Table Of ContentPASSING JUDGMENT: THE POLITICS AND
POETICS OF SOVEREIGNTY IN FRENCH
TRAGEDY FROM HARDY TO RACINE
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HÉLÈNE E. BILIS
Passing Judgment:
The Politics and Poetics
of Sovereignty in French
Tragedy from Hardy
to Racine
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2016
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0026-9 (cloth)
♾
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled
paper with vegetable-based inks.
______________________________________________________________________
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bilis, Hélène, author
Passing judgment : the politics and poetics of sovereignty
in French tragedy from Hardy to Racine / Hélène E. Bilis.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0026-9 (cloth)
1. French drama – 17th century – History and criticism.
2. French drama (Tragedy) – History and criticism. 3. Sovereignty
in literature. 4. Judgment in literature. 5. Politics in literature.
I. Title.
PQ528.B54 2016 842'.409 C2016-901969-1
______________________________________________________________________
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance
to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Funded by the Financé par le
Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
To my mother, who taught me how to read,
Katharine Bilis-Bastos (1946–2016)
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 3
1 The Critique of Le Cid: Richelieu, Royal Judgment,
and the Rules 14
2 Failed Judgments, Thwarted Justice: Alexandre
Hardy’s Scédase ou l’hospitalité violée 46
3 The Ceremony Unravels: Tragedy’s
Comedic Turn 72
4 Learning from Experience: On Corneille
and Coherence 99
5 Corneille’s Cinna and Rotrou’s Crisante: A Search
for the Emperor’s Judgment 131
6 Racine and Royal Fathers of Injustice –
Mithridate and Phèdre 173
Conclusion 201
Notes 205
Bibliography 243
Index 255
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Preface
Seventeenth-century France witnessed the concurrent rise of absolutist
politics and tragedy’s establishment as the preeminent literary genre.
Scholars of this complex period have not reached a consensus as to
how these two developments may be tied, especially since as the tragic
genre gained in prestige, French playwrights steered clear of presenting
characters from French history, most often choosing their subjects from
Roman culture or Greek mythology. What was, then, the relationship
between the fictions of tragedy created by playwrights and the theories
of power advanced by absolutist thinkers of the same period? Did French
tragedians give artistic form to absolutist ideas, or were political themes
and portrayals in tragedy largely ornamental, divorced from the contem-
porary realities of monarchical power?1
In Passing Judgment, I seek to answer these questions from a new per-
spective: I suggest that invoking abstract notions of sovereignty in deter-
mining where politics and theatre intersect fails to capture the specificity
of tragedy’s engagement with royal power and political thought. Turning
the focus instead towards the royal judge – a persistent but controversial
tragic “type” – exposes the distinct challenges playwrights faced in seek-
ing to consolidate the demands of poetic practices and political rheto-
ric. In short, I argue that the royal judge, perhaps more than any other
tragic character because he is meant to embody sovereignty, can serve as
a sharp measure of the intertwinement of political theory and theatrical
practice in the seventeenth century.
Scholarship on seventeenth-century French literature tends to divide
the century in two. Le premier dix-septième is everything leading up to,
roughly, 1660, the date around which Louis XIV decides to rule without
a prime minister and Pierre Corneille publishes his poetic manifesto,
x Preface
the Trois discours sur le poème dramatique. Pre-1660 studies on theatre focus
on what is known as “irregular theatre” (theatre not subject to Aristote-
lian poetics) and the rise of neoclassicism, as the growing importance of
the Académie Française founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu began
to encourage adherence to the “rules” of tragedy. Le second dix-septième
siècle, i.e., the post-1660 era, is seen as the heyday of both French monar-
chical power and neoclassical tragedy, which the great works of Jean
Racine are said to exemplify. Yet, as this study will show, the royal judge is
present across these chronological divisions and the debates around his
portrayal constitute a thread that ties together tragic works at both ends
of the century, including canonical and lesser-studied plays. Taking the
long view of this tragic type allows us to grasp how, suddenly, as Cardi-
nal Richelieu becomes invested in promoting tragedy over other genres,
judgment scenes of tragedy became an urgent aesthetic and political
problem. The royal judge appears onstage in the early tragedy of Alex-
andre Hardy, in the baroque world of Jean Rotrou, and in the canonical
plays of Corneille and Racine, tragic works long considered in isolation
from the earlier drama. In following the winding path of the king as
judge, we come to see how playwrights reconfigure and recast earlier
tragic models of royal judgment as they attempt to anchor their fictions
in the politics of the day. This lens allows us to understand the role the-
atre played in legitimizing political power in a period intensely preoccu-
pied with royal portraits, but also how difficult it was to consolidate such
demands with the necessary goal of entertaining spectators.
The royal judge constitutes an overlooked portrait, one that brings
to light the distinct challenges inherent in the theatrical presenta-
tion of kings, or what we might describe as the double bind of tragic
royal representation: how to navigate between the increasing emphasis
on safeguarding the dignity of the royal function while also placing a
monarchical character at the heart of the tragic drama. As critics close
to the Crown emphasized the need for admirable royal characters, play-
wrights were faced with two options. In the first, the king may be repre-
sented as completely detached from the action of the play, uninvolved in
the merely human dramas of the narrative. This detachment preserves
the king’s dignity and specialness, his splendid isolation from ordinary
human concerns, but this threatens to reduce him, ultimately, to a mere
function (the function of rendering judgment). This reduction leaves
him looking like little more than a bureaucrat (a magistrat, not a sou-
verain) who lacks the dignity crucial to the respect of the monarchical
function. Such a strategy generates a dramatic problem as well: though
