The fifteen articles in this volume highlight the richness, diversity, and experimental nature of French and Francophone drama before the advent of what would become known as neoclassical French theater of the seventeenth century. In essays ranging from conventional stage plays (tragedies, comedies, pastoral, and mystery plays) to court ballets, royal entrances, and meta- and para-theatrical writings of the period from 1485 to 1640, French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory seeks to deepen and problematize our knowledge of texts, co-texts, and performances of drama from literary-historical, artistic, political, social, and religious perspectives. Moreover, many of the articles engage with contemporary theory and other disciplines to study this drama, including but not limited to psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, and performance theory. The diversity of the essays in their methodologies and objects of study, none of which is privileged over any other, bespeaks the various types of drama and the numerous ways we can study them.
Illustrations Notes on Sources and Translations Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Mystery Plays Reloaded: Performing Demonic Possession in the Histoires veritables Andreea Marculescu Chapter 2: Abraham sacrifiant and the End of Ethics John D. Lyons Chapter 3: Farce, Community, and the Performativity of Violence in Rabelais's Quart Livre: The Chiquanous Episode Caroline Gates and Michael Meere Chapter 4: Calvinist "Comedie" and Conversion during the French Reformation: La comedie du pape malade (1561) and La comedie du monde malade et mal pense (1568) Sara Beam Chapter 5: French Humanist Comedy in Search of an Audience: The Case of Jean de la Taille Corinne Noirot Chapter 6: Rethinking the Politics of Court Spectacle: Performance and Diplomacy under the Valois Ellen R. Welch Chapter 7: Our Future Barbarism: Sacrifice, the Body, and Performance in Robert Garnier's Greek Tragedies Antonia Szabari Chapter 8: Courtroom Drama during the Wars of Religion: Robert Garnier and the Paris Parlement Phillip John Usher Chapter 9: From the Politics of Performance to the Anthropology of Festivals: Montaigne's "Of the Education of Children" (I.26) and "Of Coaches" (III.6) Fabien Cavaille Chapter 10: Too Late? The Drama of the Cannibals in Rouen Elizabeth Guild Chapter 11: Red and Black, Pink and Green: Jacques de Fonteny's Gay Pastoral Play Christian Biet Chapter 12: Stage Designs of Cruelty: Theater in Rouen at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century Sybile Chevallier-Micki Chapter 13: The Court Turned Inside Out: The Collapse of Dignity in Louis XIII's Burlesque Ballets Alison Calhoun Chapter 14: Poison in French Tragedy and Tragic Stories, 1600-1636 Stephanie O'Hara Chapter 15: Et in Arcadia alter egos: Playing Politics with Pastoral in Two French Baroque Dramas Richard Hillman Bibliography About the Contributors
