PFSCL XXXIX, 76 (2012) Hélène Baby, Jean-Marc Civardi, Anne Surgers (éds.) : Jean Mairet, Théâtre complet. Édition critique sous la direction de Georges Forestier. Tome III : La Virginie, Les Galanteries du duc d’Ossonne viceroi de Naples, L’Illustre Corsaire. Paris : Honoré Champion, 2010 (« Sources Classiques », 103). 640 p. Jean Mairet, one of the most gifted and most influential of the playwrights active during the era of Louis XIII and one of the leading early theorists of classic doctrine, is remembered today mainly for being a rival of Corneille. His complete plays have never been collected until now, and it is a pleasure to see the appearance of the third in a projected series of four volumes. Volume 3 consists of two tragicomedies and Mairet’s lone comedy. The tragicomedies have been largely ignored and have not previously been reedited, whereas the comedy has received considerable attention and several scholarly editions. All three works have come in for intense criticism from those who would prefer to pigeonhole Mairet as a pioneer of classicism and who find it disturbing that he could switch back and forth between “forward-looking” plays and works that violate one or more aspects of the new dramaturgy, combining baroque and classical elements in varying degrees. The plays in this volume shed light on Mairet’s versatile and innovative spirit, linked to a desire to constantly reinvent himself. They also make for very enjoyable reading, since the characters are energetic, the plots are fast-moving and suspenseful, and each work raises significant ethical and aesthetic issues. The introductions, in addition to providing such basic background as history of composition and performance, sources, and publication history, give helpful and frequently insightful analyses. Hélène Baby and Jean-Marc Civardi demonstrate that the very elements in Virginie that have most drawn the ire of later critics in fact testify to Mairet’s self-reflexive manipulation and recombination of standard tragicomic elements. The highly complicated plot, which Mairet manages to fit into the constraints of the three unities, is totally original. However, since Mairet aimed to incorporate a wide variety of crowd-pleasing devices, he drew many of the constituent elements from earlier tragicomedies and from two well-known pastoral works, by d’Urfé and Bonarelli. The multiplicity of locations—nine in all—and the frequent movement between them are symbolically appropriate, mirroring the dualism at the heart of tragicomic plots: each cluster of places combines danger and refuge, openness and closure, stability and instability. The sea, both during the play and in the action preceding it (a shipwreck), allows for the constant shifting, standard for tragicomedy, between chaos and harmony, loss and reunion. The fragmentation of space further allows Mairet to PFSCL XXXIX, 76 (2012) 256 present sequentially episodes that presumably occur simultaneously in different places. As for the plot structure, which according to the playwright successfully blends the vraisemblable and the merveilleux, the two sets of obstacles are in fact linked, though this is not made clear until the end. While Mairet places unusual emphasis on the role of divine providence in arranging for everything to turn out right and enforcing poetic justice, he also revels in the stock tragicomic elements of chance and reversibility (new obstacles could arise at any time). The villainess Harpalice, whose malice seems inadequately motivated, could be viewed as metatheatrical: this negative double of the playwright invents fictive scenarios and dialogues and demonstrates the creative power of language. Les Galanteries du duc d’Ossonne, a highly unusual work with an amoral love intrigue, valorizes unbridled energy and desire. Anne Surgers, in addition to providing useful information about the play’s composition, premiere and possible sources (notably a 15 th -century Italian novella), shows how Mairet’s views of the comic genre and of galanterie accord with the baroque delight in blurring of boundaries and pushing beyond established limits, exploiting but also questioning conventional stereotypes (such as ridiculing of the Spanish nobleman as ineffective in both love and war). She concludes that the play is basically unclassifiable, combining standard comic features with other elements more commonly used in tragicomedy or even tragedy. Surgers’s reconstruction of the play’s original decor and staging is especially fascinating. Her ingenious theory, solidly based on contemporary documents, is that the actors’ movements around the stage were non-illusionist: where a character is at any given moment depends on what he/ she says with minimal reference to the physical set. The vast majority of the action was played in the central portion of the stage, regarded as neutral space. She also argues that, contrary to what earlier scholars have supposed, the scenes inside Flavie’s house and on an upper story (two bedrooms linked by a corridor) were actually played at ground level. In several cases where a character ascends into the house through a window by ladder, or descends in similar fashion, there was a discontinuity: following the climb a curtain was pulled, after which the actor emerged inside the house, but in a room on the same level as the street. Surgers, who provides multiple diagrams to depict her conception of the original set, makes a strong case for a staging that modern audiences would find startling but audiences of Mairet’s time would have accepted without question. L’Illustre Corsaire shares many features with Virginie, respecting the unities in its overall structure while thoroughly baroque in plot and theme. Hélène Baby argues convincingly that the tragicomedy, sometimes called Mairet’s weakest production, does not deserve its bad reputation. Following Comptes rendus 257 well-reasoned discussions of the dating (always a thorny question with Mairet’s plays) and sources (the invented plot owes much to a novel by Desmarets, the Greek romances, and recent history involving naval battles and pirate attacks), she shows how the remarkably blatant implausibility of plot and characterization, combined with an unusual sobriety of spectacle and on-stage action, is well suited to its dramaturgy and main themes. To a greater degree than usual, language is action, provoking strong emotional responses from listeners and contributing to the realization of the hero’s plan to reconquer both his beloved and his kingdom. Narrations make up about one-fifth of the text, and even the key moment when the heroine recognizes the hero is founded upon speech, rather than visual signs. The play also contains a pronounced metatheatrical dimension, since the episode of the men pretending to be mad, structurally important as a method for the hero to gain access to his beloved, is made the subject of on-stage comments both by those in the know and those who are fooled. Madness allows characters to speak the truth from within a make-believe context, to provide amusement to the audience both onstage and in the hall, and to reverse the comic situation (the ostensible fools make fools of the people they are supposed to be entertaining). The fact that the hero has multiple identities (prince and pirate) and further engages in multiple disguises (madman, false prince) permits for complex play on the unstable relationship between appearance and reality, while establishing a connivance between the knowledgeable characters and the audience—a connection enhanced by the unusual frequency of asides and whispered dialogues. At the same time, the play could be viewed as political commentary, since rulers behave inconsistently: the virtuous and heroic prince temporarily becomes an outlaw, the tyrant is at times cruel and threatening but at others a buffoon and coward, while the third prince is well-meaning but naive and inept. By linking the themes of madness and disguise, Mairet affirms the dual character of theater itself, combining truth and illusion (itself a kind of madness). In keeping with the principles of the series, the spelling has been modernized (though, surprisingly, “et bien” has been left unmodified), but the original punctuation has been retained, with emendations only when the incoherence would hinder readability. The explanatory notes and glossary are extremely helpful. There is extensive discussion of how the new theory about dramatic pronunciation in the seventeenth century would impact the delivery of Mairet’s texts. The volume’s main flaw is inadequate proofreading. Nine words followed by asterisks were left out of the glossary; the last line on p. 382 is repeated on the top of the next page; there are eight cases where a line of verse has one syllable too many or too few (most seem PFSCL XXXIX, 76 (2012) 258 to be inadvertent errors by the current editors). Despite these negligible defects, the volume makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship and will provide great enjoyment to lovers of early modern French drama. Perry Gethner Delphine Denis (dir.) : Honoré d’Urfé, L’Astrée. Première partie. Édition critique établie sous la direction de Delphine Denis par Jean- Marc Chatelain, Delphine Denis, Camille Esmain-Sarrazin, Laurence Giavarini, Frank Greiner, Françoise Lavocat et Stéphane Macé. Paris : Honoré Champion, 2011 (« Champion Classiques, Littératures »). 700 p. L’Astrée semblait trop volumineuse pour les lecteurs d’aujourd’hui, qui lisaient le roman d’Honoré d’Urfé tout au plus dans les anthologies s’ils ne le rangeaient pas parmi les œuvres vouées « à la grande paix des bibliothèques » (7). On présume que cette situation se modifiera désormais grâce à l’engagement de l’équipe dirigée par Delphine Denis, qui a le courage d’en établir la première édition critique intégrale. Ce premier volume permet d’accéder la première partie dans un volume de 700 pages mais bon marché. La « table des histoires » (p. 691), «  des poésies » (pp. 693-696), «  de lettres » (pp. 697-698) y invite à une lecture sélective selon les pratiques du XVII e siècle où ces romans abondants trouvaient un lectorat profitant des secours pour une consultation partielle aussi bien que disposée à se plonger dans les méandres des intrigues complexes. La manière des lecteurs d’aborder la fiction romanesque correspondait toutefois plus à la structure de L’Astrée que nos anthologies qui se passent d’éléments structurant son intrigue et déterminant le récit. Est-ce une gageure de vouloir, au XXI e siècle, faire redécouvrir une lecture dont on s’enthousiasmait au XVII e siècle en France et partout en Europe (voir la journée dirigée par Delphine Denis consacrée à « La gloire de L’Astrée » dans Cahiers de l’AIEF 60 (2008), pp. 139-276). On ne peut que souscrire au constat que « L’Astrée est une pièce majeure du patrimoine littéraire occidental » (p. 61) et qu’elle « occupe une place de choix dans ce que Goethe a appelé ‘la littérature mondiale’ » (p. 61). Son éminence sera mise en évidence par l’équipe qui mettra à la disposition des érudits, sur le site web « Le Règne d’Astrée », l’intégralité du texte ainsi que ses nombreuses variantes dans une édition hypertextuelle, enrichie du corpus de la littérature pastorale avec laquelle Honoré d’Urfé entretient un dialogue