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Acknowledgement
We wish to extend our deepest thanks to Tim Chesters, the external reviewers, and the entire Early Modern French Studies production team for their patience and flexibility concerning delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biographical note
Michael Meere teaches French and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University. He has edited French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory (2015) and has completed a book (under contract) on the ethics and poetics of onstage violence in sixteenth-century French vernacular tragedy.
Notes
1 Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
2 See the many publications by Christian Biet on justice, law, and literature. Hélène Bilis and Yann Robert have indispensable monographs on the topic: Bilis, Passing Judgment: The Politics and Poetics of Sovereignty in French Tragedy from Hardy to Racine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); Robert, Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). See also work by Toby Wikström, especially ‘Law, Conquest and Slavery on the French Stage, 1598–1685’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 2010).
3 For contemporary theatre that addresses questions of social, racial, health, LGBTQ+, disability, and environmental justice, particularly in the United States, see for instance The Justice Theater Project <http://www.thejusticetheaterproject.org/> [accessed 5 July 2020]. In her article, Dionne also alludes to a 2020 performance titled Antigone in Ferguson, created in the wake of the murder of Michael Brown in 2014, and directed by Brian Doerries for the Theater of War Productions <https://theaterofwar.com/> [accessed 20 September 2020].
4 Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès et al., ‘Legal Theory, Legal Practice and Drama (1200–1600),’ Law and Humanities, 5.1 (2015), 75–95; see also Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Jelle Koopmans, and Katell Lavéant, eds., La Permission et la Sanction: Théories légales et pratiques du théâtre (XIVe–XVIIe siècle) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017).
5 Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), p. 25.
6 Indeed, ‘the law’ and ‘justice’ should not be conflated—what is ‘just’ is not necessarily ‘legal’, and vice versa.
7 Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet argue that, ‘within the space of the stage and the framework of tragic representation, the hero is no longer put forward as a model, as he used to be in epic and in lyric poetry. Now he has become a problem. Now, as the action unfolds and through the interplay of dialogue, what used to be praised as an ideal, the touchstone of excellence, is brought into question in front of the public.’ Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. by Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 242. Critchley develops this idea further, particularly in terms of justice: ‘Justice is always on both sides and one is swayed one way and the other by argument and counterargument. Justice is slowly twisted into its opposite and vice versa. The truth of tragedy – the truth of what Gorgias would see as its lie – consists in bearing ambiguity, living with ambiguity. Justice (or power or law or whatever the key term that is in play in the play) is not one, but is at least two, possibly more’ (p. 48).
8 Marie Demeilliez et al., eds., Le Théâtre au collège, European Drama and Performance Studies 11.2 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018). On Jesuit theatre, see Pierre Peyronnet, ‘Le théâtre d'éducation des jésuites,’ Dix-huitième siècle, 8 (1976), 107–20.
9 The most famous guild of legal clerks involved in theatrical productions was the Basoche. See Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Les Clercs de la Basoche et le théâtre polique (Paris, 1420–1550) (Paris: Champion, 2007); Sara Beam, Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 77–110.
10 For a treasure trove of plays about heroines written by women, see Theresa Varney Kennedy, Women’s Deliberation: The Heroine in Early Modern French Women’s Theater (1650–1750) (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).
11 Barbier has been called ‘the most outspokenly feminist’ women playwrights of the eighteenth century, though many of her works were originally attributed to men, including Le Jugement de Pâris (to the abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin). See English Showalter, Jr., ‘Writing off the Stage: Women Authors and Eighteenth-Century Theater,’ Issue on ‘The Politics of Tradition: Placing Women in French Literature,’ Yale French Studies, 75 (1988), 95–111 (99).
12 The opera-ballet premiered at the Académie Royale de Musique on 21 June 1718. Alicia C. Montoya records between twenty-five and twenty-eight performances of the ‘pastorale’, as well as several popular parodies, which indicate its success at the time. Marie-Anne Barbier et la tragédie post-classique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), pp. 181–88. The text printed by Ballard in 1718 is available online: <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k71680s/f1.image.r=barbier%20jugement%20de%20paris>; the music can be found here: <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k45003535/f1.image.r=%22jugement%20de%20paris%22barbier> [accessed 2 September 2020].
13 Montoya, p. 187.
14 David M. Powers, ‘The “Pastorale Heroique”: Origins and Development of a Genre of French Opera in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,’ 2 vols (PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1988), vol. 2, p. 256. Powers attributes the libretto to Pellegrin and makes no mention of Barbier.
15 The music was composed by Toussaint (or Thomas) Bertin de La Doué.
16 This final image of Junon in her chariot, on the brink of wreaking havoc on Troy, certainly recalls Medea fleeing Corinth in her own dragon-led chariot after slaying her children, Creon, and his daughter. For a stimulating revision of the influence of the story of Medea on neoclassical French drama, see Juliette Cherbuliez, In the Wake of Medea: Neoclassical Theater and the Arts of Destruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020).
17 On taste, see Michael Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Carine Barbafieri and Jean-Christophe Abramovici, eds., L’Invention du mauvais goût à l’âge classique (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), Elena Russo, Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), Jennifer Tsien, The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
18 Estelle Doudet, ‘Finis allegoriae: un trope problématique sur la scène profane française. Nouveaux questionnements sur l’allégorie au théâtre (XVe–XVIe siècle),’ in Mainte belle œuvre faicte. Études sur le théâtre médiéval offertes à Graham A. Runnalls, ed. by Denis Huë, Mario Longtin, and Lynette Muir (Orleans: Paradigme, 2005), pp. 117–44; Doudet, ‘Dame Justice et ses suppôts, un personnel dramatique sur la scène des moralités et sotties (XVe–XVIe siècle),’ in Bouhïk-Gironès et al., La Permission et la Sanction, pp. 295–315.
19 La Moralité à cincq personnages, du manuscrit B.N.F. ms. fr. 25467, ed. by Joël Blanchard (Geneva: Droz, 1988), p. 29.
20 Le Mistére du Viel Testament, ed. by James de Rothschild, 6 vols (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1878–1891), (vol. 1) 1878. Thomas Lecoq’s Tragédie representant l’odieus et sanglant meurtre commis par le maudit Cain (1580), in many ways imitates – or even outright copies – portions of Le Mistére du Viel Testament, however Justice disappears from the play (though other allegorical figures do appear on the stage, including Péché, Remords, and La Mort). Lecoq’s tragedy has been ed. by Nerina Clerici Balmas, in La Tragédie à l’époque d’Henri III, Deuxième Série, vol. 2 (1579–1582) (Florence: Olschki; Paris: PUF, 2000), pp. 383–437.
21 The reenactment of law trials in theatrical productions is certainly nothing new in the early modern period. See F. R. P. Akehurst, ‘Seeing Justice Done: Courtroom Scenes in Medieval French Drama,’ Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes/Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies, 25 (2013), 75–91. doi:https://doi.org/10.4000/crm.13068.
22 The play was not printed until 1624, in the first volume of the Théâtre d’Alexandre Hardy Parisien; it has recently been edited by Christian Biet et al., Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2006), pp. 335–90.
23 La Magicienne estrangere, tragédie (Rouen: David Geuffroy and Jacques Besogne, 1617), <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k724391.image> [accessed 5 September 2020].
24 Jean Racine, Les Plaideurs, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Théâtre–Poésie), ed. by Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, ‘La Pléiade,’ 1999), pp. 299–365.
25 Louise K. Horowitz, ‘Justice for Dogs: The Triumph of Illusion in Les Plaideurs,’ The French Review, 52.2 (1978), 274–79.
26 On the performance of justice during the French Revolution, and notably the re-enactment of such consequential trials as Jean Calas’s and Louis XVI’s, see Robert, Dramatic Justice.
27 Another fascinating study of the porosity between Garnier’s experience in court and his dramatic writings is Phillip John Usher, ‘Courtroom Drama during the Wars of Religion: Robert Garnier and the Paris Parlement,’ in French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory, ed. by Michael Meere (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2015), pp. 139–52.
28 Garnier is mostly indebted to Seneca’s Troades and Euripides’s Hecuba. On Euripides’s Hecuba, and to a lesser extent Seneca’s Troades, in sixteenth-century France, see Donald Stone, Jr., French Humanist Tragedy: A Reassessment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), pp. 67–74. See also Marc Bizer, Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Tiphaine Karsenti, Le Mythe de Troie dans la tragédie française (1562–1715) (Paris: Champion, 2012). I cite from Charles Mazouer’s critical edition of Garnier’s Troade, in vol. 2 of La Tragédie à l’époque d’Henri III (1574–1579), 2nd series (Florence: Olschki; Paris: PUF, 1999), pp. 321–435.
29 On personal revenge and homicide in sixteenth-century France, see Robert Muchembled, ‘Anthropologie de la violence dans la France moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècle),’ Revue de synthèse, 4.1 (January–March 1987), 31–55; Xavier Rousseaux, ‘La répression de l’homicide en Europe occidentale (Moyen Âge et Temps modernes),’ Genèses, 19 (1995), 122–47. This example of Hécube also recalls Barbier’s depiction of Junon’s personal revenge against Pâris (above).
30 Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 6–7.
31 See Bilis, Passing Judgment.