Comptes rendus 111 force and irreverent crispness of the chapter on Pascal, which in 30 dense pages brings more to the field than many recent monographs. Furthermore, throughout the chapters, there are recurrent reflections on authorship, subjectivity, and sovereignty, which taken together constitute a major contribution to the interpretation of seventeenth-century absolutist culture in general. This is a wonderfully rich and ambitious book that brings together three sets of skills that are rarely combined: (a) a formidable general erudition pertaining to a vast set of traditions, including very impressive corpusspecific expertise; (b) a sophisticated fluency in high-level theoretical discussions; (c) the display of supreme close reading and micro analysis, which always serve the purpose of the wider discussion into which they enter. As such, this is an enterprise few others than Christopher Braider could have undertaken. It is a summa, a cornucopia, a career-defining moment, as justly acknowledged by the MLA committee that awarded the book the 2012 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the best book in French and Francophone Studies. Hall Bjornstad Michael Call: The Would-Be Author: Molière and the Comedy of Print. Purdue Studies in Romance Languages 63. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015. 292 p. This study aims to “trace Molière’s navigation of the changing nature of authorship and its social, legal, and literary implications” (22), and thus to “examine how Molière and his contemporaries, conscious of authorship’s connotations and utility, constructed, negotiated, and debated the image of Molière the author” (21). One might call this a study implicating the ‘prince of comedy’’s two bodies, or rather three: the physical one, particularly the actor; the writing and publishing one achieving authorial status; and (forgive me) the corpus of writings produced by the first two bodies’ mingled activities, and remaining after they had disappeared. Their interactions were, to be sure, nothing if not complex, beginning, in Professor Call’s telling, with the historic mixing of the notions of actor and auctor, and furthered in the double status of ‘Molière’ during his lifetime, stage name increasingly becoming pen name, “Molière’s authorship essentially becom[ing] one of his many roles” (20-21), its image even constituting Molière’s “greatest creation” (64). It is very much to the author’s credit that his work constitutes a serious, detailed, and substantial contribution to re- PFSCL XLIII, 84 (2016) 112 examining this knotty area of Molière studies—no small feat in the wake of C.E.J. Caldicott’s landmark study La Carrière de Molière entre protecteurs et éditeurs (1999), and the 2010 Pléiade edition’s much-debated editorial choices. After the Introduction, subtitled “The Death of the Author,” and an initial chapter dealing with onstage representations of writers and writing, the chapters follow a chronological trajectory to the Afterword, subtitled “The Death of the Actor.” The study traces stages of the evolution in which Molière became at first, thanks mainly to the threat of piracy, to all evidence an ‘auteur malgré lui’, then gradually gaining control over publication of his works (including the ones collaboratively authored with Lully, Quinault, Corneille) in frequent opposition to the Communauté des libraires, up to shortly before his death. In so doing, he pushed hard against the envelope of prevailing custom and even legality, as Caldicott has argued, very likely provoking the rupture with Lully as much as, if not more than did the composer’s own actions. In truth, none of the parties to these disputes emerges in an entirely favorable light. This study demonstrates once again how flagrant unevenness of application of the privilèges governing rights of publication, dictated that authorship was indeed an insecure and multifaceted social construct, from (in our case) Molière’s ‘authorial self-fashioning’ (244) to the libraires’ implementation of the rights they owned fully for the length of the privilèges (generally six to ten years, although frequently extended on request to the authorities), to the watchful eye of the police over potentially subversive materials. Finally, as Professor Call notes, in the era of absolutism’s political and cultural triumph, gaining and retaining royal favor was crucial, often overriding both custom and the law itself. Molière benefited immensely from such favor through the moment of his unprecedently sweeping privilège of 1671, before losing out heavily to Lully just a year later, after Molière’s singly-authored edition of Psyché excluded recognition of all collaborators, first and foremost the other Jean-Baptiste. Such issues at times make for rather heavy going for a reader not already well-initiated in this area. The issues are critical, however, to the overall argument, since nothing like copyright would exist for over a century, and since Molière was eventually able singlehandedly to change publishing practice for his own publications, achieving greater control over his publications than any previous author—but only so long as he retained royal favor. Too, his early death only added to the complexity of the later publishing—and thus, authorial—situation. Professor Call consistently works to link the content of the major plays under consideration, from Les Précieuses ridicules through Les Femmes Comptes rendus 113 savantes, to Molière’s situation with regard to publication. He finds a parallel to Tartuffe’s wielding of incendiary documents to threaten Orgon’s very life, for instance, in the play’s long-suspended near-death state of performance and publication; Célimène’s letters escape her control, taking on a ‘life of their own’, as does (in Alceste’s mind, at least) the “livre abominable” which Oronte suggests that Alceste has authored, and as Molière’s published text will eventually do also (168-169). While these links can be suggestive, perhaps not every reader will be entirely convinced that “the failures of Molière’s protagonists become emblematic of the author’s own awareness of his inability to control or contain the possible meanings of his own work” (8); that Donneau de Visé’s lettre prefacing the Misanthrope’s first edition “resonates” with Célimène’s multiple written professions of exclusive affection (171); that “Just as the fourbe Scapin (originally played by Molière) dupes and robs the play’s miserly old men, Molière the author used the publication of his farce to dupe and rob authors, critics, and even his former publishers” by publishing “a manuscript that stole, printed against his publishers’ will” (195, 198 resp.); or that Chrysale’s defense of his body, his “guenille”, is really relevant to the subsequent play edition’s paper’s composition out of rag material, literally “guenilles” (204-5). Of more problematic status is the presentation of notions of authorship. To be sure, the “messy nature of theatrical authorship” (245) with its transition from oral performance to printed word is duly acknowledged and not inherently controversial; but the transition from Molière’s protestation (sincere or not) at being forced to publish Les Précieuses ridicules—a practice “du plus mauvais goût” in the mondain circles that Molière frequented, probably determining that he publish the work anonymously (Forestier and Bourqui ed., Molière, Œuvres complètes I, xi)—to his soon-prevalent eager embrace of authorship, its reknown and significant remuneration, remains unclear, not to say at times contradictory. We read in the space of very few pages, in not-always coordinated contexts, of the “authorial character that Molière constructed,” of the “created author,” of “different Molières,” of “authorship’s contingency,” of Molière’s “authorial persona” and “alter ego,” at the price of a certain rhetorical confusion (13-16). The precise nature of the “authorial character” that Molière constructs for the preface to Les Précieuses ridicules and places in the publication—“Molière places himself, a new author, inside the book, coterminous with it, or even a product of it. Molière uses the preface to show in a wry manner the artificial way in which authorship’s authority is constructed and provides for the reader a compelling and pleasing authorial persona… this authorial character is a product of the book, not its cause” (14-15)—remains rather un- PFSCL XLIII, 84 (2016) 114 clear. This is all the more so given the rapid slippage here from the hesitant “…or even a product of it” to the emphatic assertion: “…is a product of the book.” Professor Call also characterizes Molière as “in some senses a ‘protopost-modern’ whose plays stage the defeat of the subject’s unitary iden- tity”—one that commits “a sort of authorial disappearing act, substantiated by the playwright’s alleged opposition to publication” (9). When Professor Call invokes what he calls the “would-be author”, the “theater of the book”, and the “comedy of print” with the author as its “most captivating of characters” (243-7), one begins to wonder what Arnolphe, Célimène, or M. Jourdain would reply here! The “image of the author” presented throughout the book is in any case quite mobile, almost protean, and not simply because of the evolution of his writing practices. And is not the œuvre, finally, itself something of a corpus delicti, or even the victim of multiple délits? Pirated, dismembered, reassembled, subject to implacable religious assault, sold and resold, printed under multiple, sometimes conflicting privilèges and in various competing editions, historically shorn of farces and music, omitting as well nearly all mention of co-authors or “borrowed” material (most famously, no doubt, Cyrano’s Le Pédant joué): thus treated, the œuvre escapes confinement within any definitive version and indeed, forces stark editorial choices among competing sources, despite the (long posthumous and collaboratively edited) 1682 edition’s longstanding claim to such status (236). In addition, the nature and extent of crimes committed by the corrupt “cabal” of libraires (Caldicott), or very possibly against them by Molière himself (Call), as well as mutually between Lully and Molière (from Psyché on), remains under investigation: the case is still very much open, and Professor Call belongs to a new generation of detectives now carrying on the sleuthing. Whether the case will ever be closed remains, of course, unpredictable. While it is not clear that despite its solid grounding in a wide range of scholarship this study breaks genuinely new ground in such an historically long and overcrowded, if still rather murky field, it is nonetheless a comprehensive and frequently thought-provoking vademecum to the complex questions surrounding Molière’s evolving status as author during his lifetime. The book is well produced, almost entirely free of typographical errors, and certainly deserves a place on up-to-date Moliéristes’ bookshelves. Stephen Fleck