Corneille nell’ombra di Molière. Come identificare un autore?

There is much evidence showing that Moliere did not write his plays. In France, during the 17th century, comedies were presented by comedians – like Molière – and not by the authors who wrote them. Molière did not behave as an author and none, among his contemporaries, considered him a writer. In contrast, many claimed that Corneille wrote some of these plays. Those claims are confirmed by several statistical indices: intertextual distance, classifications, combinations of common words, meanings of keywords, sentence length

Corneille, Molière et les autres. Stilometrische Analysen zu Autorschaft und Gattungszugehörigkeit im französischen Theater der Klassik

The digital age, by making large amounts of text available to us, prompts us to develop new and additional reading strategies supported by the use of computers and enabling us to deal with such amounts of text. One such "distant reading" strategy is stylometry, a method of quantitative text analysis which relies on the frequencies of certain linguistic features such as words, letters or grammatical units to statistically assess the relative similarity of texts to each other and to classify texts on this basis. This method is applied here to French drama of the seventeenth century, more precisely to the now famous "Corneille / Molière- controversy". In this controversy, some researchers claim that Pierre Corneille wrote several of the plays traditionally attributed to Molière. The methodological challenge, it is shown here, lies in the fact that categories such as authorship, genre (comedy vs. tragedy) and literary form (prose vs. verse) all have an influence on stylometric distance measures and classification. Cross-genre and cross-form authorship attribution needs to distinguish such competing signals if it is to produce reliable attribution results. This contribution describes two attempts to accomplish this, parameter optimization and feature-range selection. The contribution concludes with some more general remarks about the use of quantitative methods in a hermeneutic discipline such as literary studies

Molière's language: perspectives and approaches

In spite of over three hundred years of commentary on Molière's plays, one area of research has been neglected by scholars, namely the role of language in the creation of comedy. Of those critics who have analysed Moliere's use of language, the majority have limited their focus to a small number of plays and do not consider what makes his discourse comic. Even more surprising is the fact that virtually no Moliériste has attempted to view Molière's language from the perspective of modern literary and linguistic theory. Consequently, the aim of this thesis is to explore the extent to which contemporary theory elucidates, or perhaps even obscures, our understanding of Moliere's language. While critics in the past have tended to apply a single theory to his plays, we will consider whether a multi-theoretical approach can best account for the range of Moliere's linguistic humour. The analysis of the comedies will be informed by post-Saussurean theories of language, many of which have never been applied to Moliere's work before. The first part of the thesis, entitled 'Language and Society' will address a long-standing debate which continues to divide Molièristes as to the nature of his comedy. Whereas W. G. Moore and Rene Bray have portrayed Moliere as an actor and director, whose primary aim was to amuse his audience, this theatricalist position has been challenged in recent years by the socio-critical theories of James Gaines, Paul Benichou, Larry Riggs and Ralph Albanese. We will consider whether it is possible to reconcile these two opposing approaches through an examination of parody. The second part of the thesis moves from the notion of language as representational to the focus on the ludic function of language games, and discusses whether these represent a retreat into a fantasy world or whether they have a subversive role. Finally, we will turn from the conscious humour of language games to the comedy of the unconscious, in which characters accidentally reveal more than they intend in their speech. The thesis concludes with a recognition of the extent to which recent critical theories may help inform our reading of the comic dramatist

The martyr-figure in French theatre,1596-1675

This doctoral project is the first comprehensive study of plays about Christian martyrdom on the French stage from 1596 to 1675.1 have compiled a corpus of such tragedies (Appendix). In Chapter One, I argue that such plays should be treated as a characteristic tragic sub-genre, distinct from other forms of religious plays. I also examine the background to the appearance of the martyr-play, in particular the exaltation of martyrdom in both Protestant and Catholic communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as other artistic representations of the martyr-hero. Religious literature has often been studied in the light of theological controversy. Since a martyr-play deals with an individual resisting lawful authority, I have concentrated on looking at plays from a political aspect: the depiction of revolt. Accordingly, at the end of Chapter One, I consider how the French king was widely portrayed under the traits of a Roman emperor in popular iconography, demonstrating that this allegory was so widespread, that an audience viewing an emperor on stage would see a link with their own monarch. In Chapters Two, Three and Four, I examine the extant tragedies from the period, with a particular emphasis on how authors treat the question of obedience and the martyr's struggle. Writers with court connections mellow and neutralise the martyr's refusal to obey, notably Comeille and Rotrou. Other dramatists emphasise and highlight the element of individual conscience, particularly La Serre and Desfontaines. The martyr-play peaks during the 1640s and early 1650s, that is to say during a time of civil war, and I believe that the play was a vehicle through which authors could express their discontent with contemporary authority, or even use the example of the martyr as a deterrent to active revolt (Gaspard Olivier is the most striking case).In Chapter Five, I explore the inherent ambivalence of the martyr, and look at the tragedies from the perspective of suicide and the portrayal of gender. I conclude that the martyr is always an ambiguous model, and that this is reflected in the French stage portrayals

"The theatre of the book": marginalia and "mise en page" in the Cardiff Rare Books Restoration Drama Collection

This paper explores the mediations between performance and text, between stage and page, as it appears in terms of authors’, publishers’ but, most importantly, readers’ alterations to the mise en page – the layout of the printed text

Iphigenia in Adaptation: Neoclassicism, Gender, and Culture on the Public Stages of France and England, 1674-1779

This dissertation interrogates the role of adaptation in creating and maintaining hegemonic cultural formations through a study of two tragedies by Euripides as they were adapted by neoclassical playwrights during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France and England. Adaptation studies, a relatively new field of academic inquiry, has thus far largely focused on defining adaptation in relation to more established studies of translation and intertextuality, and has primarily concentrated on cross-medium adaptations such as novels adapted into film. Taking these focuses as a point of departure, this study expands the field of adaptation studies by looking at adaptation not across medium, but across time and culture, through the examination of stage plays that were rewritten for public performance in early modern Western Europe hundreds of years after their initial performances in ancient Greece. In this context, with no change in medium, the uses of adaptation as a tool for disguising cultural difference are revealed, refocusing the scholarly discussion of adaptation from a search for definitions to an exploration of its implications for cultural studies. Exploring the ways in which new ideas about religion, gender, and morality made unadapted Greek tragedies unsuitable for public presentation on early modern stages, the case studies examine the alterations made in nine different adaptations of the two Iphigenia plays that have come down to us from ancient Athens. Looking at adaptations of adaptations (Gluck's operatic adaptation of Racine's retelling of Iphigenia in Aulis, for example) alongside direct adaptations of Greek tragedies, this study argues that local cultural conventions may be threatened by even very recent versions of a story, and that adaptation is leveraged accordingly in order to neutralize such ideological threats. In the process, this exploration traces the ways in which neoclassicism was interpreted and reinterpreted as it shifted times, locations, and genres: from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, France to England, and spoken tragedy to opera