Passing Judgment: The Politics and Poetics of Sovereignty in French Tragedy from Hardy to Racine by Hélène E. Bilis (review)

Reviews 249 writers are rare, if one excepts Philippe Sollers (who has published Schuhl’s last three books in his “L’Infini” collection at Gallimard). Such contextualization would be welcome, because it would help us to understand how Schuhl situates himself on the literary horizon of his time, and ours. Basquin’s prose is highly stylized, wagering upon mobility, quickness, and surprising shifts of focus. In many instances, those effects are pleasing, serving to pique our interest and keep us on our toes. At other moments however, that clamant stylization deflects attention from Schuhl and his work, and one may wonder in those moments whether Basquin’s chief concern in this book is Schuhl’s writing, or his own. University of Colorado Warren Motte Bilis, Hélène E. Passing Judgment: The Politics and Poetics of Sovereignty in French Tragedy from Hardy to Racine. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2016. ISBN 978-1-48750026 -9. Pp. xx + 258. Passing Judgment shows, through elegant readings of mostly canonical dramatic and critical texts, that seventeenth-century tragedy was burdened with conflicting imperatives to place the king at the center of the action while simultaneously sanctifying his person and deeds. Focusing on representations of “royal judgment” (legal decisions not always undertaken by the king), Bilis traces the unresolved tension between the divergent needs of drama and ideology through the era’s greatest plays. The book’s six chapters sometimes flout chronology in service of an“anti-teleological view” (45), although historical sequence does not imply causality and might provide a clearer picture of how Bilis’s thesis maps onto the century’s political progress. Corneille looms large in this study, as Bilis aligns the critical scandal of Don Fernand’s verdict in Le Cid with the sovereigns of tragicomedy, whose judgments resolve unlikely plot complications with little regard for promoting a strong, coherent, or moral image of the monarch. In an assured and fluent interpretation of Corneille’s early dramaturgy , Bilis further argues that the author’s first tragedy, Médée, influences his evolving depictions of royal jurisprudence in Clitandre, Le Cid, and Horace. But the claim that in Le Cid,Corneille“fails to heed [...] calls for more dominant and dignified monarchical displays of power” (119) only makes sense in the wake of that play’s unprecedented popular success, which transformed the stage into a crucial arbiter of the royal image and dramatic criticism into an explicitly political discursive field.A reading of Hardy’s early-century play Scédase highlights the injustice of kingly judgment when a commoner finds himself the victim of a crime committed by nobles. Sovereign judgment is also shown to be susceptible to contamination by ridicule, as an analysis of Racine’s Les plaideurs and Britannicus reveals the fragility of tragedy as a buttress to absolutist ideology. Here, as elsewhere, Bilis gestures at the delegation of authority inherent to stage acting, but further exploration of performance’s ability to destabilize intended textual meaning would enrich the discussion of the generic boundaries between comedy and tragedy, as well as of the fraught relationship between politics and theater. A fine discussion of clemency underscores how the extra-legal decision to take no action in the face of crime corresponds to a redefinition of the king from executor of the law to its embodiment, an observation that illuminates readings of Cinna and Rotrou’s Vencenslas (although concluding this interpretation with Rotrou’s historically and thematically anterior Crisante does little to reinforce this argument). Returning to Racine, Bilis shows how the “king’s judgment becomes the central problem of the play, not its resolution” (185) in Mithridate and Phèdre, whose monarchs are blinded by their emotions and an over-reliance on ambiguous physical evidence reminiscent of tragicomic dénouements evoked earlier in the study. Even Racine fails in the contradictory task of constructing a moving spectacle around a faultless sovereign. Passing Judgment convincingly argues that this irreconcilable esthetic-political paradox pushed seventeenth-century playwrights toward the dynamic, original artistic practices that characterize the golden age of French tragedy. Louisiana State University Jeffrey M. Leichman Bonzi, Federico. L’honneur dans l’œuvre de Montesquieu. Paris: Champion, 2016. ISBN 978-2-7453-3052...