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.

Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès and Estelle Doudet counter the perception that ‘French medieval theatre’ might be French, medieval, or even theatre. Whereas theatre created from the seventeenth century onwards is termed ‘modern’, activity prior to this period is often portrayed as unsophisticated and non-professional. Bouhaïk-Gironès and Doudet argue for a new approach to the theatre that emerged between the mid twelfth and mid sixteenth centuries, which firstly testifies to its rich and varied nature. Second, they decentralize the geographical frame implied by ‘French’, recounting the French-speaking theatre activity taking place over France’s borders. Finally, they describe the sophisticated processes of collaborative performance-making, rehearsal and stage production that evolved during this period, which gave rise to a whole new lexicon of terms for describing practices by playwrights, actors, producers and audience members, many of which are used in European languages to this day.

This chapter challenges historiographical claims that the theatre created before the seventeenth century was a mere prelude to the symphony of the neoclassical age. French-language plays written between 1550 and 1600 under the aegis of the Pléiade poets, who were charged with renewing the French language by looking back to classical Greek and Roman writings, form the focus of their study. Despite their classical credentials, these plays are best understood not by categorizing them as ‘humanist’, but instead by ‘situating’ them within the history within which they were written: the denominational split brought about by the Protestant Reformation of Christianity in Europe, which provoked a seismic upheaval and called into question representation on social, political and even cosmological levels. Whether Protestant or Catholic, explicitly militant or seemingly apolitical, literal or analogical, these plays were inevitably affected by this crisis, otherwise known as the Wars of Religion. Bouteille and Karsenti conclude that by returning to classical antiquity, Renaissance playwrights sought as much to garland their work with greater prestige as to innovate devices capable of recounting their anguished, conflicted and traumatic world.