En disant l'alexandrin: l'acteur tragique et son art, XVIIe–XXe siècle (review)

This book will be of special interest to students of seventeenth-century theatre and performance history. Its author has set herself an unenviable task, which is to trace an evolution in the acting styles applied to seventeenth-century French tragedy from the original performances to the present day. Given that the earliest sound recordings date from the beginning of the twentieth century, the material on which she can base her claims is inevitably uneven across the chronological span. There is another kind of unevenness, which results from a particular focus on case studies, fascinating in themselves, but often at odds with some of the general trends she tries to adumbrate. So the seventeenth-century chapter focuses predominantly on Molière and Racine. The eighteenth-century chapter, more wide-ranging, none the less dwells a good deal on Adrienne Lecouvreur; the nineteenth-century chapter on Rachel; and the twentieth-century one on Sarah Bernhardt, Marie Bell, Maria Casarès, and Gérard Philipe. The story she tells, however, is perhaps an unsurprising one. Until the 1930s, tragic acting was declamation, though declamation evolved. In the seventeenth century, there was a strict adherence to the pronunciation and particular delivery of the alexandrine along with the observation of a rhetorical code of gesture. She points out that Molière was not as revolutionary in his attitude to tragic acting as often thought and that Racine was distinctly more revolutionary in his approach to the alexandrine (so echoing Sabine Chaouche's L'Art du comédien; see FS, LVII (2003), 78-79). There is a relaxation of these codes in the eighteenth century when the art of acting is considered in its own right rather than as a subset of rhetoric, and again in the nineteenth century when romanticism invites actors to consider the psychology of their roles (so taking the emphasis away from the external display of passions and inflecting critical approaches to seventeenth-century tragedy ever since). In the twentieth-century, Gros de Gasquet finds a variety of acting styles: from the one that treats tragic characters as if they were ordinary people and the alexandrine as if it were prose to Eugène Green's attempts to recapture the strangeness of tragedy by restoring something of the original performance styles. Gros de Gasquet clearly prefers the latter to the former. Her arguments about Racine's approach to versification and rhythm are unfortunately invalidated by her insistence on the importance of the original punctuation for the delivery of the lines, whilst showing no signs whatsoever of having inspected any seventeenth-century editions of his plays and whilst ignoring the fact that actors learnt their lines from manuscript part-roles and not from printed editions. Had she known Mary Flowers's work on Racine's sentence structure and characterization, and Angelica Goodden's on eighteenth-century acting styles, she could have spared herself some effort.