PFSCL XLII, 82 (2015) Sylvaine Guyot : Racine et le corps tragique. Paris: PUF, 2014 (« Les Littéraires »). 288 p. Research and writing on Racine has generally concentrated on all aspects of his theater except the matter of the body, or, if it has been treated, it has been so only fleetingly, as a parenthesis, as an aside. Here Guyot takes the body of Racine and studies it systematically and thoroughly, through all of his theater. The body may be absent, dying, in conflict with the characters’ principles, it may be expressive, it may refer to the actor’s body, and even the effects of Racine’s discourse on the actor’s body, as it throws itself into playing roles, such as Montfleury’s death from acting the improbable role of one of Racine’s great heros - the poor young maddened Oreste. Guyot’s book, Le Corps Racinien, is a major contribution to Racine studies, a feat at this late date, when so many fine studies of his oeuvre have appeared over the centuries, and especially in the recent past. Guyot has tackled an angle of Racine’s theater that is rarely touched on and when so, only with a remark in passing here, there, and never in a sustained manner. Here Guyot frames the study of the Racinian body in the context of studies on the seventeenth-century French body and discourses on it, especially in painting and sculpture at that time, along with philosophies of painting both from an esthetic point of view and a technical one, and then, the context established, proceeds to a close analysis of the body in Racine. Guyot proves convincingly that contrary to most analyses of the French classical period, the body played an important part in considerations of cultural production at that time, and shows that its importance from the renaissance on, especially with Rabelais, would not wane but would simply change emphasis and provide a smooth and easy transition into the libertine culture of the eighteenth century. Guyot points out the importance of the influence of British actors such as David Garrick who crossed the channel, developed and cultivated public personas, and shifted French interest from the message to the bearer of the message, the actor. Guyot combs through Racine’s own correspondence to find that Racine’s own theater, with the key roles in his dramaturgy assigned to women, was very much influenced by the increasing attention to actresses not only for their voices and styles of declamation, but for their physical presence on stage, their magnetism, their star quality. For example, only at this time do actresses like la Du Parc, la Champmeslé become household names among theater-goers. Sensitivity becomes the hallmark of a person of virtue while indifference and callousness signal the villain in Racine’s characters. Sympathy, generosity and compassion come to characterize the hero’s reaction to events, unlike Corneille’s stalwart stoicism. Tears have up to now been associated PFSCL XLII, 82 (2015) 226 with weakness and considered a call for help, thus an admission of weakness. They have been associated with women’s behavior and relegated to the private sphere. Racine’s Alexandre encourages tears as a sign of official mourning, and thus transforms tears into an instrument of state, while Creon’s refusal to weep indicates he is a villainous character. Shared tears become a sign of a political community. However they enjoy an ambivalent reception. Alexandre’s tears made of him an unworthy hero, according to some. The French were not entirely ready to accept a monarch who could cry. Bérénice’s tears will be fitting to her sex and situation, and Antiochus’ s private tears will signal his weakness, but the public will resist sympathy for Titus who weeps to lose Bérénice in order to step into his position of power at his father’s death; and these last tears will be decried by the 17 th -century audience in good part as a sign of his weakness and unsuitability for the position of Roman emperor. Tears can also interfere with the ability to communicate effectively. Bérénice hopes to convince Titus of her love by showing to him her tears, as proof of her love, but rather than do that they incite Titus to threaten suicide instead. Titus’s tears will persuade Bérénice of his love for her and release her to leave, in that knowledge. This play takes the new ethos of sensitivity and emotion to the limit. How is the actor to take on and express the affect of the role he / she is playing? With Bajazet, the hero must pretend to be in love with Roxane in order to protect his very life; but the actor must play the role of Bajazet playing a role - not altogether evident. Does this pretending degrade the status of the hero or expose an imperfection of character? Bajazet’s blushing is misread for a sign of passion when it is in fact an expression of shame at having to live a lie; how does the actor playing Bajazet playing a role bring this point across? Acting can require a knack for spontaneity that cannot be taught or imitated. Two styles of acting prevailed at the time of these plays. One was a complete identification of the actor with the character he was playing to the point of taking on all of his emotions, problems, dilemmas, and becoming ill or doing himself harm. The other style involved a technique of mastering a complete code of gestures and intonations involving much more emphasis than in normal circumstances. Grandiloquence and exaggerated gestures of this style would increasingly become the object of ridicule. A third style of acting will be increasingly in vogue towards the end of the century, one that resembles the roles called for in every-day sociability: maintaining a distance from one’s role so as to preserve one’s space of privacy, but allowing nevertheless for some passage of convincing emotion. It is precisely this sort of acting that Bajazet’s Atalide cannot read. She is the only one of Racine’s heroines, along Comptes rendus 227 with Phèdre, to die on the stage, and this happens because she doesn’t understand that behaving naturally does not necessarily mean behaving sincerely. The actor will submit an expression of his own sentiment to the service of the passion he is representing. With the increasing participation of a female public in the theaters and at court for performances of plays scheduled there, comes a feminization of universal taste. Toward the end of the century the mark of success of a tragedy will be the amount of weeping it inspires. The valid critic of the theater ceases to be the savant to become the sensitive spectator instead, and the emotional participation of the audience is solicited and valorized. Sensitivity has become a criterion of artistic judgment, and the theatergoer attends a play expecting to be emotionally moved. I enter into detail to recount some of Guyot’s fine analysis to convey the sense of the argument she produces on Racine’s oeuvre. The book is organized in four chapters, each of them divided into thematic sections thus enabling an easy read. Guyot begins by focusing on the face, and the staging of physical attraction, and then the manner of playing by some of the greatest actors. Guyot in Chapter 2 argues for the representation of sensitivity in Racine’s classical theater, a quality that is usually associated with Diderot’s 18 th -century theater. Racine’s characters are moved, troubled, vulnerable, and their degree of sensitivity serves as proof of the nobility of their character. The villains, such as Néron, are guilty above all of callous indifference. And so a set of values is staged that sets great telling store in the degree of sensitivity of the characters. In the meanwhile, of course, Oreste and Hermione for example represent deeply conflicted natures, since their sensitivity is on the order of a violent passion that will lead them astray. Guyot sustains an excellent argument and sheds light on all of the plays as she forges ahead with her original thesis. Chapter 3 on the political body will focus on the distinction between the figure of the king as one that abandons earlier representations of power by military might to transform into a center of enlightened rule, just as we see represented in the passage from the earlier reigns of Henri IV, Louis XIII and the tumult of the Fronde to the calm and unquestioned authority of the reign of Louis XIV. Here we are mainly concerned with the representation of the king, be it in the young Joas, or Astyanax, or the well-seasoned Mithridate. Here Guyot leans on Longinus’s Traité du Sublime to discuss the traits that will elevate a hero to a great hero. She also examines the relationship between the Law (embodied in a community’s great leaders) and classical tragedy - a staging of the application of this Law. Guyot’s final chapter focuses on the effect of this representation of corporeal sensitivity, of corporeal sublimity in the figure of the great heroes, on the audience, the PFSCL XLII, 82 (2015) 228 spectators. Racine succeeds admirably in creating a theater that will provoke tears without displeasing, will inspire pity without weakness; overwhelm without shocking, please without simply seducing. She concludes on a note focusing on the intensity of Racine’s theater, its violence, its difficulty, and recalling to the reader that the actors who performed Racine were just that, human beings, but that Racine’s theater elevated the characters to positions as men who were also major markers in history. This is a beautiful book. It stands with the studies on Racine’s theater by such seasoned critics as Richard Goodkin, Jacques Morel, John Lyons, Hélène Merlin, Georges Forestier, Gérard Defaux, Lucien Goldmann, Louis Marin, in no particular order, and more recently Volker Schröder, and reassures us that the fate of seventeenth-century French Studies is passing into capable young hands, and certainly Racine studies will be with us for quite some time to come. La Bruyère’s “tout est dit” may be proven wrong yet again. Michèle Longino Anne Régent-Susini (dir.) : L’éloquence de la chaire à l’âge classique, Revue Bossuet, Supplément au n o 2, 2011. 173 p. Gérard Ferreyrolles (dir.) : L’éloquence de la chaire à l'âge classique (II), Revue Bossuet, Supplément au n o 4, 2013. 299 p. Les deux suppléments de la Revue Bossuet consacrés à l’éloquence de la chaire remplissent une lacune constatée dès 1980 par Marc Fumaroli, qui sollicitait une étude de l’âge de la prédication « en rapport à la fois avec l’histoire de la rhétorique, l’histoire sociale et l’histoire de la spiritualité ». Les études réunies dans ces deux publications sont consacrées à ces trois aspects. Le genre littéraire du sermon méritait d’être traité dans deux séminaires de master à l’université Paris-Sorbonne dont ces volumes rendent accessibles les exposés en se complétant mutuellement. Une bibliographie, élaborée par Ferreyrolles, se base primordialement sur les indications des contributeurs, option qui entraîne des inconvénients, dont il faut signaler au moins deux. Elle néglige Louis de Grenade, quoique cité par Laurent Susini. Son ouvrage Rhetoricae exxlesiasticae, sive de Ratione concionandi libri sex (1576) est publié à Paris par G. Pelé en 1635. Sa version française La rhétorique de l’Eglise ou l’éloquence des prédicateurs, due à Nicolas Joseph Binet, y sort en 1611. P. Le Monier la publie de nouveau en 1673, Cl. Hersant obtient en 1696 un autre privilège qu’il cède en 1698 à l’éditeur