French Renaissance Tragedy: The Dramatic Word

Cambridge Studies in French

FRENCH RENAISSANCE TRAGEDY

Cambridge Studies in French General editor: MALCOLM BOWIE Recent titles in this series include: DALIA JUDOVITZ Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity RICHARD D. E. BURTON Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity MICHAEL MORIARTY

Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France JOHN FORRESTER The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida JEROME SCHWARTZ Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion DAVID BAGULEY Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision LESLIE HILL Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words F. W. LEAKEY Baudelaire: Collected Essays, 1953-1988 SARAH KAY Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry For a full list of books in the series, see the last pages in this volume.

Tragic stage-design {scena tragica) from Sebastiano Serlio's De architectura libri quinque (Venice, 1569), reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

FRENCH RENAISSANCE TRAGEDY THE DRAMATIC WORD

GILLIAN JONDORF Fellow of Girton College and Lecturer in French in the University of Cambridge

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521360142 © Cambridge University Press 1990 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1990 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Jondorf, Gillian. French Renaissance tragedy: the dramatic word / Gillian Jondorf. p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in French) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 521 36014 5 1. French drama — 16th century — History and criticism. 2. French drama (Tragedy) - History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PQ523J59 1990 842'.05120903-dc20 89-78350 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-36014-2 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-36014-5 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521 -02558-4 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-02558-3 paperback

In memoriam M.R.M. & O.M.

CONTENTS

A cknowledgements Note on references and spelling 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

page xi

xii

Introduction Allusiveness Exposition The rhetor The Chorus Characterisation Shape Pleasures

1 9 29 45 65 87 111 131

Appendix: The tragedians Notes List of works cited and consulted Index

155 161 163 169

IX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the University of Cambridge and to the Council of Girton College for the period of leave during which a large part of this book was written, and for grants which enabled me to spend that leave in Paris. I have enjoyed useful discussions with Dorothy Coleman, Frangoise Charpentier, and Richard Griffiths, and more general encouragement and help from Elizabeth Wright, Tom Loe, W.R. Jondorf, and Alice Jondorf; I am grateful to them all. Alison Fairlie read the book in draft and made many valuable suggestions: the latest of innumerable kindnesses I have received from her over the years, since she admitted me to Girton as an undergraduate. Susan Moore copy-edited the text with a searching eye and great patience, both of which I much appreciated. My last debt of gratitude is to two friends to whom I can no longer express my thanks, and to whose memory the book is dedicated: Ruth Morgan encouraged me to begin it; Odette de Mourgues (who, with Alison Fairlie, introduced me to French Renaissance tragedy) read several chapters in draft, and commented on them with her characteristic blend of courtesy and penetration.

XI

NOTE ON REFERENCES AND SPELLING To keep notes to a minimum, sources are indicated in parentheses in the text, by author, date, and, where necessary, page-number. For quotations from sixteenth-century tragedies, act and linenumber are given. I have followed the spelling used in the texts cited for the names of characters in plays, but have used the standard English forms for the names of the historical or legendary figures on whom those characters are based.

XII

INTRODUCTION

The subject of this book is sixteenth-century French tragedy, which is variously referred to as 'humanist tragedy', 'Pleiade tragedy', 'learned tragedy', 'early regular tragedy', 'rhetorical tragedy', or 'pre-classical tragedy'.1 Anyone interested in this tragedy owes a great debt to early explorers of the field such as Gustave Lanson, Eugene Rigal, and numerous German scholars (including Karl Bohm, Fritz Holl, Paul Kahnt, and Otto Reuter), as well as to the notable contributions of Raymond Lebegue, to more recent works by Richard Griffiths, Donald Stone Jr, John Street, Fran^oise Charpentier, and to the editors of the various modern editions which have prompted me to write this book. Those who work on humanist tragedy have long pleaded for it to be judged by appropriate criteria, preferably its own; but it has always tended to be seen (often by the very people who have made the plea) in relation to the classical tragedy of the seventeenth century. One manifestation of this is to see in these texts (particularly in the plays of Robert Gamier) a quarry from which Corneille and Racine extracted some beaux vers, and with their superior skill turned them into proper seventeenth-century poetry. A. Maynor Hardee, in the introduction of his edition of Montchrestien's La Reine d'Escosse (1975a), praises Montchrestien for poetic qualities which 'annoncent parfois l'art de Racine', or for his 'heureux emploi de la stichomythie... [qui] oriente la tragedie sur la voie ou s'affirmera plus tard la glorieuse maitrise de Corneille' (16). Reading Jan Antoine de Baif's speech for the Fury, Megere, composed as an addition to Mellin de Saint Gelais's Sophonisba (Baif, 1965, 204), I noticed an 'anticipation' of Oreste's hissing snakes at the end of Racine's Andromaque: 'Sus serpens sur ce chef, / Sus sifflez sautelans joyeux de ce mechef. Probably every modern reader of Gamier, Jodelle, or Montchrestien has made similar discoveries. How we think of them, how they 1

French Renaissance tragedy affect our attitude either to the sixteenth century or to the seventeenth century, is another matter. Thierry Maulnier was so enthusiastic about Gamier that he was almost inclined to regard Racine as a plagiarist for purloining some of Garnier's best lines (Maulnier, 1939, 86). An even commoner way in which readers bring the earlier and later tragedy into a relationship with one another is by thinking in terms of evolution. Sixteenth-century tragedy is seen as the evolutionary ancestor of seventeenth-century classical tragedy; a typical example of this approach can be seen in Micheline Sakharoff's Le Heros, sa liberte et son efficacite de Gamier a Rotrou (1967); this contains many statements like the following: 'le theatre du XVIe siecle represente une etape dans l'elaboration du genre tel qu'il apparaitra au siecle suivant' (29). The notion of evolution is one which is very hard to exclude. We are all postDarwinians, and the Darwinian model is now firmly fixed in our mental landscape. In her excellent book on humanist tragedy (Pour une lecture de la tragedie humaniste, 1979), Frangoise Charpentier says: 'c'est une perspective fausse que d'evaluer les oeuvres en fonction de 1'evolution qu'allait connaitre leur genre' (6); but if she does not want to use this evolutionary model as a criterion for evaluation, it is clear that even Charpentier (a very sympathetic and perceptive reader of humanist tragedy) still finds the evolutionary idea useful for description: 'Nous sommes ici a un moment decisif de la doctrine tragique... il est clair que Montchrestien, un peu trop oublie, occupe une position charniere entre la maniere de Gamier, et la tragedie exemplaire et heroique que Corneille a portee a sa perfection' (51). The drawback is that the evolutionary model is evaluative, since by the Darwinian hypothesis it is impossible to evolve for the worse. The theory of descent from an ancestor implies ascent from a lowly origin. In the case of French tragedy, this ascent is deemed to falter somewhat in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and then to find its direction again, to culminate in what we grandly call French classical tragedy, when what we probably mean is fewer than half of Corneille's plays, and eight of Racine's (excluding La Thebai'de, Alexandre le Grand, and Esther). Although I think that the discovery of imitated lines has more interest for the study of Corneille and Racine than for that of

Introduction Gamier, Jodelle, or Montchrestien, and although I distrust some of the implications of the evolutionary model, I also think that it is neither possible nor necessary to try to pretend, when reading humanist tragedy, that we have not read Corneille or Racine. As soon as we read the second book in our lives, we are no longer in a void; we cannot evacuate our minds before reading something new to us, and our reading would be impoverished if we could. Accordingly, in this book I have frequently drawn comparisons between humanist and later tragedy, but not, I hope, to the disadvantage of either. Any reader of humanist tragedy is bound to have some notions as to what tragedy is, or ought to be. For Englishspeaking readers of French, these notions are probably based either on Shakespeare or on Corneille and Racine. This is why I have, at several points in this book, traced a reversed chronological path, to show that features of humanist tragedy which might seem difficult or rebarbative are also present (even if in different proportions or different forms) in more familiar works, where they do not impede the reader's enjoyment. When critics called for humanist tragedy to be considered on its own terms, one proposal as to what these terms should be was put forward by those to whom I have sometimes referred in this book, for brevity, as the rhetoric-critics. These critics (of whom the most influential has been Richard Griffiths with his book on Montchrestien, 1970) broke new ground in the study of humanist tragedy. Briefly, they emphasised the central importance of rhetoric in the schooling common to the tragic authors of the sixteenth century, and suggested that rhetorical display was an end in itself in humanist tragedy (see, for example, R.M. Griffiths, 1970, 37; T.L. Zamparelli, 1978,10; C.N. Smith in Montchrestien, 1972, 8). I am sure that the rhetoric-critics are right in saying that an understanding of the importance of rhetoric is essential for an understanding of humanist tragedy. I would reproach them not with overestimating the place of rhetoric in humanist tragedy, but rather with adopting too narrow a view of it. Rhetoric is not only I'art de bien dire, it is also I'art depersuader, not only fine writing but purposeful writing. It has always had this double identity, and cannot therefore be a matter of a poet 'bombinans in vacuo', or of a kind of writing where content,

French Renaissance tragedy reference, and values are irrelevant. The concerns of rhetoric include the didactic (in the broadest sense) as well as the impressive. Rhetoric becomes a red herring when interpreted too narrowly, and when it is one of the reasons adduced for a supposedly almost unbridgeable gap between humanist tragedy and the modern reader. It should also be remembered that (as the work of Peter France, A. Kibedi Varga, Marc Fumaroli, and others has amply shown), rhetoric does not fade out at the end of the sixteenth century. When Kibedi Varga (1970) refers to 'siecles classiques', he means the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even the beginning of the eighteenth. To think of sixteenth-century tragedy as rhetorical, and of seventeenth-century tragedy as having freed itself from the bonds of rhetoric (with perhaps a few regrettable vestiges in Corneille), is an absurd distortion. It is partly to emphasise this that I have used the 'reversed chronology' mentioned above. Rhetoric does not represent the only perspective adopted by students of humanist theatre. Another approach, emphasising the didactic rather than the formal element in humanist tragedy, has tended to focus particularly on plays with biblical subjects, and plays of political propaganda. There have also been occasional attempts to work out a philosophical stance from the sententious content of plays (for example by Kurt Willner, 1932). Donald Stone Jr's book, French Humanist Tragedy. A Reassessment (1974), is the best exposition of didacticism in humanist tragedy, which he links, in this respect, with earlier French theatre and with other sixteenth-century French forms of didactic writing. My own view of these two strands of criticism, the rhetorical and the didactic, is that they belong together. I believe that sixteenth-century humanist tragedy is didactic or edifying - but I use these words in a broad sense: I think that most humanist tragedies have something to say. This may be a precise political or religious message: 'Gaspard de Coligny was a villain, and the St Bartholomew Massacre a good thing'; 'God requires absolute submission and obedience.' It may be an edifying statement of a more general kind: 'Pride is dangerous'; The higher you climb, the harder you fall.' It may occasionally be an unresolved problem: 'Is tyrannicide justified, given that it may lead to disorder and much suffering?'; or a specific question arising from the subject matter:

Introduction 'What was the meaning of Alexander the Great's craving for immortality?' I am not asserting that 'message' always preceded 'medium' in the sense that a man wrote a play because of a message that he wanted to deliver, although plainly this must sometimes have been the case, most obviously in plays with a strong political or sectarian bias. I am claiming that a humanist tragedy typically contains a thesis or problem which forms its intellectual basis, a tenor of which various structural and stylistic elements in the play are the vehicle. I have suggested elsewhere that a reason why some of these plays are more satisfactory than others may be found in the degree of harmony between this 'message', the intellectual kernel of the play, and the way it is embodied in the play (Jondorf, 1978,274). I find some of these plays more pleasing than others, and some not pleasing at all. While aware of the perils of guessing at intentions, I surmise that the pleasure afforded by a play may be related to how successfully the author has carried out what appear to be his aims, and also to what those aims seem to be (I am repelled, for example, by a play which seeks to justify the St Bartholomew Massacre, and so have not discussed Frangois de Chantelouve's La Tragedie de feu Gaspard de Colligny in this book). Many humanist tragedies seem to me to have an intelligible design, coherently and persuasively executed. It is a question of the use of rhetoric - rhetoric in the sense of choice of diction (elocutio), but also in the sense of choice and arrangement of material (inventio and dispositio). Rhetoric thus transcends a fond/forme division, for it is concerned with both, and the moral or intellectual content is inseparable from the way in which the material is selected, organised, and expressed. It is in this perspective that I look, for example, at the deployment of character in Filleul's La Lucrece in Chapter 5, and at aspects of structure in Chapter 6. Throughout, although most explicitly in the last chapter, my object is to account for (and share) my pleasure in these plays. Over the last fifteen or twenty years, there has been a great increase in the number of texts of sixteenth-century tragedies available in modern editions, usually excellent. The genre has long since established its droit de cite in university syllabuses. I find it odd that some of those who have worked to promote it, with so

French Renaissance tragedy much erudition and skill, do not seem to like it very much or think very highly of it. Even Raymond Lebegue, after years of pioneer work on sixteenth-century theatre, concluded in 'Les Juives' de Robert Gamier (1979, 5) that humanist tragedy is worth reading because it helps us to appreciate 'les Corneille et les Racine' (I am intrigued by his use of the plural). Donald Stone Jr declines to commit himself on the merits or defects of the plays he examines, or is mildly disparaging about them. Other critics (Kathleen Hall, Christopher Smith, Enea Balmas, Fran^oise Charpentier, Odette de Mourgues) communicate greater enthusiasm, and I hope that this book will be seen as contributing to their efforts to encourage readers to regard these plays as worth reading for their own sake, and not merely as literary-historical documents or reflections of sixteenth-century taste. In the discussions that follow, I have made a point of referring almost exclusively to plays available in post-1960 editions, so that inaccessibility of texts need not deter any potential reader of humanist tragedy. I have sometimes wondered whether readers who distrust highly rhetorical writing are less ill at ease with a form of rhetoric which derives a good proportion of its figures from the Bible, rather than from Greek or Latin orators, dramatists, or poets. Could this account in part for the widespread approval of Garnier's Les Juifvesl Sometimes I almost wish that Gamier had never written LesJuifves. Thierry Maulnier, for all his admiration for the plays of Jodelle and Gamier (which he liked mainly for their poetic qualities), described LesJuifves as *la plus ennuyeuse' of Garnier's plays (Maulnier, 1939, 82). That is perhaps rather petulant, but I sympathise with his exasperation. Les Juifves is a play whose qualities are striking, and easy to appreciate; it allows readers to feel that they have done justice by humanist tragedy, because they like and appreciate this play. After all, it is a typical representative of the genre; it is plainly very rhetorical - Richard Griffiths has provided a scheme whereby the whole play is chopped up into 'set pieces' (Griffiths, 1986, 30-1). It is Senecan, and imitative: Nabuchodonosor's tyrant-speech, 'Pareil aux Dieux je marche', is modelled, at least in its opening movement, on Seneca's 'Aequalis astris gradior' (Thyestes, 885). Several of the choric odes have obvious biblical models. As if showing how far imitation can be pushed, Gamier has even imitated himself, his Amital recalling the

Introduction Hecube of his own Troade. Les Juifves is judged to be both typical of humanist tragedy, and superior to all the rest, which is therefore disregarded. I certainly agree that Les Juifves is a good play, but it seems a pity to let it stand in the light, and prevent us from enjoying other plays by Gamier, let alone by anyone else. In this book, I have tried to bring some other plays into the light. I have been conscious, while looking at these plays, of the distinction made by Valery (in Tel Quel, I) between 'valeur' and 'merite': La critique, en tant qu'elle jugerait, consisterait dans une comparaison de ce que Tauteur a entendu faire avec ce qu'il a effectivement fait. Tandis que la valeur d'une oeuvre est une relation singuliere et inconstante entre cette ceuvre et quelque lecteur, le merite propre et intrinseque de l'auteur est une relation entre lui-meme et son dessein... Une critique ... ideale prononcerait uniquement sur ce merite, car on ne peut exiger de quelqu'un que d'avoir accompli ce qu'il s'etait propose d'accomplir. (Valery, 1960, 479-80)

This seems to beg some questions; there is plainly enormous difficulty in the attempt to give an account of merite, since we may easily misjudge the author's aim. There is also the whole problem of reading works composed a long time ago: even if we renounce the task of defining merite, and limit ourselves to valeur, are we to try to imagine the responses of contemporary readers, or rely on our own? If we try to do the former, we can never be sure how well we are succeeding, and in any case our enjoyment will probably be very limited if we are constantly having to make concessions to the tastes and procedures of another time; on the other hand, we plainly must make some attempt to equip ourselves with the wherewithal to read as a contemporary reader would have read, otherwise many of the works of the past will be almost unintelligible. Or should we look for a kind of transposed topicality, seeking parallels between events and figures portrayed in these plays, and modern civil strife, modern tyrants, the aftermaths of modern wars? This exercise might be more rewardingly carried out on overtly topical plays like the moralites polemiques (such as those edited by Jonathan Beck (1986) under the title Theatre et propagande aux debuts de la Reforme) than on humanist tragedy. But even in the face of these difficulties and uncertainties, perhaps

French Renaissance tragedy valeur may be worth setting out, although it is 'singuliere' and subjective, for one reader's account of valeur may enhance another's pleasure. That is the hope in which I read works of criticism, and in which I have written this book.

1 ALLUSIVENESS

An obvious feature of any sixteenth-century French poetry, of whatever genre, is its allusiveness; this could hardly be otherwise, given the importance of imitation as a principle of poetic creation in the Renaissance, and the Pleiade reliance on a select, welleducated readership who would recognise and appreciate echoes and re-workings of classical models. The effect produced on a reader by allusiveness depends, first, on the extent to which writer and reader share a common culture. Such a common culture could be assumed, for an educated class in Europe, for several centuries. It was based on the literature of Greece and Rome, and the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. One consequence of such a shared background is the shared possession of a repertory of ideas, myths, and images which, when used in poetry, do not necessarily constitute specific, intentional allusions to earlier literary texts. In a poem such as 'Cupidand my Campaspe playd, / At Cardes for kisses' there is an amusing anachronistic jolt between the playing cards and the figure of Cupid with 'quiver, bow and arrows, / His mother's doves, and team of sparrows', but these 'classical' appurtenances are not intended to remind the reader of any specific poem from older literature.1 Cupid in the guise of a playful boy is a stock figure, whose origins in the Greek Anthology the reader is not called upon to know, or to recall precisely, in order to enjoy the poem. On the other hand, although in a great number of European poems there are allusions to specific earlier texts, and although recognition of these allusions enriches reading, recognition is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for understanding and enjoyment of a text. The weeping Pleiads wester, And the Moon is under seas; From bourn to bourn of midnight Far sighs the rainy breeze: 9

French Renaissance tragedy It sighs from a lost country To a land I have not known; The weeping Pleiads wester, And I lie down alone.

This poem by A. E. Housman (from More Poems) can be enjoyed for its pleasing patterns of alliteration and repetition, its restrained melancholy, the flexibility of its rhythms. These pleasures do not depend on recognition of what is presumably the source, Sappho's lyric fragment: Ae8i)Ke u£v d Kai nAj|id5epa, eyco 8e n o v a KOIT£\38CO.

(VI, 111)

(The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, time is passing, and I lie down alone.') Recognition provides its own pleasure, but to my mind does little else for the allusive text in this case: in comparison with Sappho, Housman no longer appears poignantly brief and controlled, but padded and sentimental. In this example, source-text and allusive text are so close that Housman's poem amounts to a free translation or reworking of Sappho's, but it is also possible for a poem to allude only glancingly to another text, and the texts brought together by the use of allusion may seem startlingly far apart. This is often the case with Baudelaire, who uses classical references in unexpected contexts. Don Juan on his way to Hell in 'Don Juan aux Enfers' pays an obol to Charon, and is rowed by 'un sombre mendiant, l'oeil fier comme Antisthene' (Antisthenes was the Athenian founder of the sect of Cynic philosophers): a legend from Catholic Europe is boldly linked to the worlds of classical epic and pagan philosophy. 'Le Cygne' opens with an invocation to Andromache, and at the end of its first section the swan raising its head is compared to Thomme d'Ovide', the reference being to the passage {Metamorphoses 1,84) where Ovid implies that man's superiority over other creatures is demonstrated by the fact that he alone has an upright posture and can look at the heavens: pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus. 10

Allusiveness Not only are Andromache, the swan, and the T of the poem linked by the pain of loss and exile, but the reference to Ovid enriches this theme in quite a complicated way. The comparison between the 'homme d'Ovide' and the unhappy swan stretching its head towards the sky suggests that man's heavenward gaze may be one of sorrow and reproach, not pride or worship; and to mention Ovid is also to name the great poet of exile, the poet of the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto. Literary reminiscence similarly reinforces the combination of memento mori, love-poem, Epicurean atomism, aesthetics, and irony in 'Une Charogne'. Critics from Brunetiere on have traced relationships between this poem and other texts, including the Bible, Petrarch, and many French poems ranging in date from the sixteenth century to Baudelaire's own time. Impossible to pin to a single source, but of great importance in the way the poem works, is the elaborately formal mode used intermittently to address the woman. Phrases like 'mon ame' and 'Etoile de mes yeux' are part of the diction of conventional love-poetry, and particularly of Renaissance love-poetry. Use of this diction in 'Une Charogne' not only contrasts sharply with the detailed description of the rotting carcase, but recalls various attitudes to love, death, and poetry expressed in Renaissance poetry using this formal diction. The power of love to transcend time and death; the power of poetry to confer immortality, which is therefore in the gift of the poet, and may be withheld from a woman who withholds her love; a warning of the imminence of old age or death; all these themes, used by poets such as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Sceve, and Ronsard, may be present in a reader's mind, called up by '6 la reine des graces' or '6 ma beaute', and reinforcing ambiguity and irony, particularly at the end of the poem. What if a reader cannot supply these associations? He can have them supplied, in notes or commentaries, and failing that will still realise something of what Baudelaire is doing, for even a naive reader will notice the contrast between formality and horror, and respond to it in some way. Lamartine uses classical allusions or echoes without the startling shifts of context found in Baudelaire. When the Meditations poetiques were published in 1820, Eugene Genoude in a preface introduced the poems as 'les epanchements tendres et melancoliques des sentiments et des pensees d'une ame qui s'abandonne 11

French Renaissance tragedy a ses vagues inspirations'. What could sound more Romantic? Yet the diction and style of the Meditations are essentially neo-classical, in the prevailing mode of eighteenth-century poetry. M.-F. Guyard remarks (Lamartine, 1963, xv) that one reason for the immediate success of the Meditations was that 'les lecteurs ouvraient un livre dont l'auteur ne bouleversait aucune de leurs habitudes de langage ou de rhetorique'. But Lamartine had not only read Voltaire and Delille, he also knew the Latin poets, and it is above all the echoes from Latin poetry that make 'Le Lac', for example, a poem with which a seiziemiste can feel curiously at home. The classical allusiveness of *Le Lac' manifests itself in theme, in imagery, and in the associations of particular phrases. The themes of personal loss, nostalgia, and the flight of time have been abundantly and memorably treated by Roman poets including Ovid, Horace, and Catullus, and an Ovidian note is struck right at the beginning of the poem where there is a traditional image of time as water: Ainsi, toujours pousses vers de nouveaux rivages, Dans la nuit eternelle emportes sans retour, Ne pourrons-nous jamais sur T ocean des ages Jeter l'ancre un seul jour? This recalls a passage from Pythagoras' exposition of his philosophy, as imagined by Ovid, in Metamorphoses XV, particularly because the prominent word 'pousses' is so close to Ovid's passive verbs 'inpellitur' and 'urgetur': cuncta fluunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago. ipsa quoque adsiduo labuntur tempora motu, non secus ac flumen. neque enim consistere flumen, nee levis hora potest, sed ut unda inpellitur unda, urgeturque eadem veniens urgetque priorem, tempora sic fugiunt pariter pariterque sequuntur et nova sunt semper. (XV, 178) ('AH things flow, and all forms are subject to change; time itself flows on with unceasing movement, like a river; for neither a river nor a fleeting hour can stand still; but as wave is driven on by wave, and as each oncoming wave is pushed, and itself pushes the wave in front of it, so time both flees and pursues, and is always new.') 12

Allusiveness Various other parallels suggest themselves for Lamartine's presentation of time as elusive and slipping away; one of the closest is between the words spoken by the loved woman in 'Le Lac' 29-30 and Horace, Odes I, xi, 7-8: 'Mais je demande en vain quelques moments encore, Le temps m'echappe et fuit' dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

('While we speak, envious time will have been escaping; grab today, and trust as little as possible to tomorrow.') But the climax of the loved woman's remembered speech, at lines 29-36 of 'Le Lac', also resembles another famous classical text: 'Mais je demande en vain quelques moments encore, Le temps m'echappe et fuit; Je dis a cette nuit: "Sois plus lente"; et l'aurore Va dissiper la nuit. 'Aimons done, aimons done! de Pheure fugitive, Hatons-nous, jouissons! L'homme n'a point de port, le temps n'a point de rive; II coule, et nous passons!' Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis. soles occidere et redire possunt: nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux nox est perpetua una dormienda. (Catullus, v, 1)

('Let us live, dear Lesbia, and love, and let us not give a farthing for the mutterings of grim old men. Suns can set and rise again, but when once our brief light has faded, there is one everlasting night to sleep through.') This comparison makes us see that the presence of Catullus by the shores of Lamartine's lake is already announced in the first stanza by the phrase 'nuit eternelle' (line 2). There are many slighter echoes. Time as a winged being, and the personification of the hours ('O temps suspends ton vol! et vous, heures propices, / Suspendez votre cours!') have antecedents in classical poetry and visual arts; 'les soins qui les devorent' (line 27) can point us either to Ovid, who uses the word 'edax' of time 13

French Renaissance tragedy ('tempus edax rerum': 'time the devourer of things') or to Horace, who uses it of 'curae' ('cares'); the use of 'trace' in line 41 ('He quoi! n'en pourrons-nous fixer au moins la trace?') seems to overlap with a Latin word: 'vestigium' means 'trace' but 'vestigium temporis' means 'instant' or 'moment', and in 'n'en pourrons-nous fixer au moins la trace?', the pronoun 'en' refers to 'moments' in the previous stanza. The 'rochers muets', 'foret obscure', and 'rocs sauvages' of the fourth and third stanzas from the end (49-56) seem to carry a hint of Petrarch's much-imitated sonnet 'Solo e pensoso' (Canzoniere, 35), but we are back in classical territory again with the rather Virgilian moonscape of lines 59-60 (Tastre au front d'argent qui blanchit ta surface / De ses molles clartes!'). There is much more that a classical lens reveals about this poem; it lends itself admirably, for example, to rhetorical analysis as expounded by A. Kibedi Varga (Kibedi Varga, 1970), and as well as reflecting the rhetorical principles of inventio and dispositio, it displays a wealth of tropes and figures which fulfil the requirements of elocutio. To play on his reader's classical culture as Lamartine seems to be doing in 'Le Lac' is perhaps a form of captatio benevolentiae, a rhetorical strategy to win the reader's goodwill, in this case through a recognition of shared culture and through the pleasure afforded by the poems recalled. Yet with all its echoes, this is also a poem whose poignant mood, beguiling rhythms, harmonious succession of sounds, and undemanding evocation of natural beauty give it great appeal for many readers who bring to it no memories of Ovid or Horace. When an author is treating a subject which is itself drawn from ancient literature, the reader's consciousness of allusion is heightened from the start. For example, Racine's subjects are taken from classical drama, ancient history, and the Bible, so that any reader conscious merely of the existence of older works containing the source material of Racine's plays must inevitably be aware that a relationship exists between Racine and these earlier texts. That awareness is a minimal level of response to allusiveness, and most modern readers of Racine are led, by the circumstances in which they read Racine and the editions they use, to slightly more knowledge than this. For instance they are often aware of divergences from ancient sources even when unacquainted with those sources; so they probably know that Aricie is a Racinian 14

Allusiveness addition to the usual form of the Hippolytus-plot and that the lovetriangle of Titus, Berenice, and Antiochus is not vouched for by Roman historians, any more than that of Neron, Junie, and Britannicus. They are less likely to be aware of positive and precise literary echoes which have their origin in a work other than the obvious source-text. Such an echo can be found in Berenice, IV, v. In his last speech in this scene Titus cites, although not by name, several great Romans who have sacrificed life or feelings to patriotism and honour: M. Attilius Regulus, who kept his word to Carthage at the cost of his life; T. Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus, who as consul had his son executed in the presence of the assembled army, for disobeying the consular edict which forbade any Roman to engage in single combat with a member of the opposing Latin army; and L. Junius Brutus, the legendary first consul who put his two sons to death, for attempting to restore the Tarquins: Deja plus d'une fois Rome a de mes pareils exerce la Constance. Ah! si vous remontiez jusques a sa naissance, Vous les verriez toujours a ses ordres soumis. L'un, jaloux de sa foi, va chez les ennemis Chercher, avec la mort, la peine toute prete; D'un fils victorieux l'autre proscrit la tete; L'autre, avec des yeux sees et presque indifferents, Voit mourir ses deux fils par son ordre expirants. Malheureux! mais toujours la patrie et la gloire Ont parmi les Romains remporte la victoire.2 (IV, v, 1158) Two of these, Torquatus and Brutus, are named in thzAeneidby Anchises' ghost, giving Aeneas a preview of Roman history: vis et Tarquinios reges, animamque superbam ultoris Bruti, fascesque videre receptos? consulis imperium hie primus saevasque secures accipiet, natosque pater nova bella moventis ad poenam pulchra pro libertate vocabit, infelix! utcumque ferent ea facta minores, vincet amor patriae laudumque inmensa cupido. quin Decios Drusosque procul saevumque securi aspice Torquatum et referentem signa Camillum. 15

(VI, 817)

French Renaissance tragedy ('Do you want to see the Tarquin kings, and the proud spirit of the avenger Brutus, and the fasces recovered? This Brutus will be the first to accept the office of consul, and grim authority; and he, a father, will for the sake of glorious liberty call for the punishment of his sons when they stir up renewed war, unhappy man! Whatever later generations make of his deeds, his patriotism and his huge lust for glory will triumph. Indeed look over there at the Decii and the Drusi, and Torquatus, ferocious with his axe, and Camillus recovering the standards.') That Racine had this passage of the Aeneid not far from the front of his mind when he wrote Titus' speech seems certain, in view of the similar, striking position of Virgil's 'infelix!' and Racine's 'Malheureux!' The parallels between the two passages are obvious: both tell of tough-minded Roman heroes, both proclaim the value of 'amor patriae laudumque inmensa cupido' or 'la patrie et la gloire'. So much is plain, but there are other, more subtle uses of allusion to be considered here. First there is a pleasing manipulation of the dimension of time, brought about by the different contexts of the two speeches. In the Aeneid Virgil, like Racine, is citing Roman history and legend, but for Anchises this history lies ahead, and he is foretelling the already predetermined future. In Racine this 'Through the Looking Glass' effect of recapitulating the future has disappeared because Titus, unlike Aeneas, knows these heroes as figures of the recorded past; nevertheless the presence of the Virgilian text in the mind of the reader creates a sort of double perspective, almost a stereoscopic effect. Even more interesting than the Anchises-Titus link is the Aeneas-Titus one. Racine in his preface to Berenice is quite expansive about the parallels and differences between the story of Dido and Aeneas and that of Berenice and Titus: En effet, nous n'avons rien de plus touchant dans tous les poetes, que la separation d'Enee et de Didon, dans Virgile. Et qui doute que ce qui a pu fournir assez de matiere pour tout un chant d'un poeme heroique, oil Faction dure plusieurs jours, ne puisse suffire pour le sujet d'une tragedie, dont la duree ne doit etre que de quelques heures? II est vrai que je n'ai point pousse Berenice a se tuer comme Didon, parce que Berenice n'ayant pas ici avec Titus les derniers engagements que Didon avait avec Enee, elle n'est pas obligee comme elle de renoncer a la vie. 16

Allusiveness Any reader who has read that preface has been prepared by the author to be receptive to echoes of the fourth book of the Aeneid, where Virgil relates the love of Aeneas and Dido, and Aeneas' desertion which provokes Dido's suicide. In Act IV, v we do indeed find a clear Virgilian echo, in Titus' speech, quoted above. But what has happened? The echo is not from the Dido book {Aeneid IV) but from the Underworld book (Aeneid VI); Dido has already been deserted, and has already committed suicide - as Berenice threatens to do at the end of this scene. Indeed, Aeneas has already, earlier in Book VI, spoken to her stonily silent ghost in the Mourning Fields ('lugentes campi', line 441), offering the most unpardonable excuse imaginable for his desertion of her: 'I could not believe you would mind my going so much' ('nee credere quivi / hunc tantum tibi me discessu ferre dolorem', line 463). It is after Aeneas has already demonstrated his 'Roman' tough-mindedness andpietas by abandoning Dido that he is told, in Aeneid VI, of Roman heroes to come; he was able to make the decision to leave her without any examples of Roman heroism to guide him. Titus, however, is using the parade of heroes to bolster his resolve and justify an action he is at this moment involved in, the dismissal of Berenice. Aeneas' grim descendants embody Roman values, which transcend personal inclination and instinctive love. By those values it is sweet and seemly not only to die, but to kill your children and drive your lover to suicide, pro patria. Titus has sworn to stand by those values, but admits the pain it costs him, 'Oui, Madame, il est vrai, je pleure, je soupire, / Je fremis'. Aeneas weeps on meeting Dido's ghost, when it is too late, but in Book IV the tears of Dido and her sister could not shake his resolve, and his grief was contained in his 'magno ... pectore', while 'mens inmota manet; lacrimae volvuntur inanes' ('his mind remains unmoved; the tears are shed in vain').3 If we follow the allusion, we are nudged into increased sympathy for Titus, because he expresses his suffering. Yet another theme that links the two passages is that of reputation and 'exemple'. Brutus, as described by Anchises, has an enormous desire ('inmensa cupido') for fame, and his action is determined by this and by his love of Rome, even though there is doubt about posterity's verdict on him ('utcumque ferent ea facta minores'). Titus claims that he is capable of leaving 'un exemple a la posterite, / Qui sans de grands efforts ne puisse etre imite'. 17

French Renaissance tragedy Later generations will doubt not the value of the example, but their ability to follow it. Berenice rejects this idea with scorn, and believes that Titus' action requires no effort at all on his part ('je crois tout facile a votre barbarie'), but at the end of the play she has come to understand the exemplary role that she, Titus, and Antiochus must act out: Adieu: servons tous trois d'exemple a Punivers De l'amour la plus tendre et la plus malheureuse (V, vii, 1502) Dont il puisse garder l'histoire douloureuse. This tendre', then, and 'plus malheureuse' than the love of Dido and Aeneas? Aeneas is promised a line of heroic descendants, culminating in Augustus, to mirror his own heroism and dedication. Dido, in the Mourning Fields, flits among the ghosts of other women who have died for love, including faithful wives (Evadne, Laodamia) and rejected or disgraced lovers (Phaedra, Pasiphae), and she is plainly worthy to be ranked with these exemplary figures. Racine's use of superlatives ('la plus tendre et la plus malheureuse') suggests that an even more exceptional quality attaches to Berenice, Titus, and Antiochus, who by a unique reciprocal sacrifice consent to their own desolation. As well as these thematic links, small verbal details form part of the complex relationship between Racine and Virgil. Two examples may suffice. The first concerns the word 'infelix' and its French equivalent. I mentioned above that the prominent placing of 'infelix' at the beginning of a line (Aeneid VI, 822) is imitated by Racine with 'Malheureux', also used at the beginning of a line (IV, v, 1167). Two further suggestions could be made here: the first arises from the fact that 'infelix' had already appeared at the beginning of an earlier line m Aeneid VI, in the very passage I have been linking with Titus' speech - Aeneas' address to Dido's ghost in the Mourning Fields (VI, 456). There, 'infelix Dido' is the opening phrase of Aeneas' speech. So Racine's 'marker', his way of clearly designating a link between Titus' speech and Anchises' speech {Aeneid VI,817-25), also provides a formal link with Dido. The second point about 'infelix' is that it is clearer in meaning than 'Malheureux', or at any rate clearer in reference. In VI, 456 it refers to Dido and is feminine, singular and in the vocative case; in VI, 822 it refers to Brutus, being in apposition 18

Allusiveness to 'hie' in line 819, and is therefore masculine, singular, and in the nominative. In short, 'infelix' is singular and can be masculine or feminine; 'malheureux' is masculine but can be singular or plural (and if plural, it could also apply to nouns of mixed gender). If 'Malheureux' simply renders 'infelix' then it refers to Brutus alone, mentioned as 'L'autre' two lines before. But it could very well refer, either instead or as well, to the 'deux fils' in the line immediately before. And if it is indeed plural, could it not refer to all the people mentioned in Titus' catalogue, agents and victims alike? This fits in with Titus' assertion that he, as agent, is as pitiable as his victim, Berenice; and the point is emphasised when, two lines further on, he applies the same word to himself. My last example of verbal links between Racine and Virgil comes from Aeneas' speech to Dido in the Underworld. By stars and gods and human faith he swears to her (VI, 460) that 'invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi' ('unwillingly, O Queen, I left your shore'). The first two words, 'invitus, regina', recall the Latin sentence placed by Racine at the head of his preface to Berenice, strung together from several sentences of Suetonius: 'Titus reginam Berenicen, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab Urbe dimisit invitus invitam' ('Titus immediately sent Queen Berenice, to whom he was even said to have promised marriage, away from Rome against his will and against hers'). A further, rather disconcerting twist here is that Virgil's line is itself imitated from Catullus lxvi, 39: 'invita, o regina, tuo de vertice cessi' ('unwillingly, O Queen, I left your head'), words which are spoken to Berenice by a lock of her hair. This was not, of course, Titus' Berenice, who was born nearly eighty years after the death of Catullus, but the most famous holder of the name, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes, of the dynasty which ruled Egypt from the death of Alexander until the arrival of Julius Caesar. That earlier Queen Berenice, of the third century BC, dedicated a lock of her hair as an offering for her husband's safe return from an expedition to Syria, and it was said to have become a constellation (so that the world could 'garder l'histoire' of her love ...). The name Berenice seems to link Racine with Catullus' text, by way of Virgil's. Catullus' poem is, as he explains in the poem before, a translation of a poem (of which little has survived) by Callimachus. This explains why, unlike most of Catullus' work, it has no overt personal reference. A poem of varied tones, its 19

French Renaissance tragedy dominant theme is married love and particularly the strength of love and desire in women, so that although the connection is unexpected it is not inappropriate. The starting-point for this Virgilian exploration was given by Raymond Picard in the Pleiade edition of Racine; he draws attention in a note (Racine, 1950,1114) to the fact of Racine's imitation of Virgil, although with an inaccurate line-reference to Virgil. Now that I have seen this web of connections and responded to the Aeneas-Titus parallel proposed by Racine in his preface, I know that I shall always be conscious of these things when I read Berenice, and no doubt further aspects will occur to me; for example, could one say that Antiochus replaces, in the pattern, Dido's husband Sychaeus who, in Aeneid VI, 474, 'respondet curis aequatque ... amorem' (in Dryden's translation, 'answers all her cares and equals all her love')? Such recognitions increase the pleasure and excitement of reading Racine. I realise that there must be countless further examples arising from every page of Racine, but I do not find this a depressing thought, nor do I think that my previous reading of the play was unsatisfactory or philistine. Titus' speech in Berenice, IV, v, even without the Virgilian echoes, is impressive and moving; we are aware of Titus' need to justify himself, of the awful weight of Roman history, as heavy as the burden of imperium itself; we experience the shocking offensiveness of this speech to Berenice, reflected in her refusal to believe in his pain ('je crois tout facile') and in the fact that she, a non-Roman, dismisses Roman values as 'barbarie' and calls Titus 'parjure' for being faithful to his oath to maintain Roman law. It needs no acquaintance with the Aeneid to furnish such a reading, which should not be considered thin or unresponsive. Racine's text, in other words, reconciles autonomy and allusiveness. On the one hand, the play is coherent and can communicate its 'tristesse majestueuse' even without reinforcement from its more subtle allusions. On the other hand, to read the play merely in search of its allusions is a pedant's game. The impossible ideal would be to read feelingly and yet with immense alertness, catching every reminiscence and echo. The unlikely minimum is a completely naive reading. Any stage in between is worthwhile if the reader finds it rewarding. One reason why we should not condemn an imperfectly erudite reading of a text is that we can never tell which allusions are 20

Allusiveness intentional, which are intentional but not necessarily intended to be noticed, and which are accidental. Among the accidental sort are those which remind a reader of a work which the poet is very unlikely to have read, or even a work which he could not possibly have read because of its date, although in such a case we are talking about resemblance rather than allusion. In 'Le Lac', the fifth stanza may possibly remind some readers of Theophile de Viau. Here is Lamartine: Tout a coup des accents inconnus a la terre Du rivage charme frapperent les echos; Le flot fut attentif, et la voix qui m'est chere Laissa tomber ces mots ... And Theophile de Viau: D'une main defendant le bruit, Et de Pautre jettant la line, Elle fait qu'abordant la nuict Le jour plus bellement decline. Le Soleil craignoit d'esclairer, Et craignoit de se retirer, Les estoilles n'osoient paroistre, Les flots n'osoient s'entrepousser, Le Zephire n'osoit passer, L'herbe se retenoit de croistre. (La Maison de Silvie, ii, 11)

It is very unlikely that there is an allusion here; but resemblance can have the same effect as allusion in that it can lend to one text something of the other's flavour, adding here a touch of Theophile's sophistication and delicacy. Since resemblance is not limited or controlled by what we think we know of an author's intention, we can even find this process working the other way, from a later work to an earlier one, so that, for example, Silvie's gesture in Theophile's poem may take on some of the poignancy of the 'accents inconnus a la terre' heard beside Lamartine's lake. Is it improper for a reader to allow such associations to be set up where they cannot possibly be intended? A possible answer is that associations are only undesirable if they do disservice to the text, and that sympathetic readers, receptive to the range and tone of a text, seldom find intrusive or jarring associations getting in the way of their response. 21

French Renaissance tragedy If readers can be trusted to react with a fair degree of alert sensibility to the controlled melancholy of Lamartine, the transformations of horror in 'Une Charogne', the compassion of 'Le Cygne', there is no reason why sixteenth-century texts should be thought inaccessible. Here is a passage which seems typical in the kind and amount of allusiveness which it contains - the first twenty lines of Robert Garnier's Hippolyte. The speaker is 'L'ombre d'Egee', the ghost of Aegeus, father of Theseus and grandfather of Hippolytus: Je sors de VAcheron, d'ou les ombres des morts Ne ressortent jamais couvertes de leurs corps: Je sors des champs ombreux, que le flambeau du monde Ne visite jamais courant sa course ronde: Ains une espoisse horreur, un solitaire effroy, Un air puant de souphre, un furieux aboy Du portier des Enfers, Cerbere a triple teste, Maint fantome volant, mainte effroyable beste. Mais T horrible sejour de cet antre odieux, De cet antre prive de la clairte des cieux, M'est cent et cent fois plus agreable, et encore Cent et cent autres fois, que toy, que je deplore, Ville Cecropienne, et vous mes belles tours, D'ou me precipitant je terminay mes jours. Vostre Pallas devoit, belliqueuse Deesse, Destourner ce mechef de vous, sa forteresse: Et alme, vous garder d'encombreux accidens, Puis qu'elle a bien daigne se retirer dedans: Et de plus en plus faicte a vostre bien proclive, Vous orner de son nom, et de sa belle olive.

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At first sight, this may seem full of things that need explanation. For a start, there are various proper names and adjectives: Egee, Acheron, Cerbere, Cecropienne, Pallas. Then there are periphrastic expressions: 'le flambeau du monde'; 'cet antre odieux'; there are also references to incidents from myth: 'belles tours, / D'ou me precipitant'; 'orner de son nom'. But even without the help provided (sometimes rather erratically) by modern editors, none of this need really halt a reader. Garnier himself provides most of the help that might be needed, either in the play or beforehand, in the 'Argument' which not only summarises the play but provides full 22

Allusiveness background. For instance, he identifies Egee in the 'Argument', and tells us that he ruled Athens, so that we are not handicapped if we do not know who Cecrops was ('Ville Cecropienne' 13), or that Pallas (15) is Pallas Athene who gave Athens its name and the olive tree. Other things are explained in the text. The significance of Acheron is made plain by 'd'ou les ombres des morts / Ne ressortent jamais couvertes de leurs corps'. Of Cerbere (7) the text tells us that he barks (so he is a dog), is the gatekeeper of Hell and has three heads: we need no more. Should we have forgotten what we read in the 'Argument' and find ourselves struggling with 'Cecropienne' (from Cecrops, first king of Athens, who chose Pallas Athene as tutelary deity when she offered the gift of the olive tree), Athens will be named en clair in line 29. The periphrases and references to myth are usually either very easy to understand ('le flambeau du monde'), explained in the 'Argument' ('d'ou me precipitant'), or clarified in the text itself (it is obvious that the 'antre odieux' of line 9 is Hell, already described). The only reference here which is neither explained nor self-explanatory is the allusion to the name of Athens and to the olive tree. A reader who misses this will not be losing anything vital to understanding. A second large area of allusiveness here concerns the relationship between this play and Seneca's Hippolytus (the imitation of Euripides' Hippolytus is very slight indeed). This is of interest to anyone acquainted with Seneca's play (which means a good many of Garnier's first readers and most of those who, today, take a scholarly interest in French humanist tragedy). The recognition of Senecan elements will also include phrases and movements imitated from other Senecan plays {Agamemnon, Thyestes). A reader competent in Latin may find enjoyment in tracing these similarities and divergences, but it is an exercise which is certainly not indispensable for enjoyment of Gamier, nor does it have the enlarging effect upon the text that the parallel with Dido and Aeneas has upon the text of Berenice. These two elements - allusions to classical myth and transpositions of Seneca - contribute to the third resource, the third kind of response which Gamier presumably expected his reader to bring to the text. It is surely the most important, and no alert reader need miss it, since it requires only an attentive ear and a willing imagination. In these opening lines we are struck by the 23

French Renaissance tragedy assonances in 'or', 'on', and 'om', extending the effect of the words 'Acheron', 'ombres', and 'morts'; by the words expressing fear, loathing, and disgust ('horreur', 'effroy', 'furieux', 'effroyable', 'horrible', 'odieux'); and by the horrible sights, sounds, and smell ('Cerbere a triple teste', 'fantome volant', 'effroyable beste', 'furieux aboy', 'air puant de souphre'). Darkness, horrible noises, the smell of brimstone - these elements of wild horror are controlled and contained by the almost ceremonial formality of Egee's speech, manifest in such features as the self-presentation ('Je sors ... Je sors'); the elaborate emphasis of 'cent et cent fois plus agreable, et encore / Cent et cent autres fois'; the address to Athens; the Latinate vocabulary ('ombreux', 'antre', 'alme', 'belliqueuse', 'proclive'). The contrast between a nightmare world and this formality of presentation makes the speech extremely disturbing. Sometimes the solemn awfulness of Egee's speech seems to be increased by appeals to different sets of associations. The 'air puant de souphre', for instance, recalls the Bible ('he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone', Revelation 14:10; there are many other biblical references to brimstone, starting with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:24). The reference to Pallas protecting a fortress-city in which she deigns to dwell calls up images of the Palladium kept in another doomed city - Troy. In Hippolyte the references are classical. In plays on nonclassical subjects, whether biblical or modern, classical allusions are found alongside those belonging to the subject. The invocation by the witch of Endor in Jean de La Taille's Saiil lefurieux exemplifies this technique of contamination or mixing. Not only has the witch become a 'Phytonisse' or 'Phitonisse' (from the title of the priestess of the Delphic oracle), but she invokes, alongside Sathan, Belzebus, and Belial, such spirits as the angels 'Que l'arrogance fit avecques Lucifer / Culbuter de l'Olympe', and refers to the sun as Phoebus, just as Garnier's Nabuchodonosor, in Les Juifves, compares himself to Jupiter. Both classical and modern allusions are found in the opening speech by the Reine d'Angleterre (Elizabeth I) in Antoine de Montchrestien's La Reine d'Escosse (published in 1601 as L 'Escossoise but quoted here in the much revised edition of 1604): 24

Allusiveness Enfin jusques a quand mon ame desolee D'effroyables sursauts doit-elle estre esbranlee? Jusques a quand vivray-je exposee au danger Du poison domestique et du glaive estranger? «Un corps sous le Soleil n'a jamais plus d'une ombre, «Mais tant et tant de maux qu'ils surpassent tout nombre, «Accompagnent le Sceptre, envie des humains, «Lourd fardeau toutesfois de l'esprit et des mains, «Qui croist de jour en jour, puis a la fin accable «Son possesseur superbe encor que miserable. Bien qu'un monde de gens me respecte a l'envi, Me regarde marcher d'oeil et d' esprit ravi: Bien que cent Nations admirent mes richesses, M'eslevent plus d'un rang sur les autres Princesses; J'estime quant a moy malheureux mon bon-heur, Qui prend pour les seduire un vain masque d'honneur. Le glaive de Damocle appendu sur ma teste Menace de la cheute, et moins que rien l'arreste: L'Espagnol non content de son monde nouveau Veut son trosne orgueilleux planter sur mon tombeau: Ou la force ne vaut l'artifice il employe, Pour remettre ma vie et mon Estat en proye: Ce Pyrrhe ambitieux, dont la toile est sans bout Embrasse tout d'espoir, aspire a gagner tout, De la fin d'un dessein un autre fait renaistre: Des deux bouts de la terre on le connoist pour maistre: Encor' sa convoitise il ne peut assouvir, S'il ne vient, 6 forfait! ceste Isle me ravir; Et sans la main d'enhaut qui m'est tousjours propice, L'innocence auroit veu triompher la malice. Ma Tamise l'honneur de nos fleuves plus beaux Rouleroit pour luy seul ses tributaires eaux; Et mon peuple guerrier en armes indontable Porteroit gemissant son joug insupportable. Mais a quoy desormais me reserve le sort? Lors que moins je me doute, on me brasse la mort. Une Reine exilee, errante, fugitive, Se degageant des siens qui la tenoient captive, Vint surgir a nos bords contre sa volonte: Car son cours malheureux tendoit d'austre coste. Je l'ay bien voirement des ce temps arrestee, Mais, hors la liberte, Royalement traitee; 25

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French Renaissance tragedy Et voulant mille fois sa chaine relascher, Je ne s?ay quel destin est venu m'empescher. Chacun par mon exemple a l'advenir regarde, «Qu'une beaute Royale est de mauvaise garde.

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The 'modern' references here are particularly easy for an English reader. Elizabeth speaks of the wealth enjoyed by her kingdom and of the prowess of its people; of the threat offered by Philip II of Spain ('L'Espagnol', 19) who has large conquests in the Americas but still has ambitious designs on Britain; and of the other principal character in this play, Mary Queen of Scots: 'Une Reine exilee, errante, fugitive' whom, somewhat reluctantly, Elizabeth keeps prisoner. Line 36 is a reference to the Babington plot, while lines 21 and 28 hint at Spanish plots against Elizabeth's life. Localisation is provided by the reference to the Thames (31) and to the fact that Britain is an island (28). Threaded among these contemporary and local details are references to the older tradition. A sententious passage (marked with guillemets as was the practice both in humanist tragedy and in humanist editions of Seneca's tragedies) expresses briefly the theme of the lure and burden of kingship (5 -10). This is a frequent theme in ancient drama, particularly in Seneca, and is often used by Gamier. There are also two references to ancient history. The first is in line 17, 'le glaive de Damocle'. Damocles was a courtier of Dionysius I (c. 430-367 BC), tyrant of Syracuse, who obsequiously and exaggeratedly praised the tyrant's happiness, which provoked Dionysius to invite him to a feast where he had to sit with a sword hung over his head by a hair (the story is told by Cicero in the TusculanaeDisputationesV,61). This citation comes in a particularly appropriate context here, since Elizabeth, like Dionysius, thinks that because she is a ruler people have an exaggerated, and indeed erroneous, idea of her happiness. Secondly, there is a reference to Philip II of Spain as 'ce Pyrrhe ambitieux' (23). The allusion is probably to the most famous of the Molossian kings of Epirus, who lived from 319 to 272 BC, and gave his name to the 'Pyrrhic victory', more costly to victor than to vanquished. However, mention of the name also recalls his legendary ancestor, son of Achilles, who fought at Troy and killed Priam at the altar of Zeus; thus the use of the name suggests simultaneously a brilliant military tactician who steadily enlarged his kingdom by conquest 26

Allusiveness (the historical Pyrrhus, described by Plutarch), the general prepared to pay a great price for victory (the historical Pyrrhus known proverbially as the winner of a 'Pyrrhic victory'), and the brutal, impious warrior who emerged from the wooden horse to take a leading part in the sack of Troy (the legendary Pyrrhus, whom we can read about in Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Virgil). These allusions lend to the almost contemporary story (Mary Queen of Scots was executed in 1587; Elizabeth I was still alive when the first edition of Montchrestien's play appeared in 1601; and Philip II had died only three years before) the grandeur, and the sense of belonging in literature, of the heroes of ancient history and legend. At the same time, they help to delineate Elizabeth as a suitably eloquent and cultivated figure, whose language is enriched with figures and allusions, making it impressive and dignified. Allusiveness increases the range of a reader's response to Garnier's or Montchrestien's text; and certainly the degree of allusiveness practised by these authors need not be a barrier to comprehension or response. The 'air puant de souphre' described by Garnier's Egee is horrible whether we notice its biblical flavour, or assume it is part of the classical Hell signposted by the names Acheron and Cerbere, or simply imagine a foul smell. If we have never heard of Damocles or Pyrrhus, Montchrestien's text ensures that we still understand that Elizabeth feels insecure and that Philip II has territorial ambitions. Furthermore, allusiveness may be many-layered, unprovable, or debatable. The speech of Egee may raise again the problem of the inappropriate association. Garnier's phrase 'portier des Enfers' reminds me of Macbeth. This is inappropriate in that the context is so different although the wording ('If a man were porter of hell-gate', Macbeth, II, iii) coincides. On the other hand, although the porter's speech in Macbeth is completely different in tone from that of Garnier's Egee, the atmosphere of the play as a whole, an atmosphere in which 'Light thickens' ('une espoisse horreur') and 'night's black agents to their preys do rouse' ('Maint fantome volant, mainte effroyable beste'), is similarly nightmarish. The occasion is accidental, or rather, Gamier and Shakespeare are alluding independently to a common stock of images. But the reader perceiving such an association is no worse off than when, as happens 27

French Renaissance tragedy sometimes, the writer makes an erroneous allusion. In Hippolyte (III, 1432), Garnier's Phedre, while making her declaration of love to Hippolyte, apostrophises her sister Ariadne in these words: Tu as aime le pere, et pour luy tu desfis / Le grand monstre de Gnide, et moy j'aime le fils\ 'Gnide' is presumably a slip of the pen for 'Gnosse' (Knossos) since the reference must be to the Minotaur, while Gnide (Knidos) was a town in the colony of Karia in S.W. Asia Minor, noted not for monsters but for a statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles. Literature is full of such errors and they confirm the point I have wanted to establish in this chapter: allusiveness is one resource among many upon which writers draw. We should let it enrich our reading to the best of our competence, but not let it harass or intimidate us. Theseus, thanks to Ariadne's thread, could find his way into and out of the labyrinth of Knossos; Oedipus, ignorant and misinformed, had lost touch with his own past. Certainty and error were equally productive of adventure. Even if we could always be sure of having hold of the right ball of string, allusion-spotting can sometimes lead to odd results. What appears to be a deliberate literary allusion may lead us to something of such different tone and context that we wonder if the writer is playing games with us. The recollection of Berenice's hair in Aeneas' words to Dido is one example. Another, from the sixteenth century, is Jacques de La Taille's Alexandre who declares that he fears no danger Tuis que je ne me sens entache d'aucun crime' {Alexandre, 11,279). Perhaps La Taille is not intending to allude to any earlier poet here. Or if there is a deliberate echo, perhaps its message to the reader is simply 'Do you catch the echo of Horace's "Integer vitae, scelerisque purus"?' This form of brief literary reminiscence gratifies the reader who spots it, and creates a feeling of friendly collusion with the author. At the same time it implicitly makes a claim for that author to be likened to the classical writer whom he has called to the reader's mind, a claim which could not, without immodesty, be made openly. If we are able to play this game of 'Did you hear that? See what I have done with my model!', we are taken further into the allusive text in that we see something of its composition. But perhaps it is above all in Montaigne, rather than the humanist dramatists, that we lose some of the meaning of the allusive text if we are not familiar with the context of the allusion. 28

2 EXPOSITION

In most kinds of play where a strong dramatic illusion is aimed at, the author's voice is for the most part concealed behind the voices of his characters, although at times a character may be deemed to be speaking for the author. A particular case of author speaking to audience occurs in expository scenes, which are needed in most plays, in the absence of a pure authorial or narrative voice, to provide information essential for the comprehension of the action. Expository scenes are indispensable in plays which open in medias res, as humanist plays regularly do, or in any play where the author wishes to respect the unity of time. It might appear unnecessary to offer much exposition in a play whose subjectmatter is well known, but even while acknowledging and indeed exploiting the familiarity of their subjects, authors still need some way of leading their audience into the play. Moreover, some plays are not on well-known subjects and some authors make substantial changes to the donnees of the fable (more frequently in the seventeenth century than the sixteenth: Racine's inventions of Aricie and Eriphile are conspicuous, but not exceptional, examples of this freedom). An unfamiliar story, or a story which has been much adapted, needs particularly careful introduction. In order to see how the mechanisms of exposition work, I shall look first at some expository scenes in seventeenth-century tragedy. After considering some of Racine's expositions, I shall use Corneille as a springboard back to the sixteenth century. Racine handles exposition with competence and sometimes with ingenuity. Often his exposition is unobtrusive. Even in his first tragedy, Alexandre le Grand (1666), we can see his deftness in this respect. The first two speeches of the first scene, where the speakers are Taxile and Cleofile, occupy between them only twenty-four lines, but transmit a good deal of information. We learn that we are in the presence of an Indian king, Taxile (who has an ally called 29

French Renaissance tragedy Porus), and his sister; that Taxile proposes to fight Alexandre, already the conqueror of many kings, a course of action which his sister regards as foolhardy and bound to fail. In her view, Taxile should try to treat with Alexandre and thus avoid an otherwise inevitable defeat. By the end of the scene (less than a hundred lines later), we know of the relationships between Porus, Axiane, and Taxile and have been introduced to Racine's inventions - the figure of Axiane, the consequent amorous rivalry between Taxile and Porus, and the brother-sister relationship between Taxile and Cleofile. This has been transmitted very unobtrusively, and the dramatic interest of the dispute between Taxile and Cleofile enables us to absorb the information almost unawares. In the first scene of Andromaque (1668), Oreste meets his friend Pylade after a separation of six months during which each feared the other dead. This is the 'Fancy meeting you here!' mechanism of exposition, neat though far from novel. Pylade can legitimately ask what Oreste has been doing lately and why he has come to Epirus, so that Oreste can conveniently provide information useful to the audience. There is a certain sketchiness as to the reason for Pylade's presence in Epirus, but this is no bad thing as it focuses attention on the more important question of why Oreste has come there. If the 'reunion of friends' format is a rather hackneyed one, the use made of it here by Racine cleverly points forward as well as filling in earlier events. Pylade's questions and Oreste's answers make us realise that Oreste has come on a double and devious errand, so that this scene provides a key to the one which follows, when Oreste presents his embassy to Pyrrhus (discussed in next chapter, 48). But whatever its merits, this is a fairly blatant expository mechanism, and in later plays Racine moves on to greater sophistication and discretion, so that exposition is treated less and less as a separate element which needs to be got out of the way before we can proceed with the action. In Berenice (1671), for example, part of the exposition is delayed until Berenice forces Antiochus into expository speech (I, iv). inPhedre (1677) the opening line, in which the hero announces his intention of immediate departure, has the force of a coup de theatre; the ensuing dialogue of Hippolyte and Theramene not only conveys a great deal of information as Hippolyte tries to justify his proposed departure and Theramene probes for its real motive, but also introduces 30

Exposition (notably in Theramene's first speech of fourteen lines) a number of themes and images which will later be revealed as significant: the possibility that Thesee is in or near the Underworld; the death of Icarus (a young man dying in the sea while in flight from tyranny, and from Crete); Thesee as philanderer; Hippolyte's 'pudeur'. The astonishing first line and the need to explain it combine to motivate an economical and unforced exposition (which is not, of course, complete until we have seen Phedre, who does not enter until line 153), an exposition in which the author's voice is concealed. CorneiUe is closer to earlier practice and covers his tracks somewhat less. In expository scenes he produces lines like 'Albe, ou j'ai commence a respirer le jour' (Sabine, Horace, I, i, 29), or 'Dis-moi done, je te prie, une seconde fois' (Chimene, Le Cid, I,i,7). Rodogune (performed 1644 or 1645, published 1647) is a play where the material to be transmitted is quite complicated and unlikely to be familiar to an audience. The expository first scene takes place between two courtiers, Timagene, 'gouverneur' to the twin princes Seleucus and Antiochus, and his sister Laonice, confidant to Cleopatre, reigning queen and mother of the princes. It is full of rather creaking phrases such as 'trouvez bon ... Que j'apprenne de vous', 'et me souviens encor', 'Je n'ai pas oublie', 'Sachez done que ...' The scene ends when Laonice says 'Je vous acheverai le reste une autre fois, / Un des princes survient'. Sure enough, three scenes later they are alone together again and Laonice introduces seventy-three more lines of exposition with Tour la reprendre done ou nous l'avons laissee'. If Corneille's expository manoeuvres are transparent, CorneiUe himself is not unaware of this. In Medee, his first tragedy on an ancient theme (performed 1635, published 1639), CorneiUe uses for exposition the device of separated friends meeting unexpectedly, like Racine's Oreste and Pylade. In his 'Examen' of the play, CorneiUe makes plain that he is well aware of the conventionality of this procedure and of the difficulty of making it plausible: Pollux est de ces personnages protatiques qui ne sont introduits que pour ecouter la narration du sujet. Je pense Pavoir deja dit et j'ajoute que ces personnages sont d' ordinaire assez difficiles a imaginer dans la tragedie, parce que les evenements publics et eclatants dont elle est composee sont connus de tout le monde et que, s'il est aise de trouver des gens qui les 31

French Renaissance tragedy sachent pour les raconter, il n'est pas aise d'en trouver qui les ignorent pour les entendre. In the case of Pollux, Corneille has at least ensured that he does a little more than just 'ecouter la narration du sujet'. Although Pollux, unlike Pylade, does not stay for the kill (disappearing after IV, iii, before any of the five deaths), he is nevertheless given a slight part in the intrigue, as Corneille points out, because Jason's civility in seeing him out of the city causes Jason to be absent when Creon and Creuse touch the poisoned robe, and when Creon dies. Jason returns in time to see Creuse die, but his absence has allowed Corneille to 'n'en avoir que deux a la fois a faire parler'. Even in the first scene Pollux's function is a little more than the minimal one of 'ecouter'; his questions not only elicit the expository facts but bring out Jason's least admirable aspects in his self-congratulatory and cynical replies. A transparent expository technique 'nuance' by one means or another: such a formula describes the opening of many of Corneille's plays, and there is great variety in the means chosen to tone down some very obvious manoeuvres of exposition. In the late play Pulcherie (1673), a 'comedie heroique' where the solution is even more absurd than the problem, the opening speech by the Roman empress Pulcherie gives us the names of her grandfather and father, the length of her brother's reign, the fact of his death, the names of five of her suitors and of the father of one of them, together with an account of the father's military brilliance. No 'fiction' such as that which brings Pollux to Corinth at the beginning of Medee is resorted to here, to mask the mechanics of exposition. Instead, Corneille distracts attention by a startling opening line. Pulcherie's opening words are: ' Je vous aime, Leon, et n'en fais point mystere', and although not irregular (since Pulcherie's imperial rank gives her a freedom not allowed to less elevated heroines), such a declaration coming from a woman gives the opening of the play a quality of surprise. Eurydice, in the first scene of Surena (1675), announces her love not to the man she loves but, more conventionally, to a confidant. In Surena, however, there is a much less explicit and mechanical exposition, indeed it is quite difficult to gather the necessary information; although some names are glossed (Tavare Crassus, chef des troupes romaines'), others are not ('Hecatompyle'), and to work out the 32

Exposition references in Eurydice's first short speech to 'deux Rois\ 'La Reine et la Princesse', 'Le roi' and 'le Prince' requires not only a clear head, but knowledge which we only acquire later. No wonder that Andre Stegmann, annotating the 'Integrate' edition (Corneille, 1963), has judged it necessary to provide seven footnotes for the first thirty-six lines of the play. This play, Corneille's last, has a bleak and sombre colouring, and Corneille seems to be refusing any concessions to the audience. There is no space here for an expansive 'personnage protatique' with time to spare (like Timagene and Laonice); Eurydice is already preoccupied by her predicament and we must piece the story together as best we can. Surena seems to me to be unlike the rest of Corneille's theatre in this respect; much more typical is the opening speech by Placide in Theodore (1646), which contains such straightforwardly informative lines as 'Mon pere est gouverneur de toute la Syrie' (and no shadow of a fiction that this comes as news to his interlocutor). In addition, however, Corneille here expands the scope of expository dialogue by making Placide address his stepmother Marcelle (who is not present) within the framework of the speech to his friend Cleobule: Marcelle, en vain par la tu crois gagner un gendre: Ta Flavie a mes yeux fait toujours meme horreur. Ton frere Marcellin peut tout sur l'Empereur, Mon pere est ton epoux ...

(I, i, 20)

This is highly rhetorical. Not only does it employ the rhetorical device of apostrophe (address to an absent person), but it is rhetorical in another, more slippery, sense. What Corneille is doing here is masking one kind of artifice by another. Who is it who needs to be told that Placide's father is married to Marcelle? It is we, of course, the readers or spectators. If Placide informed Cleobule not only that his father governed the whole of Syria but also that his father was married to Marcelle, we might jib, or at least Corneille probably thought we might. The address to Marcelle is such an obvious artifice, so plainly a 'rhetorical effect' very far removed from a natural register of speech, that it distracts attention from the lesser artifice of exposition. This then is a 'rhetorical' way of handling exposition, and it provides a useful point of comparison with sixteenth-century 33

French Renaissance tragedy techniques. The expository manoeuvres of sixteenth-century dramatists are often extremely obvious. Without going quite to the lengths of Shakespeare's 'hempen homespuns' (This man is Pyramus, if you would know: / This beauteous lady Thisby is certain'), the playwright tells the reader what he needs to know in a direct and open way. The use of elaborate forms of address facilitates identification of characters whether they address themselves: 'Cesar, non plus Cesar, mais esclave de crainte! ... O premier Empereur!' (Grevin, Cesar, 1,7; 1,9) or each other: SIRENE

Eh mais voici Rustan. ROSE

Vient il ici? ROSE

O Rustan des Baschas le plus que fortune. (Bounin, La Soltane, 1,216,229)

Copious speech can remind or inform us of historical or biographical detail: 'Aborder un Cesar, a qui n'est eschappee, / Sans d'elle se vanger, l'audace de Pompee!' (Grevin, Cesar, 1,47). Sometimes these playwrights resort to what one might call the 'As you know, Muriel, we have been married ten years' style of exposition: CESAR

Vous allez au Senat. M. ANTOINE

Ja le Soleil est hault Ce qui me faict haster puis vous s?avez qu'il fault S'assembler aujourdhuy, et que vostre presence Est requise sur tout. (Grevin, Cesar, 1,213)

Often the play opens with what amounts to a speech to the audience, even if this is faintly disguised as a prayer or other form of address to a supernatural being or abstract entity. Thus the Sophonisbe of Nicolas de Montreux begins with a speech of 114 lines by the Roman general Scipion (Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major, 236-7183 BC). The first words are an apostrophe to 'Invaincu Jupiter', but this invocation leads nowhere; even syntactically we are at a dead end and, abandoning Jupiter without 34

Exposition a main verb, Scipion moves on to another deity: 'O divine clarte, 6 Phebe'. He has not very much to say to Phoebus either, and in a few lines it becomes clear where the speech is really heading towards a panegyric of Rome. The tenuous sequence of ideas is: Jupiter guides the sun, the sun shines upon Thonneur de Rome triomphante'. Plainly the real target of these words is neither Jupiter, nor Phoebus, nor the other characters on stage (Scipion's friend Lelius and the captive king Siphax, king of the 'Massesiliens' or Masaesyles), but the audience. The speech is expository in function, situating us in time (after the defeat of Carthage both at home and in Spain) and place (North Africa). It conveys not only these factual details but also the buoyant, indeed perhaps hubristic, self-confidence of Rome and her representatives. Although references to past Roman defeats show an awareness of loss and weakness, the hubristic note strikes through: Tuisque Rome florist indomtable au destin' (1,64), and this, not inappropriately, casts a slightly dubious light on Rome and Roman boasting; here, as in Cleopatra-plays, the Romans do not have it all their own way and their power turns out to be slightly less than they supposed. Neither Sophonisba nor Cleopatra were to ornament a Roman triumph. After listening to Racine and Corneille, we can surely hear this speech of Scipion's as sounding in a double voice; a quasi-authorial voice, the voice of character-as-expositor, speaks through it, giving us both facts and moral or emotional colouring, while the voice of Scipion-as-character displays him as representative of mighty and arrogant Rome. The opening speech of Garnier's La Troade is 124 lines long, much of it being loosely based on the protasis of Seneca's Troades, although greatly expanded. The speaker is Hecube, widow of Priam king of Troy, and she addresses variously 'Quiconque a son attente aux grandeurs de ce monde', Troy, its ashes, Priam, all Priam's and her children, their son Paris in particular, herself, the gods, and Fate, before finally turning to the 'cher troupeau', the Chorus of captive Trojan women, whom she invites to weep and in whose threnody she then takes part. Like Scipion's speech, Hecube's is aimed not at the Chorus, still less at the various dead or supernatural persons addressed, but at us. Like Scipion's speech, Hecube's combines fact and feeling. We are given the name 35

French Renaissance tragedy Troye' in the seventh line, and Troy's destruction by fire in the eighth. More precise indications of place are given at lines 99 ('en ces fatales naus') and 108 ('nous qui sommes sur ce port'). Many Trojans and Greeks are mentioned, the Trojans by name, the Greeks mostly by patronym or periphrasis ('Le caut Laertien, ny le vaillant Tydide': Ulysses and Diomedes; 'le jeune Pelean': Pyrrhus, son of Achilles and grandson of Peleus). Some of the people mentioned appear in the play (Cassandre, Andromache, Helen (i.e. Helenus), Pyrrhe, Ulysse, Polyxene) but others are dead (Paris, Priam) or at any rate will not appear in the play (Diomedes, Sinon). They are in the speech because they are part of the Trojan story of which Gamier is reminding us, just as the description of Troy burning is aimed at us, not at the Chorus. The extreme artifice and public nature of the voice here are emphasised by Hecube's acting as Chorus-leader, regulating the actions and words of the Chorus, and then silencing the Trojan women not for a naturalistic reason, such as that someone is approaching (the arrival of the Greek herald is observed only after they have been told to stop their 'langoureuses plaintes'), but for a reason that is purely rhetorical. Hecube had instructed the Chorus to weep for Hector, and then for Priam. After a 22-line poem in honour of Priam the Chorus is told by Hecube, at some length, to stop: Cessez, filles, cessez vos langoureuses plaintes, Estouffez les soupirs de vos ames contraintes, Laissez, laissez vos pleurs, vos gemissables pleurs, Laissez vos tristes chants, et les tournez ailleurs. Le destin de Priam ne semble lamentable, Le destin de Priam ne luy est miserable, Priam est bien-heureux, qui, bornant son ennuy, Vieil a veu trebucher son royaume avec luy.

(1,257)

We are not to assume that Hecube has suddenly become cheerful here: this is a cadenza at the end of the movement. The figure of rhetoric employed is correctio and its effect is to underline the formal, public quality of the speech. At the same time, this public quality in Hecube becomes part of the way she is characterised. Like a masked actor of antiquity she takes on the largeness of a type, almost an abstraction (compare Amital in Les Juifves: 'Je suis le malheur mesme'). She is not only the embodiment of grief 36

Exposition and misfortune, but in an allusion to her prophetic dream while carrying Paris (she dreamed that she gave birth to a firebrand which burned down the city), she becomes the very destruction of Troy: C'est moy qui Tay souffle, c'est moy qui vay bruslant Les grands murs d'llion, les antiques Pergames, Hecube, c'est ton feu, ce sont tes propres flames.

(1,64)

We are strongly conscious of the quasi-authorial voice, telling us what the author wants us to have in mind, and yet because we are also viewing, or at least imagining, a figure on stage, the public voice becomes part of our perception of that figure.1 The history of tragedy reinforces, in this case, the relationship between authorial voice and character-voice. When Hecube instructs and leads the Chorus she takes on, like the Nourrice at the end of Garnier's first play, Porcie, the role of xopo5i8daKaA,o