“Dramatis Personae”: une œuvre perdue de Marguerite Yourcenar

Abstract

This article aims to retrace the evolution of Yourcenar’s lost work, Dramatis Personae, a collection of mythological plays (Électre ou la chute des masques, Le Mystère d’Alceste, Qui n’a pas son Minotaure?) written during the 1940s, a period wrongly considered unproductive for the author, in order to understand the importance of this text in the writer’s literary production. Thanks to some unpublished letters and the recent publication of Yourcenar’s correspondence with her editor Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte, we can have more information about a collection that, even if it was never published, represents an important stage in the development of her theatrical work, especially as regards Qui n’a pas son Minotaure?, which was reworked several times during those years. Moreover, the history of the collection’s preface is also remarkable, because Yourcenar readapted three of her previous mythological articles (Mythologies), published before the project of Dramatis Personae, to form a huge preface which will in turn be modified creating the introductions to the plays in the definitive edition of her theatre.Finally, the article aims at shedding light on the editorial issues Yourcenar had to deal with and to understand why the collection was never published and had been abandoned.