French Renaissance Drama

The Renaissance was one of the most exciting periods for French drama written and performed in the Kingdom of France and the surrounding Francophone areas such as Flanders and Geneva. Although often overlooked or even denigrated in conventional scholarship, the drama that emerged between the reign of Charles VIII (r. 1483–1498) and Henri IV’s assassination in 1610 has attracted much more considerable and significant critical attention in the past several decades. Medieval dramatic practices, aesthetics, and traditions, including religious drama (the mystères, the moralités, the Passion plays), farces, and sotties, coexisted alongside and against the rediscovery of ancient drama and the writing, in French and Neo-Latin, of humanist comedies and tragedies, not to mention the appearance of new “genres” such as tragicomedy and pastoral. Despite the importance and influence of Neo-Latin drama in the Renaissance, this entry will only focus on primary texts originally written in the French language. The “French” Renaissance also produced many theoretical writings about drama, particularly on tragedy and, to a lesser extent, comedy, which led to its eventual codification in the 17th century. Other occasions during which dramatic productions took place, such as the royal entrance, festivals, and diplomatic proceedings, also contributed to the political, cultural, and artistic landscapes of the period. Still, the virulent, violent, and divisive religious wars hindered the development of French theater, especially when compared to the contemporaneous drama that existed in Elizabethan England, while Calvinists ceased writing and performing drama in French except for educational purposes after the Synod of Nîmes (1572). These challenges and constraints notwithstanding, the French Renaissance was a time of daring innovations and reinventions of drama that must be dealt with on their own terms.