{"title":"Performance, Ethics, and Poetics of Violence","authors":"M. Meere","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter demarcates the scope and parameters of the book, first by defining the term “violence,” and then by outlining the three pillars that support the chapters that follow: performance, ethics, and poetics. This discussion is not meant to be exhaustive but rather a foundation painted with broad strokes to allow for the subsequent chapters to go into more detail with respect to the particulars of the plays being studied. The section on performance lays out the book’s theoretical approach and provides some historical conditions of performance, as most of the tragedies studied in the book were performed around their date of publication. The chapter then delineates the connections between ethics and tragedy before revisiting the poetics of sixteenth-century French tragedy and the use of onstage violence as a dramaturgical device.","PeriodicalId":319885,"journal":{"name":"Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122888668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"State-Inflicted Violence and the Ethics of Suffering","authors":"M. Meere","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter investigates two ways in which playwrights adapt violent historical subjects for the stage in Gabriel Bounin’s Soltane (1561) and Jean de Beaubreuil’s tragedy Regulus (1582). The loyal heroes from both are victims of state violence, though their stories unfold quite differently. In La Soltane, Moustapha obeys his father’s orders to visit him despite being warned his father will have him killed. In Regulus, Atilie remains loyal to his homeland (Rome) despite knowing the Carthaginians will punish his betrayal. However, whereas Bounin depicts Moustapha as an innocent victim of filicide, Beaubreuil paints Atilie as an arrogant warrior whose hubris causes his defeat in battle. Nonetheless, Atilie accepts his change in fortune and his violent death in Carthage. Thus, despite his flaws, he is a stoic exemplar who might inspire spectators to take virtuous action themselves. Further, while the stories take place in the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean Basin, they mirror the religious and civil wars of sixteenth-century France.","PeriodicalId":319885,"journal":{"name":"Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114893360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Concluding Remarks","authors":"M. Meere","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The goal of this book has been to untangle and trace the threads of the ethics and poetics of violence in sixteenth-century French tragedy through the lens of performance. In so doing, this book has shown that the “emergence” of onstage violence and the “abandonment” of the ...","PeriodicalId":319885,"journal":{"name":"Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy","volume":"438 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115936756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women Who Kill","authors":"M. Meere","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter on murderesses first considers the theatrical training of young men at the collèges and then turns to Jean Bastier de La Péruse’s Médée (1556). The chapter examines how Médée offers a negative example of violence by manipulating the myth of the infamous filicide on the one hand, and, on the other, by gendering violence to show the irascibility of the female monster who escapes man’s control. The fear of and disdain for women in the period underline the topical urgency of this female threat. Indeed, by staging the murder of Médée’s children and placing this violence in the present tense, rather than keeping the filicides offstage, La Péruse’s tragedy suggests that the Medea archetype inspired by Euripides and Seneca was not simply a mythological figure of the past but very much a current concern in sixteenth-century France.","PeriodicalId":319885,"journal":{"name":"Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130574614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Biblical Violence in Catholic and Calvinist Tragedy","authors":"M. Meere","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter analyzes biblical violence in Catholic and Calvinist tragedy by examining dramatic adaptations of the stories of Cain and Abel and David and Goliath. Thomas Lecoq’s Tragédie de Cain (1580) imitates the early sixteenth-century Mistére du Viel Testament and uses Cain’s murder of Abel as a counterexample of virtuous behavior at the peak of the religious wars, encouraging spectators to behave peacefully toward their neighbors despite differing beliefs. The chapter then considers how the Calvinist tragedies by Joachim de Coignac (La Desconfiture de Goliath, c.1551) and Louis Des Masures (David combattant, 1563/1566) use violence as a positive, liberating force. David’s defeat of Goliath mirrors the Reformed Church’s hopeful victory against the Roman Catholic Church. This chapter argues that Coignac and Des Masures depict David’s violence as a morally good act, yet their plays raise theological, moral, and epistemological questions of when and why it is acceptable to kill.","PeriodicalId":319885,"journal":{"name":"Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126768723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Duke of Guise’s Murder and the Imperative of Vengeance","authors":"M. Meere","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844132.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on Simon Belyard’s Guysien (Troyes, 1592), a tragedy that reenacts the Duke of Guise’s assassination at Blois in 1588. On the one hand, Guise suffers unjust punishment and deserves our pity; on the other, Guise’s loyalty to his homeland inspires virtuous action in the spectators. In Le Guysien, the French king Henry III’s violence is a negative, evil force that paradoxically must be countered with more violence to free the French people from tyranny. The chapter considers the Catholic League’s polemical literature concerning Henry III’s legitimacy, as well as political philosophy and the legitimization of tyrannicide in late sixteenth-century France. Belyard’s play not only incites spectators to pick up the sword to avenge what he considers to be the unjust death of Guise, but is itself a militant act during the turbulent years between Henry III’s own assassination (1589) and Henry IV’s conversion to Catholicism (1593) and subsequent coronation (1594).","PeriodicalId":319885,"journal":{"name":"Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy","volume":"328 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132982369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}