Acting and Ontology in Molière

Abstract

Though counts the of actors French and seventeenth acting, a consistent century has feature left a is number their theoretiof accounts of actors and acting, a consistent feature is their theoretical underdevelopment. This underdevelopment may seem perplexing since a signal achievement of so-called classical France was the invention of theory itself in a specifically modern sense. We meet the self-consciously professional discipline Rene Descartes brought to the scientific search for truth, imposing order on the rational pursuit of knowledge through close logical analysis of the conditions of possibility of rational thought as such. We get the systematic lessons in statecraft laid down in Cardinal Richelieu's posthumous Testament politique ( Political Testament) (1688) or Gabriel Naude's Considerations politiques sur les Coups d'Etat ( Political Reflections on Coups d'Etat) (1639), reducing government to a rigorous science grounded in unblinking scrutiny of the material interests that drive political agents. Boileau's L'Art poetique (The Art of Poetry) (1674) presents a synoptic system of literary forms based on the principle of rational self-possession that, for all the aweinspiring sublimity of its most telling effects, enables poets to say just and only what they mean to say as a function of the critical idea that governs poetic utterance. And we have the equally critical goal Pierre Corneille sets himself in the three discourses on dramatic art framing his collected Theâtre of 1660, deriving practical rules from