Rire et comédie: émergence d’un nouveau discours sur les effets du théâtre au xviie siècle. Par Coline Piot

Abstract

Coline Piot’s nuanced study of the evolution of French seventeenth-century discussions on the role of laughter, and the perceived aims and the effects of comedy, offers a wide-ranging and robust contribution to scholarship. Piot begins by noting that the modern reader immediately links audience laughter with the genre of comedy, but reminds us that this link was long absent in theoretical discussion on comedy. In this way, she seeks to ‘déessentialiser le lien entre comédie et rire du spectateur pour mieux restaurer le processus historique de sa construction’ (p. 10). She does this by examining how the link was made in non-theoretical discussions on the theatre, the principal reasons that led theoretical writers to wrestle with such ideas, and the resulting change in attitudes towards the comedic genre in the seventeenth century. From the 1660s onwards, there was a new focus by critics on audience response to performances, and Piot thus extends the scholarship undertaken as part of the research ­project ‘Naissance de la critique dramatique’, led by Lise Michel and Claude Bourqui, along with other burgeoning research in the last decade on reception studies in the period. The corpus of texts examined (dating from 1660 to 1670) can be divided into three categories. The first involves accounts by real spectators of the time, with an impressive range including ‘écrits de constance, de témoignages de réception, de pamphlets et d’éloges, de descriptions de spectacle, de galanteries, de recueils mondains, de gazettes’ (p. 18). The second incorporates the perspective of playwrights of the time, ‘dans les paratextes de comédie ou les discours de défense ou de promotion’ (p. 18). The last category features discussions on performances in novels, fictional narratives, and comedies with a metatheatrical dimension. The first part of the book provides an overview of discourses on comedy in theoretical and non-theoretical texts from the sixteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth century (Chapter 1) and examines the influence that burlesque literature and Italian comedies had on discussions of audience laughter, which were gaining traction in France (Chapter 2). The second part of the book adopts a more analytical approach and investigates the aesthetic, social, and moral elements at the heart of such discussions. Chapter 3 of this section provides an excellent examination on the traditional discourse of l’honnêteté du rire in comedy, in the wake of discussions on Molière’s L’École des femmes. In the final part of the book, Piot focuses on the emergence in critical writings of certain commonplace ideas around laughter, principally the idea of comedy’s corrective role. She traces how this crystallized into a standard critical topos, with the expectation that classical comedy had a moral objective of correcting vice. However, the study also underlines the privileging of pleasure through a new form of galanterie in which ‘maîtriser “art de la raillerie” en société et savoir “entendre raillerie”’ became ‘des marques de distinction sociale’ (p. 13). Overall, this book presents a persuasive and detailed account of the way in which a new theory of comedy emerged and took centre stage.