5 - Polyeucte: seeing is believing

Summary

‘Je vois, je sais, je crois.’

Polyeucte, although a ‘tragédie chrétienne’, is firmly grounded in political history. The drama that is centered in the immolation of Polyeucte is strategically situated at a moment of historical passage. Polyeucte lies on the threshold of a new world order. As the play begins, at the far corners of the Empire, in Armenia, the Christians are an ever more present menace to the internal stability of the Roman world. On the borders of that world, the Persians, although contained for the moment, are a threat to its geographic integrity. Clearly, the atmosphere in which Polyeucte evolves is one of malaise, of instability. When the curtain goes up on the first scene of this drama, the ‘throne and the altar’ are in danger.

The moment of passage from one order to another is a sacred one; it is a moment of agony, the agony of an entire system of legal, social and sexual codes, and of the birth pains of a new society. It is this trembling that we are called upon to witness. It is the terror and anticipation of our participation that accounts for Polyeucte's hold on us. In this, Corneille's most complex tragedy, the lines that separate life and death are confused and inverted. At its religious core, the tragedy engages theater in its very nature as a form of representation. The borders separating seeming and being shift. Concurrently those other borders, the divisions that society imposes between its members, division of sex and of power, are engaged in their own dislocation.