Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots. Literature and the Popular Comic Arts in 19th-century France by Louisa E. Jones, and: Pierrots on the Stage of Desire. Nineteenth-Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime by Robert Storey

Abstract

Reviews175 later milieux such as Franciscan devotions and vernacular developments in liturgy. Finally, the discussion analyzes the formal characteristics that link the Italian pieces to other compositions in Romance languages and suggests lines of origin and development. Sticca addresses a second and still more difficult question when he turns from the liturgical Passion plays of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the large vernacular cycles of the later Middle Ages. There are, to be sure, some lines of influence, especially regarding narrative techniques within the drama; but it has been plausibly argued that the Passion play is a culmination of liturgical drama rather than a beginning of the vernacular mysteries. As a response to this discontinuity Sticca urges a method of comparative study, and he reviews the vernacular Passion dramas of the Later Middle Ages to map the points of convergence between national traditions. Though the analysis is organized in part as an account of present scholarship, it brings into focus fundamental interpretive questions, such as the nature of dramatic inventio through the rewriting of earlier texts, the relation of genres, literary bilingualism, and the continuing influence of liturgy and devotional literature on the late medieval drama. This is a book of great scope and learning, which supplements and extends Sticca's earlier study, The Latin Passion Play (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1970). The discussion of the planctus as a lyric form is, by comparison, more extensive than the commentary in Patrick S. Diehl's recent study, The Medieval European Religious Lyric (Berkeley. Univ. of California Press, 1985). The analysis of the planctus and the Passion drama builds convincingly on a study of thematic influences . More important, it identifies the ways in which medieval playwrights exploited the abiding differences between their disparate sources and their own form. ROBERT EDWARDS State University of New York at Buffalo National Humanities Center Louisa E. Jones. Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots. Literature and the Popular Comic Arts in 19th-century France. Lexington: The French Forum, 1984. Pp. 296. $17.50. Robert Storey. Pierrots on the Stage of Desire. Nineteenth-Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. 351. $37.50. These two critical histories should be studied in tandem, and probably it is preferable to do Storey's before Jones'. Storey's meticulous documentation cum continuity should be consulted; Jones' clarifying narrative should be read. Further, Storey, whose grants-in-aid made possible a copious collection of plates, literally illustrates Jones. His criticism of her use of sources (p. xv, n. 5) is not entirely fair, even if partially founded. Storey relied chiefly on extant manuscript scenarios, while Jones relied more on published accounts. Each tack was appropriate since Jones is showing the development of a modern topos, while Storey 176Comparative Drama is itemizing and annotating documents. Each, not surprisingly, finds a different critical approach appropriate. Jones, who is looking for the larger outlines and inclusive patterns, draws on archetypal and generic syntheses in the Frye manner. Storey, who is concerned with the singular detail (which by accretion could form a pattern), draws on Freudian analysis, especially as propounded by Lacan. Accordingly, in Jones the reader finds the popular Pierrot mime tradition , which both she and Storey begin with Jean Gaspard "Baptiste" Duburau (apotheosized by Jean Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis ), a growing and changing organism; it changed as it was co-opted by the bourgeois vanguard both without and within the mime troupe. In Storey, the reader can infer an organism from the data, but the reader's attention is focused on the particularity of performer, "text," and Establishment response. Neither historian has much to say about the public that initially acclaimed and supported the Pierrot figure. Yet if these pantomimes had not already acquired an unwashed, unlettered, unmannerly, and foul-smelling following, literati such as George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Théodore de Banville, Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Paul Verlaine, and the like would never have discovered or exploited them. (Some established writers like J.-K. Huysmans and Champfleury actually wrote "plays" for the pantomime stage.) Although both, of course, note that the government regulation forbidding dialogue in low-level...