Chapter 3 - Drama before Standardization

Summary

Christian Biet explains that ahead of the restrictions on theatrical representation imposed in the seventeenth century, sixteenth-century theatre was free to stage macabre spectacles of cruelty and bloody horror, convulsive emotions and transgressive acts. Like Bouteille and Karsenti in their chapter in the same book, Biet is careful to locate the theatre he examines during the catastrophically destructive Wars of Religion. While overt depictions of the war were banned in an attempt to avoid sectarianism, playwrights presented schism, chaos, politics of state and abuse perpetrated by the monarchy via the detours of allegory, classical myth or foreign context. In Nicolas Chrétien des Croix’s Les Portugais infortunés (The Unfortunate Portuguese, 1608), for example, the encounter between the Portuguese and the inhabitants of the land they colonize indirectly critiques France’s own colonial politics of expansion and the use of religion to justify terror and abuse overseas. Biet argues that, far from being primitive or archaic, theatre from this period has much to teach us today about the representation in the arts and media of violence and atrocity.