Le Drame: du XVIe siecle a nos jours

Abstract

Can we identify the drame as a distinct genre with its own poetics, tradition and ethics? Diderot and Beaumarchais may have theorized the drame in the mid to late eighteenth century, but is their vision of the genre the same as that of Strindberg or of Wedekind? The reader of this collection of articles cannot help but ask these questions given the diversity of the subjects treated, ranging from the canonical (Musset, Hugo, Beckett) to the less familiar (Leonid Andreev, Julius Slowacki). Running through many of these articles is the notion that the drame occupies that uncertain space between tragedy and comedy, from which the transcendent is absent and where the individual grapples instead with temporal and human obstacles. The implications of the drame's ambiguity are not only ethical (as elaborated in Marianne Camus's article on G. B. Shaw, for example); they are also practical and commercial, as the excellent articles by Pierre Frantz and Jacqueline Razgonnikoff demonstrate with reference to the activities of the Comédie-Française in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is upon the genre's relative lack of positive characteristics and its very refusal of generic boundaries that this collection's chief merit is based; it takes up the challenge represented by the wide field of potential investigation, and tracks the genre through most of the major European literatures. None the less, this valuable book's emphasis is justifiably on the genre's Romantic and modern French representatives, although, given its title, more of the genre's ‘pre-history’ from earlier eras would perhaps be welcome. However, it is also due to the very suppleness of the book's subject that its reader may occasionally feel frustrated in attempting to synthesize a general formulation of the genre's specificity, although Nathalie Macé-Barbier's concluding article does offer some pistes. In several respects due editorial care has not been taken to transform a number of conference papers into a single collection of articles; typographical errors are not uncommon, the ordering of the articles is not always helpful — the reader might be left wondering, for instance, who exactly described drames as ‘ces productions monstrueuses’ (p. 270), and André Wyss's rich and intriguing analysis of Hugo's psychic séances is somewhat marred by such inclusions as ‘parmi les extraits que j'ai distribués’ (p. 97). Furthermore, given the diversity of the contributions, a general bibliography and index might have served to make the collection cohere further and arguably to improve readability. Despite these lapses, this collection is certainly of interest and value to scholars of European theatre, and particularly to those of nineteenth-century French drama.