Énée et Didon à la scène, ou l'art d'accommoder les restes

Abstract

René Martin : Dido and .Eneas on stage or how to use leftovers. The last French tragedies inspired by book IV of the Aïnead were written during the 18th Century. Their authors, who were forced both to develop Virgil's rather thin diegesis and to innovate in this respect compared to their predecessors of the previous century, solved the problem by using two different tactics : they transformed the inflexible Trojan hero into a passionate lover ready to sacrifice his duty to his love, and they built up the secondary character of Iarbas, who became the joint rival and equal of �Eneas. Sometimes their unfaithfulness to Virgil was pushed even further into a sort of fictional mythology in which the Trojan hero gave up his mission and chose to reign over Carthage. Thus the survival of the episode imagined by Virgil was ensured by means of various betrayals, with results that were unequal but sometimes not devoid of interest.