Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy Performance, Ethics, Poetics

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.

Michael Meere, Assistant Professor of French and Medieval Studies, Wesleyan University

Michael Meere is Assistant Professor of French and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University. He is a scholar of early francophone literatures and cultures with a focus on theater and performance, forms and representations of violence, travel narratives and cross-cultural interactions, and gender,
queer, Indigenous, and disability studies. He has also written on contemporary theater, notably the work of Mohamed Kacimi. He was educated in the United States and France, earning degrees from the University of Virginia, Sorbonne Universit?, the Universit? Lumi?re Lyon 2, and Northwestern
University. His research has been supported by the Chateaubriand Program, the Fulbright Commission, the Society of Early Modern French Studies, and the Society for French Studies.