In his meticulously researched book, Charles Mazouer traces the different representations of the Middle Ages in a variety of dramatic genres, from the Renaissance to the second half of the twentieth century. A few questions animate his approach: what traces did the Middle Ages leave in literary and historical memory during these centuries? Is there a homogeneous Middle Ages or should we rather refer to a series of representations of the Middle Ages that echo the historical and cultural horizon of each century? How do different playwrights incorporate medieval topoi in their work? Do dramatic works from various centuries unearth the “real” Middle Ages or do they stage historically distorted medieval material filtered by the zeitgeist of a certain period?
In providing potential answers to such questions, Mazouer adopts a chronological approach, which lies at the base of the organization of his monograph. The first part is dedicated to the theater of the premodern era (1580-1715). In this corpus, mainly dominated by tragedy and, occasionally, by other genres such as ballets, Mazouer identifies a few common medieval historical characters, events, and themes. Post-Roman kingdoms as well as early-medieval French dynasties like the Merovingians and the Carolingians are among the recurrent historical backdrops of the pre-Revolutionary dramatic productions. Key historical characters and their performance in important historical moments--Clovis, Charlemagne, but also Jeanne d’Arc and Attila the Hun--organize the dramatic structures of the plays and of subsequent themes that surface in them: the figure of the non-Christian other, violence, and the role of Christianity in shaping a proto-national French identity. In establishing this corpus, Mazouer analyzes an impressive number of texts ranging from more canonical plays (Corneille’s Attila, roi des Huns and Garnier’s Bradamante) to lesser-known ones: L’Histoire tragique de la Pucelle de Domrémy, Denis Coppée's Tragédie de saint Lambert, Jean Prévost's Clotilde, and Claude Billard's Mérovéeamong others. These plays, of unequal aesthetic value, stage a lacunary medieval past focusing on Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Moreover, as Mazouer points out, they also tend to use the Middle Ages as a narrative pretext rather than a true source of historical information, which explains the multiple historical distortions that he identifies in these plays.
The second part of the monograph is dedicated to an analysis of dramatic productions referencing a medieval topic written and staged in the long eighteenth century (1732-1830). Using a similar approach to the one in the previous section, Mazouer identifies different dramatic genres, themes, characters, and playwrights referencing medieval materials. Whereas tragedy was the predominant genre in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, during this period the dramatic corpus with a medieval component diversifies and incorporates other genres such as lyrical tragedy (Guillard et Andrieux’s Louis IX en Égypte), comedy (Le Château du diable, Duplat de Monicourt’s Les Paladins, Sedaine’s Richard coeur de lion) and the pantomime (Pleinchesne’s Programme de la Pucelle d’Orléans ou Le Fameux Siège). However, tragedy does not disappear but is present in a different format. The classical tragedy of the seventeenth century with its strict prosodic structure and aesthetic program becomes outdated for the sensibilities of the eighteenth century, which aim for a diversity of scenes and characters, and which are not geared only for, as Mazouer puts it eloquently, kings who speak in alexandrines (72). This is the reason why, at the end of the eighteenth century, tragedy is gradually replaced by a genre troubadour which, under the Empire and Restoration, morphs into a new genre entitled historical theater. These newly emergent genres echo a larger literary tendency to strengthen national identity. Following Voltaire who, in his Preface to the play Tancrède, recommends the staging of subjects from French national history, eighteenth-century playwrights emphasize the creation of a national historical tragedy that focuses on national heroes and foundational figures in French history. As de Bellay writes in his Preface to Siège de Calais, a play should be representative of the historical theater. Such a shift coincides with the emergence in the eighteenth century of a new type of historiography preoccupied with excavating a historically accurate Middle Ages. The dramatic productions of historical theater respond to this double exigency. They stage royal figures (Charlemagne, Clovis, Louis IX, Charles VI, Philippe Auguste) or historical events (the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War) representative of the French historical identity in a historically realist style which Mazouer labels “coloris du temps,” consisting of the accurate use of medieval regalia such as costumes or architectonic details (102). These regalia, however, do not overcome the use of anachronism: as readers we do not have access to a genuinely medieval mentality and material world. Contrary to that, the medieval past is used ideologically, either to legitimate a medieval past and its foundational institutions such as the monarchy, or to condemn the same past as “barbaric,” “superstitious,” or “violent,” a position in line with the philosophical ideals of the Enlightenment.
The third part of the monograph, suggestively entitled Du Romantisme au Symbolisme, covers the plays written and staged throughout the nineteenth century when the Middle Ages becomes a preferred topos, or as Mazouer puts it, when: “le XIXe siècle romantique vénéra le Moyen Âge” [the Romantic nineteenth century venerated the Middle Ages], 121). In fact, 21% of the dramatic productions of the first part of the nineteenth century are inspired by medieval realities. The Romantics do not necessarily invent new dramatic genres but innovate within already existing ones such as the tragedy, melodrama, and the historical drama. The different French dynasties, especially the Valois, dominate the content of the plays and provide a positive image of the sovereign as a defender of the kingdom and guarantor of social harmony in opposition to the usurpers who undermine the legitimacy of the monarchy (150). It is this specific aspect of the “good” French king, points out Mazouer, that appealed to a Catholic and anti-revolutionary audience who saw the Middle Ages as a golden age of Christianity and monarchy. This perspective is central in plays such as Cordelier-Delanoue’s Le Barbier de Louis XI, Anicet-Bourgeois’s historical drama Perinet Leclerc, ou Paris en 1418, and Charles VII chez ses grands vassaux by Alexandre Dumas père.
In addition to royal figures, the theater of this period also makes room for a category nearly inexistant in previous dramatic productions, namely characters belonging to the Third Estate or the peuple, staged either as a distinct group, such as the revolutionary peasants in Prosper Mérimée’s La Jacquerie,or as individual characters like Hugo’s Esmeralda, the protagonist in a libretto for an eponymous opera. Such a tendency echoes the revolutionary movements of the period as well as the collective efforts of the Romantics, including historians, to give voice to what they call “the people.” The Middle Ages depicted in Romantic theater illustrates this double aspect: a legitimating past for a more reactionary type of spectatorship, and a historical era that allows the voices of the Third Estate (peasants, artisans, but also marginal figures) to surface. In this duality, Mazouer argues, following Michel Zink, the Middle Ages is a conglomerate of unsorted affects: “un peu mythique, brutal, excessif, à la fois campagnard et enfantin” [a bit mythical, brutal, excessive, both rustic and childish] (149).
With the Symbolists in the later nineteenth century, these traits are effaced in favor of a more subjective experience of the medieval material. In the dramatic creations of authors such as Remy de Gourmont (Théodat), Pierre Quillard (La Fille aux mains coupées), Maeterlinck (La Princesse Maleine), and Jean Lorrain (Brocéliande) the medieval past provides a very loose framework, and the preoccupation of the Symbolist authors is far from providing an accurately historical representation of the Middle Ages. The medieval component, also enriched with the adaptation of Arthurian literature for stage, acquires deeply oneiric, symbolic, and poetic connotations.
In the last part of the monograph, entitled Le XXe siècle: de l’histoire aux mythes, Mazouer identifies several authors who used medieval topics as sources of inspiration in their dramatic creations: Charles Péguy (Jeanne d’Arc), Paul Claudel (L’annonce faite à Marie, Le Livre de Christophe Colomb, Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher), Jean Anouilh (L’Alouette), Jean Giraudoux (Ondine), Julien Gracq (Le Roi pêcheur), Jean Cocteau (Les Chevaliers de la Table ronde), and Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud (Graal Théâtre), among others. Mazouer notes certain continuities in terms of themes and characters between the plays from this period and those from the previous centuries. Jeanne d’Arc and the crusades are recurrent subjects as are certain hagiographic topoi which are at the center of the Catholic theater represented by the playwright Henri Ghéon. But what really stands out during this period is the Arthurian material that is adapted and reinterpreted with a great degree of fantasy by various playwrights. However, the authors who used medieval material in their adaptations are not preoccupied to recreate a faithful medieval background. Contrary to that, they use different medieval texts, characters, and stories following their own interpretations. This leads Mazouer to invoke a certain plasticity of the image that the Middle Ages possessed, not only in the French theater of the twentieth century, but also throughout what was developed in the previous centuries.
The greatest merit of Charles Mazouer’s monograph is to excavate and describe the themes, motifs, and characters of an impressive number of plays inspired by the Middle Ages, many of which have received little or no critical attention. However, such an archival effort is not complemented by a compelling philological framework where the reader would have found more about, for instance, the criteria according to which these plays have been selected, the channels through which these plays circulated and reached their publics (anthologies, repertories, chrestomathies), or the continuities and ruptures that connect the four periods beyond their shared recourse to medieval material. Multiple times in the monograph, Mazouer points out that every era and author shaped the medieval material according to their own sensibilities, but this “plasticity” of the Middle Ages, as he suggestively calls it, is never analytically developed as a larger socio-historical heuristic, although it could have furnished the interpretive thread that the study otherwise lacks. In fact, the monograph operates without a clear theoretical scaffolding of historical terms such as “medieval.” Numerous medievalists including Jacques Le Goff, Geraldine Heng, Richard Utz, and Nadia Altschul point out the multiple facets of the term and the impossibility of providing a linear, universal interpretation, especially without considering the history of the institutions that shaped it. However, Mazouer assumes that the Middle Ages is a taken-for-granted concept that different playwrights adapted with different degrees of accuracy. In this sense, while acknowledging the plasticity of the medieval, Mazouer remains intrigued by the impossibility--ours and the playwrights’--of perceiving the Middle Ages accurately: “Le Moyen Âge sera-t-il accessible?” [Will the Middle Ages be accessible?] (162). Similarly, although Mazouer mentions the term médiévalisme, or “medievalism,” he does not specify how the concept should be understood in the context of French theatrical history. He does not engage with the now substantial body of scholarship on medievalism that has theorized precisely the questions his corpus raises. The result reads as literary history of a classical and teleological modality rather than as a critical study of theatrical medievalism. These reservations notwithstanding, Mazouer’s erudition is incontestable and his monograph will serve as an indispensable repertory for scholars of French theater, of medievalism, and of the reception of the Middle Ages in modern culture.