L’Espace et le temps dans la dramaturgie médiévale française (review)

A central difficulty of theatre and performance studies is constructing or hypothesizing about tacit, and often non-verbal, elements of a work that exists only in written format, a particularly acute problem when dealing with medieval theatre. In marking out and explaining the properly performative aspects of a play, a fair amount of imagination is required. Pascale Dumont takes on this challenge with a rather straightforward thesis: first, one can define a specific medieval dramaturgy, distinct from other genres and fairly homogeneous; secondly, one can trace important developments in the representation of time and space between the twelfth and late fifteenth centuries. To make up for the absence of textual clues, Dumont often turns to other written texts for help, producing a study that in certain respects draws more heavily on intertextuality than performance studies, an excellent methodological choice that helps to overcome the dearth of textual clues in the plays. By examining narrative texts that formed the basis for plays (for example, the seventh-century Sermo contra Judaeos, Paganos et Arianos as the model for the twelfth-century Jeu d’Adam), Dumont shows how modifications are motivated by the necessities of the stage. Throughout, she emphasizes the dramatists’ creativity and innovative approaches. Genre transfer, as a narrative text is recast as spectacle, can be perplexing: what exactly is lost, and what is gained in the process? Dumont is very adept at showing how theatrical representations, where visual considerations dominate, demand both deletions from and additions to the narrative text. She does a solid job bringing coherence to the apparent chaos, offering plausible explanations for why various changes were made and what was likely present on stage that we cannot see in the written text. She shows how dramatists employed music, mimes, monologues, and other devices both to speed up and to slow down time and to demarcate different spaces on the stage. Dumont’s argument that medieval dramaturgy is a legitimate, clearly delineated genre and should not be dismissed or denigrated because of our postclassical views of theatre is undisputed. However, her most compelling contribution is in demonstrating how the stage dictates various modifications to a narrative text. Dumont is also to be applauded for having mastered the intricacies of a not inconsiderable corpus of plays, including some of the later Mystères, plays that run into the tens of thousands of lines and were performed over several days. On the other hand, one finds little that is new in Dumont’s explanations for changes in how time and space were represented from the twelfth to the late fifteenth century (for example, the increased prominence of Purgatory, the invention of mechanized clocks, New World discoveries, etc.). In thirteen chapters, with multiple subheadings for each chapter, Dumont breaks down into digestible bits a vast corpus of primarily hagiographical and biblical plays. Her brief foray in the latter chapters into the corpus of plays referred to as théâtre profane is not entirely helpful, and the near absence of anglophone scholarship is unfortunate. To her credit, Dumont has clearly thought long and hard about how space and time are represented on the medieval stage and offers interesting insights into how medieval dramatists demonstrated tremendous creativity in adapting narrative texts for the stage.