PFSCL XLIX, 96 DOI 10. / PFSCL-2022-0017 Bernard J. Bourque (éd.) : Jean Magnon, Théâtre complet. Tübingen, Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, « Biblio 17, vol. 223 », 2020. 641 p. Jean Magnon (1620-1662) was a poet and playwright who garnered considerable esteem in his own day but soon fell out of fashion. Today he is remembered mainly for two elements in his biography: he was a friend of Molière, whose company staged at least two of his plays, and he was murdered (probably on the orders of his wife’s lover). The present edition brings together for the first time all eight of Magnon’s plays, only two of which have previously received scholarly editions. While Magnon was not an innovator in form or content, his tragedies and tragicomedies have historical significance in showing how French serious drama evolved in the period from 1645 to 1660, between the tetralogy of Pierre Corneille and the major tragedies of Jean Racine. Magnon’s popularity may well have stemmed from his ability to sense which elements of his contemporaries’ dramaturgy played best to the Parisian public and to rework them into new configurations. His talent for plot construction keeps the reader’s interest: he is adept in producing surprise and suspense, and all his plays include memorable confrontations between adversaries. But he tends to strain the limits of vraisemblance in his constant use of disguise, mistaken identity and misunderstandings, devices that he sometimes features multiple times within the same play. At times characters engage in reckless behavior without sufficient motivation, as if the playwright were exploiting them to create additional dramatic moments. Magnon’s style, which has often been called inferior, is actually respectable, if sometimes obscure, and, as Bourque notes, there are moments of real eloquence. Characterization tends to be superficial, but a few characters truly come to life, especially the energetic women, both heroic and evil. The plays feature a number of character types that were popular at the time, such as the female warrior, the tyrant who tries to compel love through threats, the favorite minister whose close relationship with the monarch has potentially erotic overtones, the valiant general who is also a submissive lover, etc. Magnon’s tragicomedies fit into a trend developed during the 1630s: using historical characters but relying on novelistic sources as well as historians and with the amorous complications (mostly fictional) outweighing the political considerations. Even in the tragedies his liberties with history are more sweeping than normal for the era, and he does not hesitate to alter the best-known facts in order to create suspense. For example, he has Joanna of Naples murdered through the machinations of her second husband, although in history she would have four marriages, and she is Comptes rendus PFSCL XLIX, 96 DOI 10. / PFSCL-2022-0017 324 shown as innocent of all the crimes often attributed to her. It is also noteworthy that in his Tite (which likely influenced Corneille’s Tite et Bérénice, written ten years later) he allows the beleaguered lovers to marry at the end. Magnon builds on the success of Polyeucte to craft with his Josaphat a type of hagiographic play where martyrdom is deemphasized (only one minor character is put to death, while the other Christians survive and flourish), and the love plot gets a happy ending, thanks to the title character’s generous renunciation of amorous desire. But Magnon is far more than a recycler of themes and techniques borrowed from other playwrights; in most cases he chooses a subject not yet treated in France but that would later be treated by others. One of the exceptions, Zénobie, is directly inspired by d’Aubignac’s tragedy of the same name, but Magnon’s version is not a mere versification but rather a new play with a substantially different plot. In line with most contemporary practice, Bourque has modernized the spelling, though this is not done consistently. It would have been desirable to distinguish more regularly between homonyms and to observe the conventions for hyphen use, as well as the distinction between passé simple and imperfect subjunctive. Although there are many hundreds of obvious errors in the original editions, including some that affect scansion, these are corrected (as indicated in the footnotes) only a small fraction of the time; this should have been done more systematically. There are multiple errors of transcription (including the frequent use of the non-existent verb voiser), and there is apparently a line missing in Jeanne de Naples. The original punctuation has been scrupulously maintained, even in the numerous cases where it is manifestly absurd and confuses the reader; not everyone would agree with that choice. The edition, while including the extraits des privilèges, leaves out the dedicatory epistles and liminary poems, deemed too long; however, the prefaces for the two plays that use them have been retained. The lack of even a brief glossary, though hardly a problem for scholars, probably makes these texts less accessible to students. The general introduction gathers together everything that is known about the author’s life and the background of the plays, plus critical reception of Magnon from the seventeenth century to the present. Bourque regularly gives useful information about the dates and biographies of the characters who have a basis in history. However, the analysis of the works themselves could have been profitably expanded. Some of the notes that elucidate complications in the plot are helpful, but often the notes merely restate the obvious. There are cases where notes should have been provided but were not, especially when the meaning of the text is unclear and when there are anomalies in poetic scansion: for example, Magnon (unlike Comptes rendus PFSCL XLIX, 96 DOI 10. / PFSCL-2022-0017 325 Corneille) treats the name Séleucus as having four syllables, and he frequently uses the now-archaic form fleau, which counts for one syllable. In a few cases the information in the notes is wrong, the most egregious being the inaccurate explanation of the name Cassandre in Oroondate, who is not the same person as Cassander. There is a brief but serviceable bibliography. In short, this edition is a valuable contribution to our understanding of mid-seventeenth-century serious drama and a figure of genuine historical significance, whose plays are well worth the read. Perry Gethner