Coriolan by Alexandre Hardy (review)

This edition and translation of Alexandre Hardy’s tragedy Coriolan, printed for the first time in 1625 but written between 1605 and 1615, is a welcome addition to the modern French editions of Hardy’s theatre as well as the growing body of English translations of early French theatrical texts. In his extensive Introduction, which precedes the French edition of the play, Fabien Cavaillé provides the reader with information regarding Hardy’s life, his social and literary milieus, his dramatic œuvre, and the genesis and challenges of the publication of Hardy’s dramatic texts. From here, Cavaillé offers an in-depth analysis of the play itself, by studying the characters, the staging devices, and the plot’s significance in early seventeenth-century France. Cavaillé’s edition maintains the original punctuation and spelling when they affect the performative features of the text such as breathing, line breaks, and rhyme schemes. In so doing, Cavaillé acknowledges that the reader will have to exert more effort to read the text, but he also hopes that these editorial choices will ‘rendre justice à un texte qui témoigne des possibilités du français au début du xvii^e siècle, et surtout, qui gagne à retrouver sa puissance théâtrale’ (p. 49). To facilitate the reading of Hardy’s text, Cavaillé provides copious but not overwhelming footnotes (187 in total) that explain the meaning, for instance, of an archaic word or an erudite reference, or signal a textual variant among the three copies that Cavaillé consulted to establish his critical edition. Renowned scholar Richard Hillman introduces his English translation, in which he makes the reader aware of ‘early modern drama as a European, rather than a strictly national, phenomenon’ (p. 110). In particular, the reader enjoys a comparative study of Hardy’s Coriolan with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608). Hillman does not argue for any direct influence or indebtedness one way or the other; rather, he points out some fundamental aspects that the plays have in common, such as the subject matter, their main textual source (Plutarch’s The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus via Jacques Amyot, in French, and Thomas North, in English), and the political topicality and undertones that the plays share. Hillman also highlights major differences between the plays, such as the depiction of the mother–son relation and the spectacular onstage suicide of Volomnie, Coriolan’s mother in Hardy’s play, versus Volumnia’s supplication sequence in Shakespeare’s adaptation. In terms of the translation, Hillman admirably imitates the French formal structure that we find in tragedies of this period: hexameter Alexandrine couplets. However, unlike Cavaillé’s edition, which maintains the original punctuation, Hillman employs the punctuation conventions of modern English. Hillman also includes numerous footnotes — seventy-one in total — to clarify meaning, make comparisons with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and so forth. Finally, Hillman inserts stage directions in bracketed italic font to guide the reader’s understanding of onstage action. This superb edition and its masterful translation will not only interest students and scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French theatre but also those whose research addresses questions of text and performance from a comparative and European perspective.