French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory ed. by Michael Meere (review)

Reviews 261 Sony est présenté comme une seule œuvre à structure ternaire “dont La vie et demie serait l’introduction et Le commencement des douleurs, le dénouement” avec entre ces deux points “une série de transformations représentées par les quatre autres romans” (145). Dans le deuxième chapitre, “Écarts ou déviations linguistiques”, le niveau de détail ne faiblit pas: dans la section“II.2.1.4.1. Les anthroponymes”, on trouve des listes de noms de personnages “à consonance tantôt latino-américaines, tantôt française, tantôt bantoue, des noms métissés et ceux empruntés à d’autres cultures”(173).Alors que le premier chapitre montre comment Sony a fait usage des ressources lexicales et grammaticales de la langue française, le chapitre 2 est consacré aux façons (là encore contextualisées et catégorisées) selon lesquelles il s’est affranchi de certaines contraintes langagières, a adapté la langue française en fonction de ses propres besoins, lui faisant parfois violence au cours de son travail d’écriture: “Ainsi, la déformation des expressions consacrées,les créations lexicales,les africanismes,les particularités onomastiques et syntaxiques” (229). On aurait d’ailleurs aimé trouver quelques comparaisons entre l’esthétique du grotesque telle que l’a pratiquée Sony et celle de Rabelais. Il ressort de l’ouvrage de Kasinga un nouveau regard sur les romans de Sony, regard qui ne se limite pas à leur thématique (généralement pessimiste). Western Washington University Edward Ousselin Meere, Michael, ed. French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory. Newark: UP of Delaware, 2015. ISBN 978-1-61149-548-5. Pp. xxxii + 336. $90. From its neutral, descriptive title, this volume of fifteen essays might be taken for an introduction to—or a textbook presentation of—theatrical literature by major sixteenth-century French playwrights. But this book takes an approach that is neither introductory nor scolaire and it extends to a broader field than one might expect. A number of the essays aim, precisely, at questioning the purely poetic or philological orientation of traditional criticism on “Renaissance Theater.” Instead, this group of mostly young scholars offer readings of texts that sometimes include but generally go beyond the canonical plays of Robert Garnier, Étienne Jodelle or Théodore de Bèze, by bringing in the unexpected: Rabelais, Montaigne, judicial proceedings, ballet de cour, and even Calvinist comedy.A number of these readings are informed by cultural criticism—see especially Andreea Marculescu’s examination of demonic possession as it existed in the Renaissance collective memory and Stephanie O’Hara’s remarkably light-hearted study of poisoners, real and imagined, on stage, in pamphlet literature and in the courtroom. In an interesting twist, Sybile Chevallier-Micki suggests ambitiously how the reenactment of cruelty experienced during the late sixteenth century contributed to stage design in Rouen, before Corneille and “classicism.” Others endeavor to understand dramatic performance from a Bakhtinian or Turnerian anthropological perspective: Michael Meere and Caroline Gates find a reflection on community building through farce in Rabelais’s Quart livre, while Fabien Cavaillé convincingly reads two important Montaigne essays as statements on the civic value of theater and festival. The volume also includes some probing politico-historicist approaches to performances composed more or less exclusively for the court. These include two readings of court ballet, the first on early Valois spectacles that Elizabeth R. Welch reads as polysemous diplomatic messages, the other on Louis XIII’s surprising self-representation as a not-so-dignified, not yet fully realized absolute monarch. The volume ends with an impressive intertextual reading of several pastoral rewritings of Sydney’s Arcadia by Richard Hillman. The pastoral genre is also represented earlier in the volume: Christian Biet, one of France’s recognized specialists in early modern theater, has provided an essay on Fonteny’s Le beau pasteur in which he finds a provocative generic (and gender) revision that distinguishes the French bergerie from Italian and Spanish models, principally through the introduction of homosexual male desire into the traditional subject matter. Biet argues that this revision both remains faithful to Virgilian prototypes and anticipates the neoclassical reconstruction of the...