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Many recent discussions of the Chauveau and Brissart frontispieces to Molière's Tartuffe have sought to discourage their use as documentary evidence for original performance practice on the grounds that their depiction does not conform to the text of the play. This article re-examines the textual and iconographic evidence for staging the 'table scene', suggesting that these frontispieces may still possess significant documentary value and cannot be so easily rejected as disaffirming the original jeu de scène. A close reading of the 1669 text as a script for performance reasserts the continuity between the text and these illustrations despite the hermeneutics of suspicion that pervade recent interpretations that rightly seek to emphasize the illustrations' material function as liminary engravings within books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses director Jacques Copeau’s 1937 staging of the French play "Bajazet" by Jean Racine performed at the Comédie-Française in Paris, France, specifically describing the scenography in the French tradition of classical tragedy. The author argues that Copeau's version of the play used the idea of palais à volonté, or a neutral palace setting without recognizable historical details, which dominated French theater for decades and became part of French theater's cultural memory.