Des arts poétiques à la scène

Abstract

This essay analyses the negative judgement borne on their contemporary theatre by the XVIth century arts of poetry, in a historical and poetic perspective. A close reading of the chapter devoted by the Instructif de la seconde rhétorique to the “moralites, farces et mysteres” shows how this text selects some of medieval drama’s main features, but presents them in conformity with Antoine Vérard’s editorial targets rather than as an illustration of the theatrical reality of the time. Moreover, what the arts of poetry despise in medieval drama is one of its distinctive rhyme device: the so-called “mnemonic” octosyllabic verses. Adapted to performance, these verses enable a poetics of rewriting which appears as an alternative to the arts of poetry’s theories of inspiration. Then the author of the text is no more than one of the “actors” of a dramatic practice which does not stop with the Middle Ages.