Wonder and Spectatorship in Early Seventeenth-Century Desseins

n seventeenth-century France, desseins (literally, “designs”) were documents published to accompany plays making extensive use of stage design and machine effects. The desseins are descriptive accounts of the pleasurable effects of the visual and musical parts of the performance. Spectators often purchased them at the entrance to machine plays and operas and read them during the performance as an aid to follow the plot and to appreciate the special effects and stage décor. The desseins were also souvenirs, and they further served as advertisements of the play for anyone who had not yet seen the show. The authorship of these documents varied. Sometimes the playwright wrote them, as did Pierre Corneille forAndromède (1650) and La Toison d’Or (1660), and sometimes the author was the machinist, such as Denis Buffequin of the Marais theater, for the dessein of Claude Boyer’s La tragedie des amours de Jupiter et de Sémélé (1666). Often, the author remains unknown but is presumed to be an actor or other artisan working for the theater. This is the case for two of the earliest surviving desseins: one written to accompany François de Chapoton’s La Grande journée des machines: Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers (1647) and the other to accompany Jean Rotrou’s La Naissance d’Hercule (1649), a new production of Rotrou’s Les Sosies (1638). A dessein also existed in 1648 for Boyer’s spectacular production,Ulysse dans l’Ile de Circé, ou Euriloche foudroyé, but it has since disappeared. It was published by René Baudry, the same publisher of Chapoton’s dessein, and only an account of the