Katherine Ibbett , The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630–1660 The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630–1660 . Katherine Ibbett. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. vi+176.
2012; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 110; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/666547
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeKatherine Ibbett, The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630–1660 The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630–1660. Katherine Ibbett. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. vi+176.John D. LyonsJohn D. LyonsUniversity of Virginia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMore The Style of the State in French Theater is an extremely original and thoughtfulbook about political and dramaturgic theory and practice in France during the crucial midpoint of the seventeenth century, a period in which Louis XIII, as king, and Anne d’Autriche, as regent, ruled with Richelieu and then Mazarin as their ministers. It saw Cinq-Mars’s conspiracy against Richelieu and the conspirator’s execution in 1642, the messy but exciting days of the Fronde (1648–53), the first three decades of the Académie Française, and the rise of a new theatrical style, neoclassicism, in the work of Jean de Mairet, Tristan l’Hermite, Georges de Scudéry, Jean Rotrou, and Pierre Corneille. In short, it was a time when much happened in theater and in politics, when, one might say, the shape of both changed in significant, radical, and interdependent ways. This interdependency is at the core of Katherine Ibbett’s book, of which the two central characters are Richelieu and Corneille. It seems appropriate that her study is framed chronologically between important dates in their lives: Richelieu was confirmed in his ascendency by a memorably dramatic moment, the “journée des dupes” in 1630, and Corneille marked the apogee of his dominance over French drama with his triumphal 1660 collective edition of his plays with its critiques of each individual work as well as the more general reflections of the three Discours on dramatic theory. As Ibbett so perceptively writes, the playwright thus created a literary testament comparable to Richelieu’s posthumous Testament politique.Ibbett’s study weaves together gender theory, biopolitics, governmentality, colonial history, neoclassical poetics, the theory of the reason of state, history of religion, and iconography. All is exquisitely documented and based on erudite and firsthand analysis of the relevant texts, which range from Giovanni Botero’s work on reason of state (studied in its influential 1599 French translation) to Jean de Silhon’s Le ministre d’estat (1631), and from Innocent Gentillet’s Anti-Machiavel (1576) to Gabriel Naudé’s Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état (1639). The core of it all is, however, a set of three of Corneille’s tragedies: his two martyr tragedies, Polyeucte (1642) and Théodore, vierge et martyre (1646), and the play that he designated as his favorite, Rodogune, princesse des Parthes (1644–45). These are accompanied by briefer reflections on a number of other Cornelian tragedies (especially Le Cid, Horace, and Cinna) as well as two less well-known martyr tragedies: Jean Puget de la Serre’s Thomas Morus ou la constance (published 1642, a play that Richelieu is said to have seen three times) and Alberte Barbe d’Ernecourt de Saint-Balmon’s Les jumeaux martyrs (written in the 1640s).With this set of texts, Ibbett builds in five chapters a fascinating argument concerning the parallel transformation of aesthetics and the exercise of political power from immediate, rapid, spectacular, and routinely male-centered physical violence to an emphasis on the power of indirect, long-term, more often female-centered (but still often physical) exercise of control. This complex argument unfolds in a set of analyses—the term “meditation” might be more appropriate—that juxtapose apparently disparate cultural productions to reveal their connecting threads. Fittingly, for a book that concerns French neoclassicism (and thus, in part, the Aristotelian legacy), Ibbett begins in medias res, at the midpoint of the century, with the pamphlet campaign against Jules Mazarin, the minister of the queen regent during the Fronde. This provides a good starting point for a wide-ranging survey of the lively debates since the Renaissance about poetics and politics and about recent critical attempts to give accounts of the relative situation of the two. After showing that much contemporary scholarship and theory stride off in one of these two directions, finally ignoring one of the poles, Ibbett charts her own course along the lines of the “activist formalism” of Marjorie Levinson and Hélène Merlin-Kajman.In the second chapter, Ibbett analyzes representations of martyrs in paintings by Hendrik ter Brugghen and Georges de La Tour as well as the plays by Puget de la Serre and Saint-Balmon, showing how the physical suffering of the male saints are no longer the center of the spectators’ attention. The martyrs are, in the French theater of this time, displaced from the stage, leaving women characters to lament and to suffer their loss. The blood-shedding martyrdom that was so much a reference for the fighters of the religious civil wars as well as for playwrights is replaced by a more psychological suffering in a “subtly transgressive questioning of the values of heroism” accompanied by the promotion of a combination of “patience and fidelity that comes to define generosity, rather than the bloody acts” (53).A further move away from the display of bloody martyrdom occurs in Polyeucte and Théodore, within each of which Ibbett ingeniously and persuasively shows the increased importance of characters in administrative roles, those who are responsible for the treatment of the martyr. Corneille, as she shows, instead of concentrating on the experience of the martyr Polyeucte, who cannot wait to die, directs attention to the shifty figure of the martyr’s father-in-law, who tries to decide whether it is in his own interest to keep Polyeucte alive or to execute him in an attempt to curry favor with the Roman authorities. An issue facing such Roman imperial governors (suggestively set next to the comparable figures of the French and Spanish colonial governors of the seventeenth century itself ) was the value of conservation and exploitation versus the sovereign exercise of the death penalty. In this connection, Ibbett makes use, of course, of Foucault’s concept of “governmentality,” but she gets most of her support from seventeenth-century primary texts that deal with conservation and management (including “ménagement”—that is, caring and sparing use) of human subjects. An analogous problem arises for the governing couple in Théodore, where instead of a sudden death, the martyr is sent off to a brothel to prolong her suffering and to exploit her as a resource.Ibbett’s study of Rodogune logically follows from the many concepts developed in earlier chapters (shift to a feminine perspective, removal of the suffering body from the stage, importance of governmentality, conservation with its attendant move from short- to long-term views) and is also one of the most innovative readings of this tragedy. Instead of foregrounding the roles of the twin brothers, one of whom is heir to the throne, Ibbett devotes more attention to the queen regent, Cléopâtre, and her hostage, Rodogune. Since the regent’s retention of power depends on delaying the disclosure of the key piece of information (the birth order of the twins), the relation between information and time is central to the practice of governing but also, as Ibbett shows, to the creation of dramatic suspense by the playwright himself.The final chapter is Ibbett’s own coup de théâtre, one of those sudden turns of events so prized in neoclassical poetics. Throughout the book, the relation of theory to practice has been tantalizingly displayed but also, as we finally see, displaced. By leaving to the end the chapter entitled “The Rules of Art,” Ibbett brilliantly stages an attack on the persistent malady of studies in seventeenth-century French theater, the almost universal insistence on teaching and studying the plays only within a framework of “rules,” presented as if they preceded the writing of the plays themselves. By delaying her full exposition of this problem, Ibbett demonstrates implicitly that even scholars who have fulminated against the misconception of a rule-driven dramaturgy have not had the courage of their convictions and have fallen into the trap of rules-first exposition. Moreover, with an insight that is simultaneously penetrating and unifying, she shows that both Richelieu and Corneille wrote out their “rules” only decades after their major accomplishments in the state and on the stage. She also elucidates the many characteristics and practices they share, such as a primary (or initial) focus on practice and a concomitant suspicion of theory, self-exemplarity, vigorously defended flexibility, and a certain way of conceiving the public. The Style of the State in French Theater is one of the most refreshing and useful books on early modern France published in the last two decades. It will, I am sure, prove to be a model for a new generation of scholars in this field. 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