Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France

Joseph Harris. Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France. Oxford University Press, 2014. 304 pp. $85.00 USD, £55 (hardback). ISBN 9780198701613.Inventing the Spectator by Joseph Harris is a lucid study of how early modern theorists conceptualized the spectator's experience with dramatic performances and literature. The author covers a wide range of drama theory in France from the first decades of the 1600s to the pre-Revolutionary period. By focusing on the relationships between subjectivity and theatre, Harris demonstrates that "dramatic theory can offer privileged insight into the supposedly universal nature of human psychology" (7). The author provides new insights into famous French theorists and dramatists (D'Aubignac, Corneille, Diderot, and Rousseau, for example) and brings to light the innovations of overlooked writers, such as Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Jean Chapelain, and Rene Rapin. Harris' writing is clear and refreshing; he helpfully guides the reader through complex arguments without jargon or repetition.Harris' book is perhaps the past decade's most exhaustive study of French dramatic theory for two reasons: first, he investigates dramatic theories from both "classical" and "Enlightenment" traditions, whereas most scholars separate the two (e.g., Georges Forestiers and John Lyons' recent work on the seventeenth century, or Pierre Frantz' and Scott Bryson's work on the eighteenth century); second, Harris examines both pro-theatrical (Corneille, Dubos, Diderot) and anti-theatrical (Pierre Nicole, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Bernard Lamy) conceptions of the spectating experience; most accounts of drama focus only on the former.Inventing the Spectator unfolds in eight chapters, several of which investigate the theories of specific writers, like D'Aubignac, Corneille, Dubos, Rousseau, and Diderot; other chapters discuss key emotional states of spectating, such as enthrallment, intellect, and identification. Despite the neat separation of ideas and authors in the table of contents, a few theoretical currents cut across most chapters. For example, Harris provides a particularly strong analysis of identification-a psycho-dramaturgical concept about which he has already published several articles. The author proves that identification is far more complex than mere "shared feelings" between the members of the audience and the characters on stage. Several authors indeed present identification in this basic schema (D'Aubignac, for example), however, as Harris proves, identification is far more variegated and complex in most dramatic theories at the time. Corneille, for example, undergirds his theory of identification in a set of a priori expectations by the spectator that are then met (or not) by the dramatist (96); while for Rousseau, theatrical identification is less a function of dramatic illusion on stage than of an "ideology" inherent to theatre and "theatrical life" (207).In his chapter on Diderot, Harris proves that the model of identification proposed by the philosophe is not in fact like the individualized, psychological connection between character and spectator that critics, both past and present, commonly associate with the drame. Instead, Diderot's identificatory scheme "is metonymic rather than metaphorical; the spectator recognizes a broadly cognate self or neighbour in the character rather than wholly replacing one identity with another"; and this operation succeeds, according to Harris, owing to the drame 's projection of a "shared social context" (243). …