French Drama Research Articles

Reconnecting Text to Context: The Ontology of “French Medieval Drama” and the Case of the Istoire de la Destruction de Troie

Jody Enders’s essay “Medieval Stages” in the November 2009 issue of Theatre Survey serves as a particularly apt introduction for this article. Enders identifies three fissures in the contemporary critical landscape surrounding medieval performance: (1) history vs. literature; (2) continental vs. British; and (3) religious vs. secular.1 These divisions in the field have acted like smokescreens, often obscuring important data and frustrating efforts to penetrate the gloom. This is especially true in Anglophone scholarship, which understandably tends to emphasize English-language drama and records, but therefore helps underpin the “Continental vs. British” polarity above. But even in other languages—and the example of Francophone drama is most relevant to the case I present here—divisions into religious and secular, sacred and profane, persist, influencing the bibliographic practices in French drama and, hence, structuring how basic reference information might be accessed. I share both Enders’s frustration with the durability of these binaries and her optimism about the future of medieval performance studies and its potential to inform the modern and postmodern critical and historiographical landscape. But there is a dichotomy at work here as well. On the one hand, specialists are no doubt aware of scholars, such as Jelle Koopmans, Darwin Smith, Carol Symes, Jody Enders, Pamela Sheingorn, Elina Gertsman, Donald and Sara Sturm-Maddox, and others, who have been using French examples to articulate a far more complex and nuanced view of medieval performance culture and its relationship to extant records.2 What is more, work over the last decade by Darwin Smith’s Groupe d’etudes sur le theâtre medieval at the Sorbonne on digitizing critical editions of texts such as the gigantic Mystere des Actes des Apotres and creating the thoroughly indexed and user-friendly database Theâtre et performances en France au Moyen Age, and Jesse Hurlbut’s similar efforts with DScriptorium, represent unprecedented advances in accessibility.3 On the other hand, the strength and interdisciplinarity of this work notwithstanding, the new perspectives have not penetrated very far into mainstream discussions of theatre history or into the journals most often read by theatre and performance studies scholars. I embark, therefore,

From Dumas fils’s Étrangère to Wilde’s Aventurière: French Theatrical Forerunners of the Wildean Female Dandy

The aim of this paper is to acknowledge the influence of French dramatical stererotypes in Oscar Wilde’s creation of the female dandy. I will particularly focus on two society comedies, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and An Ideal Husband (1895) so as to unearth French female forerunners of his aventurière throughout a series of plays written by boulevard authors such as Victorien Sardou, Emile Augier and Dumas fils. My aim is thus twofold: first to recognize the debt British playwrights contracted towards French drama and, secondly, to state that French theatrical stereotypes, even when being the main cause of native playwrights’ drowsiness, were also the first step towards the renaissance of English drama, as it can be observed throughout Oscar Wilde’s, Pinero’s, Gilbert’s and Jones’s dramaturgies.

‘Renaissance’ History in Modern French Drama: the Lure of the Impossible?

‘Renaissance’ History in Modern French Drama: the Lure of the Impossible?

External and Internal Dramaturgies: The French Context1

What do ‘dramaturgy’ and ‘dramaturg’ mean in a French context? To explore these questions, I interviewed French theatre-makers who, between them, have practised dramaturgy since the 1960s. Jean Jourdheuil worked as dramaturg with Jean-Pierre Vincent in the late 1960s and early 1970s.2 For a more contemporary perspective, I approached Bruno Tackels, who has worked as dramaturg with two highly experimental French contemporary playwright-directors, Didier Georges Gabily and Francois Tanguy.3 Whilst Tackels has worked essentially with and on contemporary artists, Anne-Francoise Benhamou serves as dramaturg, primarily on classic texts, for director Stephane Braunschweig.4 In 2000, she also helped to found the dramaturgy section of the Ecole superieure d'Art Dramatique at the Theâtre National de Strasbourg (TNS), which established France's first dramaturgy degree scheme. Adele Chaniolleau, whom I also interview, graduated from this course in 2007. Joseph Danan, practising dramaturg and academic at the University of Paris III, offers a definition of dramaturgy with respect to contemporary French playwriting. I therefore also invite a contemporary French playwright to respond. Noelle Renaude thus completes my panel. Owing to the vast array of artistic and intellectual pursuits to which my interviewees dedicate themselves, it was impossible to bring them all together. Instead of including each of their interviews intact, I permit myself to juxtapose, or ‘dramaturgically stage’, their varied responses to my questions. In this way, I enable tendencies and consistencies on the one hand, and conflicts and contradictions on the other, to emerge. This tension reflects the diverse and unresolved definitions of dramaturgy present in French theatre.

The Theatre Performance as Interaction between Actors and Their Audience

Based on video-recorded perfor­man­ces of rela­tive­ly naturalis­tic, modern French dramas, the study examines the behaviour of the theatre audience in relation to unfolding stage events. Such behaviour is described through close inspec­tion of the sounds the audience pro­duces, mainly coughing, throat-clearings, and laughter. CA (Conversation Analysis) methodology is used to analyse not only an audi­ence’s overt reactions to stage events, but also the actions occurring outside these relatively short-lived phenomena in the context of a theatre performance. It is demonstrated that members of the audience refrain from making ‘vocal noise’ during the verbal inter­action of actors, and some of the resources used to achieve this end are described. Furthermore, the audience’s laughter is described. It is shown how members of the audience negotiate collective moments of laughter not only with each other, but also with actors on stage, to insert a laughing turn in the unfolding sequence of dramatic actions.

Ripple Effect: the Theatrical Life of Max Linder

By 1909 the French actor, playwright, and director Max Linder was probably the most popular male film star of his time, and his success as an innovative writer-actor of variety and revue continued until the outbreak of the First World War. But this followed five years of frustration in stage-ornament roles on the professional, ‘legitimate’ stage, and only after success in the cinema did his playlets, integrating filmed and live action, further enhance his fame in variety venues across Europe. After the war, and Linder's stints in Hollywood, his long descent into bouts of manic depression tragically began. But his theatrical spirit survives in the cine-stage works of the Prague theatre, Laterna Magika, and Frank Bren also discusses here his possible influence on the work of Erwin Piscator, and more surely on the spectacular Paris music-hall production, Jour de fête à l'Olympia, created by and starring Jacques Tati in 1961. This was plainly modelled on Linder's cinema-theatre creations of 1910–1914, with Tati and Pierre Etaix the outstanding successors to Max in French film comedy. Australian actor-author Frank Bren is currently writing a biography of Pierre Etaix, whose classic film comedies of the sixties are now being restored for international re-release – two of them paying discreet homage to Max Linder. Bren has written or co-written histories of Polish and Chinese cinema and theatre as well as articles for diverse international periodicals.

Playing with Documentary Theatre: Aalst and Taking Care of Baby

The coinings of ‘verbatim theatre’ and the ‘testimony play’ have added new factors to any consideration of documentary drama. It is a form that has been proliferating recently, whether in enacted judgements of public policy – privatization of the railways in David Hare's The Permanent Way, the invasion of Iraq in Called to Account at the Tricycle – or in exploring the ‘truth’ about more private issues. In the following article, Stuart Young questions whether the form is appropriate to the discovery of such ‘truth’, but finds that two recent works in the genre, Aalst and Taking Care of Baby, have effected a more complex and reflexive intervention by emphasizing the process of writing or reporting, thereby drawing attention to the methods of construction in documentary theatre and to the problematic issues inherent in those methods. Stuart Young is Associate Professor and Co-ordinator of the Theatre Studies programme at the University of Otago. He has published on Chekhov in performance abroad and rewritings of the plays, New Zealand drama, and gay and queer theatre, and also translates Russian and French drama. He is currently working on a documentary theatre project on family violence in New Zealand.

Descartes’s Ballet: His Doctrine of the Will and His Political Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: Descartes’s Ballet: His Doctrine of the Will and His Political Philosophy Julie Walsh Richard A. Watson. Descartes’s Ballet: His Doctrine of the Will and His Political Philosophy. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 133. Cloth, $27.00. Richard Watson’s Descartes’s Ballet engages three main questions uncommon to traditional Cartesian scholarship: Did Descartes script La Naissance de la Paix, the ballet performed in honor of Queen Christina’s twenty-third birthday in December 1649? Did Descartes have [End Page 139] a political philosophy? Did Descartes read the French dramatist Pierre Corneille? Watson answers no, yes, and yes. By emphasizing the complete lack of evidence that Descartes wrote La Naissance de la Paix, Watson disarms the suggestion made by Adrien Baillet, Descartes’s seventeenth-century biographer, that Descartes authored the ballet. Watson further suggests that only someone who was immersed in the subtleties of political culture in the Swedish court and was in Christina’s confidence could have written it. And Descartes, he argues, could not have met this description. Had it been written by Descartes, the ballet could have provided a foundation on which to build an interpretation of Cartesian political philosophy. Without it, explicit textual support for the construction of Descartes’s political philosophy is nonexistent. Undaunted by the lack of texts, Watson nevertheless constructs one based largely on the Discourse on Method and Descartes’s life. He suggests that Descartes supported monarchy—benevolent despotism, in fact—while nevertheless holding that the individual is the most important unit in society (99). Aside from the prima facie tension between monarchy and individualism, however, it is difficult to accept this as Descartes’s political philosophy because the position is not discernable in his texts. If Descartes had written the ballet, it could also motivate an investigation into his poetic and literary influences and a comparison of the philosophical themes expressed in the ballet with those developed in his philosophical texts. Without Descartes’s authorship it is difficult to understand the motivation for Watson’s discussion of Corneille. Watson suggests that, being in the same intellectual milieu, Descartes and Corneille could not have been unacquainted, though he still acknowledges that there is no direct evidence that they were known to one another. Even so, Watson concludes that they influenced each other (85). Perhaps the best reason for investigating whether Descartes and Corneille knew of one another’s works is the conceptual similarity between the austere self-control of Corneillean heroes and Descartes’s writings on the human will, particularly in The Passions of the Soul, where the discussion of the will is focused on its relation to the passions. Watson’s treatment of Descartes’s theory of the will contains the book’s most philosophically interesting remarks. Watson focuses primarily on Descartes’s prescriptions for controlling the bodily passions and suggests that the sole function of the will is to moderate these passions in human beings. It is only in virtue of having a body, Watson says, that we have a will at all, for a disembodied soul would have no use for this faculty (71). This is a strange statement given Descartes’s frequent references to God’s will, and Watson’s own mentions of God’s will in this section of the book. Furthermore, Descartes’s claim that the human will is like God’s will has motivated much scholarly discussion, particularly concerning whether the human will is capable of both pure freedom of indifference and freedom of spontaneity. An aspect of this problem is determining what counts as an object of volition. Watson says that Cartesian willing is an intentional act (69), but he does not spell out what this means. Given the suggestion that the will is the moderator of the bodily passions, Watson intimates that the objects of volition are grounded in sensory perception—the objects of volition must be the passions. But Watson also acknowledges Descartes’s claim that there are pleasures of the soul that belong to it alone (68), which undermines his interpretation. Part of analyzing Descartes’s notoriously thorny account of free will must include a substantial discussion of the intentional objects of volitional...

From Dawn to Dusk

Research Article| September 01 2008 From Dawn to Dusk Yasmina Reza Yasmina Reza Yasmina Reza, a French playwright, actress, novelist, and screenwriter, is the author of Art, which won the 1998 Tony Award for Best Play, and God of Carnage, which is playing in London's West End. In 2006–07, she spent a year following Nicolas Sarkozy on his successful campaign for the French presidency and wrote, Dawn Dusk or Night (Knopf, 2008). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google World Policy Journal (2008) 25 (3): 233–235. https://doi.org/10.1162/wopj.2008.25.3.233 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Yasmina Reza; From Dawn to Dusk. World Policy Journal 1 September 2008; 25 (3): 233–235. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/wopj.2008.25.3.233 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsWorld Policy Journal Search Advanced Search You do not currently have access to this content.

Parodies en scène

Parody is usually described as a textual phenomena, a comic travesty of written and well-known authorities. The strong mental frames of Western Medieval Culture designate this period as especially favourable to this posture. But, between Middle Ages and Renaissance, new genres use parody, and among them, the drama. Our understanding of parodic plays implies the knowledge of textual but also contextual structures. Pierre de Lesnauderie’s plays, performed in Caen in 1493 and 1496, are not only an example of academic performance in France. They both show a complex parodic style, based on the usual ironic pastiches of classical mythology and religious literature, and on satirical imitation of the theatrical structures themselves. The public debate is on stage: an academic riot against the central power; the epidemy of French disease in Europe. Giving new perspectives to parody, the humanistic french drama aims to constitute himself as a political and cultural authority.

French Tragic Farce in an Age of Interpellation: Michel Azama'sCroisadesand Hervé Blutsch'sAnatole Felde

Since its heyday among playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco, the genre of “tragic farce” has continued to interest playwrights, both in France and around the world, as a means of dramatizing such existential concerns as the fragility of identity, the relativity of truth, the plurality of meaning, and the isolated condition of the individual in the modern, technocratic world. Contemporary French dramatists, Michel Azama and Hervé Blutsh, are two such playwrights. They represent voices from what Patrice Pavis has identified as a “new generation” of playwrights who, in recent decades, have moved French theatre beyond a strict adherence to any one particular ideological influence, including Existentialism and Absurdism, and who have instead moved it into a period of “interpellation.” Drawing on Althuser's psychoanalytic understanding of the term, which views “interpellation” as “the central operation by which ideology assigns to the individual human being an identity as a subject/object” (The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism 158–59), this article argues that, through their interpellation of ideology, this new generation of playwrights is forcing the contemporary French stage to look into the “Lacanian mirror” in a perpetual process of self-discovery and self-refinement. It argues that this “age of interpellation” reflects a larger trend in French literature in general, known as auto-fiction – a fiction whose creation is based on “facts” and that serves as a conduit into the subconscious. Ultimately, through a close reading of two contemporary tragic farces, Azama's Croisades and Blutsch's Anatole Felde, “interpellative theatre” is seen as being left to grapple with a whole host of simultaneous paradoxes as it attempts to “subject” itself in a contemporary context, caught between the polarities of ambiguity and polyvalence, absolutism and relativity, singularity and pluralism, globalization and cultural identity.

:Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama

At the start of the twenty-first century, performances of early modern Spanish drama experienced resurgent popularity--not only in Spain but also on stages across Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In the academy the comedia, which includes comic, tragicomic, and tragic works, is widely taught in a range of contexts to a variety of students, in Spanish and in translation. Given the steady increase of Spanish as the language of choice in foreign language departments, these courses will continue to flourish. This volume offers guidance to teachers in helping students engage with and understand these late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century works. Part 1, Materials, evaluates editions and anthologies in English and Spanish; identifies important critical works and historical studies; and surveys illustrated books, films, and Internet resources. In part 2, Approaches, experienced teachers discuss the way the plays challenged the interests of the monarchial state; examine the obsession with honor shared by Spanish men and women alike; explain the key role costume played in providing both pleasure and meaning; and explore how late-twentieth-century films reflect elements of these early Spanish plays. Other approaches center on five women playwrights; delve into the complex theological and philosophical underpinnings of the plays; pair the plays with Shakespearean drama; show how Spanish plays influenced French dramatists; and trace the appeal of the Don Juan figure.

Cora, ou l'esclavage (review)

Reviewed by: Cora, ou l'esclavage Lesley Wright Barbier, Paul-Jules. Cora, ou l'esclavage. Ed. Barbara Cooper. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006. Pp. 216. ISBN 2-296-01575-1 Now best known for opera librettico-authored with Michel Carré, like Gounod's Faust or Thomas' Mignon, (Paul-) Jules Barbier (1825-1901) made his debut in legitimate theater. His play in verse for the Comédie-Française, Un Poète (1847) - which includes American characters and reference to slavery - was awarded a prize by the Académie Française. In the 1860s he penned several five-act dramas for the Ambigu-Comique, where Cora, ou l'esclavage had its premiere on August 21, 1861 , virtually coincident with the beginning of the American Civil War. Presented as a contemporary story, it attracted wide attention. Georges Bizet's comments catch the enthusiasm of the audience response: "Je suis sorti du théâtre profondément ému, et c'est de cette émotion que je viens vous remercier. Si la grotesque organisation sociale à laquelle nous sommes soumis pouvait nous faire oublier que nous avons du coeur, il suffirait de quelques oeuvres comme la vôtre pous nous le rappeler. J'ai donc pour votre drame mieux que de l'admiration, j'ai de la reconnaissance" (Dossier d'artiste, Jules Barbier, Bibliothèque de l'Opéra [F-Po]). Barbara T. Cooper, a specialist in nineteenth-century French drama and Alexandre [End Page 348] Dumas, père, has rescued Barbier's Cora, ou l'esclavage from oblivion with her recent critical edition (and several scholarly articles). She makes an excellent case for reading the play now, although she acknowledges its style is old-fashioned, its plot contrived and almost all the characters stereotyped. In these days of galloping digitization, high quality critical apparatus like hers is crucial to justifying editions of this sort. Making use of Barbier's papers (F-Po), Cooper discusses his references to travellers' commentaries, sociopolitical studies and scientific publications on slavery and race that grounded his drama in geographical, sociological and legal details for a public already familiar with Uncle Tom's Cabin. She also surveys Barbier's earlier manuscript drafts that reveal the work's genesis. Comments on Cora's initial reception appear to be based on only about a dozen of the numerous critics of that time, but excerpts of their reviews are partially reproduced in appendices. A fascinating selected bibliography of books and articles on slavery, theater, America and the press from the midnineteenth century as well as relevant modern critical sources follows the introduction. A useful addition here might be Mary Jean Speare's doctoral dissertation, The Transformation of Opéra Comique 1850-1880 (Washington University at Saint Louis, 1997), with its biographical essay on Barbier and an extended analysis of his collaboration with Michel Carré. Barbier's drama opens at a ball in Paris. There the beautiful, innocent, refined and fair-skinned heroine, Cora Gérard, attracts the gaze of the hero, the young French engineer Georges Bessières. Raised in France at her father's expense, she is unaware that she is part black and that her mother was a slave. She is also ignorant that she would be legally defined as property should she ever return to Louisiana. In this prelude, Cora is admired and courted. She finds out that her father, in financial straits, has also been injured and decides to go home, where during the next four acts she is ostracized and insulted, and eventually sold as a slave because of her father's insolvency. Georges abhors both slavery and racism. He believes that technology will provide the way to replace slave labor, just as it has revolutionized the lives of French peasants. He, too, travels to Louisiana. Barbier shows the evils of slavery without scenes of overt violence and without obviously black characters. He foregrounds the civilizing influence of French humanitarian ideals (particularly in the ironic comments of French-educated Curtiss, an American business partner of plantation owner Williams Johnson) and contrasts these with the racism and heartless mercantilism of the evil Kraig (another plantation owner) and the lustful Johnson. After many twists and turns, Cora's father is freed from...

A Rebel against Colonization A Comparative Study of Cesaire’s Caliban in A Tempest with Shakespeare's Caliban in the Tempest

This thesis makes a comparative study of French playwright Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest and Shakespeare’s The Tempest to present the conflicts between two important characters in both plays, Prospero and Caliban. By analyzing the relationship between the two characters, it is easily acknowledged that the relationship between the two characters is that of the colonizer and the colonized, which is the main theme of the two plays. However, the author points out that Cesaire’s Caliban is different from Shakespeare’s Caliban in that Cesaire’s Caliban incarnates the rebellious image of the colonized people in a more vivid way and proves to be more powerful than Shakespeare’s Caliban in their struggle against colonization for liberty, freedom, and equality.

Reviewing quality cinema: French costume drama of the 1950s

If the study of 1950s French cinema as a whole has been fairly limited so far, a major part of the cause is the legacy of the 1950s critics of the Cahiers du cinéma (especially Truffaut) whose labelling of this cinema as ‘a cinema of quality’ or ‘daddy's cinema’ cast it into some kind of abyss from which it is only just beginning to emerge, thanks to studies by a few scholars who contest this simplified reductionism of a whole generation of cinematic production. But, to date, the focus has been more on auteurs and stars, on the one hand, and, on the other, the thriller genre and social-realist cinema, rather than on the costume drama. Furthermore, the Cahiers' dismissive rhetoric has meant that the relationship between a nation's cultural artefact (cinema) and a very important period of political cultural history has, by and large, been overlooked. This bleaching out is particularly poignant in relation to the costume drama given that, although it purports to speak to history, it often speaks less to the past and more to the present contemporary moment (albeit through the disguise and displacement of the costumes and settings). There is therefore a clear need to investigate thoroughly and more globally this area of French film culture, especially given that the 1950s was one of the most prolific and popular periods for this genre, with the great majority of them attracting large audiences. The following article sets out the general contexts within which this genre needs to be viewed. This article is part of a much longer piece of research I am in the process of writing: a book on the 1950s French costume drama, to be published by Intellect Press (2010).

The School of Shipwrecks: Improvisation in Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung and the Lehrjahre

GOETHE'S TWENTY-SIX YEAR TENURE as director of the Weimar Theater gives little indication of an interest in improvisational acting. In 1803 he composed a comprehensive list of rules for the aspiring actor which includes guidelines for pronunciation, rhythmic delivery, posture, hand positions, costumes and almost everything else imaginable.1 This narrow corset2 with which Goethe girded the actors under his purview is a far cry from the improvisational acting popular in Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century, before the onset of the theatrical reform spearheaded by Johann Christoph Gottsched and others.3 Given Goethe's programmatic attention to detail as director, it comes as some surprise that the first two Wilhelm Meister novels, Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung (1786) and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795), reveal a pervasive interest in extemporized acting. In fact, it is fair to say that in the Lehrjahre Wilhelm Meister's early theatricalcareer (i.e., his childhood) is profoundly shaped by an act of involuntary improvisation when, on the spur of the moment, he decides to stage a performance of Ariosto's Jerusalem Delivered. He summons the neighborhood children, assigns the parts and hastily gathers an audience. Despite the good intentions of the young actors, however, the performance is a failed venture:Verungluckt war die Expedition (MA 5:29)The children are unfamiliar with the story and have no idea when to speak or even what to say. Wilhelm's performance as Tancred, recited directly from Ariosto's text, provokes laughter from the audience when a lengthy mo no log unwittingly slips into the third person. Only the last-minute decision to perform the well-known story of David and Goliath, with the help of a clownish Hanswurst to compensate for the occasional lapses, keeps the theatrical expedition from shipwrecking completely4 The evening becomes a true exercise in improvisation the moment the children take up a plot with which they are familiar and perform it extemporaneously. The structure of repetition and variation-when a familiar scenario is enacted in such a way as to allow for the contingencies of the moment-is the essence of improvisational theater. The improvised performance of David and Goliath is indicative of a broader interest in extemporized acting in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre already found in the Theatralische Sendung. References to improvisational in the two novels are clearly connected to the theatrical tradition of the commedia dell'arte.this style of acting was familiar to Goethe, who witnessed-and enjoyed-lengthy extemporized pieces during his journey to Italy in 1786. It was also well-known within the eighteenth-century German cultural context: troops of traveling commedia dell'arte performers had been roaming through the continent at least since the sixteenth century5 The references to commedia dell'arte in the Wilhelm Meister novels provide a well-established performance model which can elucidate Goethe's idiosyncratic use of improvisation, and they also allow for renewed reflection upon the importance of as a potentially product in a time when German lands were fractured politically and linguistically by a multitude of principalities and diverse dialects. The question of a German theater-what guidelines it should follow, and even who is writing for it-runs throughout the eighteenth century and is also a frequent topic of discussion for Wilhelm and his friends. Yet the vast critical scholarship on the Wilhelm Meister novels has in its discussion of a national theater preferred to focus on Goethe's Shakespeare reception, references to classical French drama, and the German Volksbuch tradition. Given that improvisation is a central topic in eighteenth-century theatrical reform, it is all the more surprising that the episodes of improvised and their connection to the commedia dell'arte tradition have been largely disregarded. …

La traduction du théâtre français en Chine

This article first presents a list of French dramas which have been translated into Chinese and performed in China. By analysing the list of works, the author attempts to nail down the factors which influence both the translation and the performance of French dramas in China. In addition to the selection of dramas made by the translators or the stage directors from the cultural perspectives, there are still specific requirements for the translated works to be performed on the stage in China. This article highlights the importance for the translation works to recover the performance implicit in the text of the original works. Meanwhile, the author explores the process of drama translation by taking examples of the Chinese translation of Le Tartuffe, the famous play written by Molière.

Unsī al-ājj and the metapoetic text: Writing hybridization1

The poetry of the Lebanese poet Unsī al-ājj (b. 1937) separates itself from the poetic traditions and aims to produce a new vision of the poetic process. This study examines the ways in which al-ājj embodies the metapoetic phenomenon systematically in his poems as an additional rebellious and critical expression within his unique vision of the poetic process and literature. Metapoetic writing, according to al-ājj, consolidates these attitudes. It is a way to criticize implicitly the poetic situation and express a rejectionist manner of writing. Analysing several poems that al-ājj has written at distant intervals reveals that he stayed faithful to the metapoetic text throughout his poetic career. The study will also examine the deep influence of the French poet and dramatist Antonin Artaud (1896 – 1948) on al-ājj's metapoetic text and inner writing.

T. S. Eliot and Racine: Tragedy and Resignation in Berenice

In addition to the influence of Dante, T. S. Eliot's poetry was deeply indebted to that of Racine. This becomes clear when all his references to the French dramatist are collated. They show that Eliot regarded Racine as one of the major voices of European literature. In particular, his praise of Berenice in The use of poetry and the use of criticism indicates the nature of this debt. Eliot focuses on the element of resignation in the play. It is suggested that Eliot's view of tragedy was deeply affected by his own predilection for resignation. This helps to explain his affinity to Racine, though it does not fully account for the power of Racine's poetry itself. The article concludes with a discussion of the ending of Berenice.

Decommercialising Shakespeare: Mutran's Translation of Othello

In a series of satirical narrative articles published in al-Sufur literary weekly in 1920, playwright and theatre critic Muhammad Taymur (1892–1921) describes a play he watched, not in reality, but in a dream. In a humourous style that oscillates between the language of fiction and the language of drama, Taymur elaborates in these articles, entitled ‘Trial of the Playwrights’ (Muhakamat Mu’alifi al- Riwayat al-Tamthiliyya), on the practices of both playwrights and theatre translators at the time. The defendants in this imagined, dream-like trial include such prominent figures as Jurj Abyad, Farah Antun, Ibrahim Ramzi and Lutfi Jum‘a, among others. Significantly, members of the jury were the foreign writers on whose work theatre makers in Egypt drew for their performances. These included Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine and Goethe. The prosecutor was the French playwright Edmund Rostand, whose play Cyrano de Bergerac was very popular among Egyptian theatregoers at the time. Two of the defendants, Farah Antun and Khalil Mutran, were known to have practised theatre translation and were thus tried on that basis. Farah Antun was found guilty of ‘translation malpractice’. According to the prosecutor in this imaginary trial, Antun ‘picked the old vaudeville plays and rendered them in a strange, astounding and distorted translation that is half colloquial, half classical, and mixed it with some Syrian jokes … to make the audience laugh’ (77). For this commercially oriented translation practice, the jury ordered Antun to suspend his translation activity for ten years to allow the Egyptian audience enough time to forget his uninspiring translations. But as for Khalil Mutran (1872–1949), the renowned poet and Shakespeare translator, the jury only blamed him for not producing enough of his translations of Shakespeare’s drama (84).