Philippe Quinault, Théâtre complet. Tome IV Tragi-comédies historiques, éd. William Brooks et Buford Norman, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2022.
Ce volume rassemble les cinq dernières tragi-comédies de Philippe Quinault, à savoir celles à sujet historique. Créées entre 1657 et 1662, elles montrent l’immense talent d’un auteur qui était à l’apogée de sa carrière de dramaturge du théâtre parlé.
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All these tragi-comedies exhibit that sense of connivance between playwright and audience that characterises Quinault's entire output: the audience is well aware of the theatrical illusion, the playwright knows perfectly well what the audience thinks, but everyone will pretend not to notice. Irony is never far from these pages. For all that he was, without doubt, a Modern in the eyes of Boileau and his allies, Quinault still had one foot in the past, and the baroque is untrammeled by the straitjacketing self-assurance of classicism.
Three of the plays build up to moments of pathos that will bring tears to the eyes of all who lack hearts of stone. Three contain heroes who, having died by various means offstage, reappear hale and hearty in later scenes. Three feature furious affronted heroines who exhibit what Daniel Mornet called "l'amour déchaîné, [qui] ne connaît plus ni devoir, ni pitié, ni prudence" and in whom he saw models for some of Racine's women. Four trace the early development of Quinault's novel and uncornelian view that the duty owed by a hero is not duty to God or to one's monarch (or even to oneself) but is imposed and controlled by powerful third parties for reasons of their own. Three feature variants on his favourite theme of mistaken identity, though in two cases the audience is in the know from early on. One, Quinault's eighth, Le Feint Alcibiade, involves cross-dressing - incidentally the last time he was to use the device - and is seasoned with a whiff of female same-sex attraction to titillate the male half (or very likely, four-fifths) of the playgoers in the auditorium.
Three, and perhaps four, were enormous box-office successes. On the other hand, Stratonice, the fourth play in the volume and Quinault's eleventh, labelled a triumph by every Quinault commentator, was a flop, as the editors show. It was one of only two plays in Quinault's whole career to achieve that dubious distinction, and no! Boileau's notorious put-down ("Et jusqu'à je vous hais, tout s'y dit tendrement" was not aimed at it, though one can be forgiven for thinking it was, since every other exegete says so. Two of the plays - Stratonice, again, and Amalasonte - appeared in modern editions in the 1980s, but the others have been unavailable since the eighteenth century. One can identify reasons for Stratonice's failure on stage, but it is a very good read.
Seekers of other dramatists' source materials can question whether an exciting moment in Amalasonte inspired Thomas Corneille (in Camma) and Prade (in Arsace), and whether a pathetic scene in Le Mariage de Cambise showed Racine how to create an even more harrowing passage in Britannicus. Contemptuous Cornelians can disparage Quinault's way with historical sources (broadly, his utter indifference to them). Experts in prosody can affirm that, while Racine "rase la prose, mais avec des ailes" (to quote Leo Spitzer), Quinault's verses "rasent la prose, tout court", though they should concede the deliberate creation of identifiable poetic effects that crowd into moments of high drama, the better to underline the tension and the emotion. Limpidity was Quinault's watchword, and even if some of us relish the challenge of Thomas Corneille's often embrangled syntax, it is a wiser playwright who realises the audience needs to keep up.
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Nombre de pages: 613
Parution: 20/04/2022
Collection: Bibliothèque du théâtre français, n° 91
ISBN: 978-2-406-12930-1
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