“Beginning of the Murmur”: Archival Pre-Texts and Other Sources ed. by Conor Carville, Mark Nixon

Abstract

and owner of his works. Here Call situates the battles with pirates and plagiarists in the complex context of seventeenth-century publishing practices, resisting the anachronistic temptation to see Molière as a precursor to modern authorship. Quarrels, and especially those surrounding L’école des femmes, provide the basis for the third chapter, which shows why the 1662 comedy posed a serious threat to its contemporaries by combining popular success with the generic innovation of a new “grande comédie” that only Molière could create:“Molière redefined the very nature of successful comedy on the dual fronts of performance and publication, establishing in the process a trademark style which was branded with his individuating ownership” (140). The fourth chapter looks in depth at the year 1666, during which a collection of Molière’s works was published without his consent; meanwhile, Le misanthrope staged the drama of Célimène’s promiscuously circulating letters, which served as an example of the dangers of authorship: both the action of the comedy and the publication history of the year of its premiere show how easily texts can escape their authors. The following chapter tracks the publishing history of the late 1660s and early 1670s.With Le Tartuffe and Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Molière continued to establish himself as author and owner of plays that made money both onstage and in print.A privilege that he was able to obtain in 1671, against the wishes of the Communauté des libraires et imprimeurs, marks a newly-aggressive approach to authorial control, such that “Molière had gone from being an author printed malgré lui to wresting almost complete control of his works from a system designed without an author’s rights in mind” (205). Call argues that the 1672 publication of Les femmes savantes marks the culmination of Molière’s innovation and independence in the world of print. The last chapter explores the fascinating case of Psyché, the result of collaborative writing by Molière, Corneille, and Quinault, staged to the music of Lully, the choreography of Beauchamp, and the machines of the Vigarani family. In spite of playing a relatively minor role in the machine play’s authorship, Molière nonetheless strove to be recognized as its sole author. An afterword examines the 1682 edition of Molière’s complete works, “a remarkably complex effort by the playwright’s contemporaries to reconcile the many competing aspects of Molière’s authorship” (230). University of Iowa Roland Racevskis Carville, Conor, and Mark Nixon, eds. “Beginning of the Murmur”: Archival PreTexts and Other Sources. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2015. ISBN 978-90-043-0991-3. Pp. 244. While many of the past few years’ editions of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui have demonstrated the rich variety of contemporary critical approaches to Beckett’s work, the newest edition makes this diversity of ways of engaging Beckett’s lasting achievement its guiding statement of purpose. Largely comprised of essays developed 218 FRENCH REVIEW 91.1 Reviews 219 from a conference held to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading, the volume stands as a testament to, as Conor Carville writes in his introduction, the fact that no one interpretive method or critical school holds the key to unlocking the meanings of Beckett’s work, but that “today there is instead a sense of several very productive strands of research coexisting with and complementing each other” (9). This proliferation of approaches in today’s scholarly community, Carville elegantly argues, is perfectly suited to Beckett’s art, as that art itself emerged from a modernist strand of “experimental cultural practice”(10).Which is to say that Beckett’s art asks a multitude of questions about the world from a variety of perspectives, and today’s brightest and most challenging readers of Beckett’s work continue to follow suit. The present volume’s own proliferation of critical approaches includes, among essays that are unanimously compelling and successful, queer theory, trauma studies, and translation studies (to name only a few), all performed with the most rigorous and exacting kind of close reading. Notable standouts include analyses of Beckett’s literary practice within...