Product Description
by Michael Meere (Author)
The performance of violence on the stage has played an integral role in French tragedy since its inception. Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy is the first book to tell this story. It traces and examines the ethical and poetic stakes of violence, as playwrights were experimenting with the newly discovered genre during decades of religious and civil war (c. 1550-1598). The study begins with an overview of the origins of French vernacular tragedy and the complex relationships between violence, performance, ethics, and poetics. The volume focuses on specific plays and analyzes biblical, mythological, historical, and politically topical tragedies--including the stories of Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, Medea, the Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, the Roman general Regulus, and the assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1588--to show how the multifarious uses of violence on stage shed light on a range of pressing issues during that turbulent time, such as religion,
gender, politics, and militantism.
Author Biography
Michael Meere, Associate Professor of French and Medieval Studies, Wesleyan University
queer, Indigenous, and disability studies. He has also written on contemporary theater, notably the work of Mohamed Kacimi. He is the editor of French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory (2015), guest co-editor with Valérie M. Dionne of a special issue of Early Modern French
Studies on Staging Violence in Early Modern France (2020), and co-editor with Kelly Fender McConnell of Coups de maître. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Culture, in honour of John D. Lyons (2021).
