adapting biblical stories to the stage (cf. Gethner) and classroom skits at Maintenon's Saint-Cyr (cf. Varney-Kennedy). These sometimes overlap a little too closely, such as Hammond's essay on Pierre Nicole's use of the term "poison" for theater and Cavaillé's on Nicole's metaphors of consumption for theater. Nonetheless, Michael Call on Molière, Hall Bjørnstad on Rotrou's Saint-Genest, and Christopher Semk on Bossuet and the dangers of "ticklish ears" are sure to become standard reading for syllabi on spectatorship in early modern France.