The Duke of Guise’s Murder and the Imperative of Vengeance

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).