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International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience; Secrets and lies, incest and madness, mental torture and brutal murders, apparitions and lycanthropy: there is little that The Duchess of Malfi, first performed in 1613-1614, shies away from, inflicting on its spectators a whirlwind of conflicting passions and emotions. John Webster’s drama has been labelled as baroque, grotesque, mannerist, gothic or feminist. Against Bosola, the figure of the malcontent who also embodies the typical early modern overreacher, the Duchess stands as a symbol of female transgression before she is eventually crushed by evil and male power. Bloody sensationalism should however not eclipse what some critics have seen as a drama of knowledge. In Delio’s concluding speech, Webster’s irony is at its peak when he encourages his audience to “make noble use / Of this great ruin” and seems to present the play as a vehicle for moral instruction, defining in a final twist an ethics based on the “integrity of life”. A masterpiece of Jacobean theatre, The Duchess of Malfi reinvents the genre of the revenge tragedy and, beyond its multiple borrowings from other writers, it explores the construction of gender, the class structure of a changing society and the complex interlacing of desire, violence and cruel laughter. Following the recent inclusion of The Duchess of Malfi in the Agrégation syllabus in France (2019-2020), this volume is meant to provide new perspectives on the play, examining questions relating to politics, gender, aesthetics, textuality, materiality and performance. Its various chapters highlight the richness and incisiveness of the tragedy, reflecting recent critical trends in early modern drama studies.

International audience; Dans un passage de son sermon, Trigge (c. 1540 – 1606), pasteur de Welbourne dans le Lincolnshire, observe : "Strangeness of eclypses, and the multitude of them in our dayes [...] and the two eclypses of the sonne which shall be seene this yeare [...], the inflammations of the aire and the raging of the seas, the unseasonable sommers and the miraculous floodes which wee have had, [...] surely these are signs of this his [Christ's] comming".Cette communication propose d'explorer la manière dont ces observations de Trigge sur des anomalies climatiques font écho à des développements sur le thème du mundus senescit et à des rappels de passages prophétiques de la Bible et s'intègrent à un constat de la dégénérescence morale et spirituelle de la société de son temps. En effet, Trigge ouvre son sermon par une citation des 3 premiers versets du chapitre 24 d’Isaïe, évoquant la dévastation de la terre par l’Eternel , et son propos est d’exhorter ses auditeurs à réformer leur vie, non seulement en leur rappelant l’inéluctabilité de la rétribution divine, mais en en suggérant l’imminence. Cette perspective fait l’objet de nombreuses mentions dans le sermon qui s’inscrit ainsi dans ce que l’on identifie comme « l’apocalyptique Tudor », dans la lignée de John Bale et de George Joye, les turpitudes humaines comme les phénomènes climatiques inquiétants étant présentés comme autant de signes que la fin des temps est proche.

International audience; Also exploring Shakespeare’s borrowings, Anne-Valérie Dulac turns to optics and takes Love’s Labour’s Lost as her departure point. She first reminds us that in her Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost , published in 1936, Frances Yates repeatedly mentions the importance of Ahazen’s optical theory in grasping the play’s many references to light, eyes, and vision. Dulac first deals with two mistakes made by Yates in her rather short description of the 1572 edition of the Opticae Thesaurus , a compendium including a truncated Latin version of Alhazen’s treatise along with Witelo’s Perspectiva . She then demonstrates that this was due to the fact that, at the time when Yates was writing, historians of science had not yet shown as forcefully how different the translations of the Kitab al-Manazir ( The Books of Optics ) are, or, in other words, how different Alhazen is from Alhacen and Ibn al-Haytham. Dulac eventually looks into the Latinised version of Alhazen’s optical theory to enquire into whether it could shed light on some of the most intricate metaphorical networks of the play.

International audience; The small octavo entitled Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent., and published in 1640 for John Benson has long been considered as little better than a pirated edition of the Thomas Thorpe 1609 edition. It has been described by Colin Burrow, among others, as a ‘bowdlerized’ edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, although the term is anachronistic. As is well-known, Benson changed the sonnets’ order, omitting eight, and organized them into thematic sections with titles reminiscent of the miscellanies popular in the period (‘cruel deceit’, ‘faithful concord’, etc.). His most decisive intervention concerns the merging of individual sonnets into larger poems, but he also corrected the gender of the persona’s addressee in two sonnets to the ‘fair youth’, which, although critics differ as to the exact significance of the revisions, has generally been interpreted as a sign of active censorship. Writing in 1998, David Baker’s argues that Benson’s 1640 Shakespeare was packaged as a “Cavalier Shakespeare”. More recently, Cathy Shrank has argued, however, that Benson's miscellany has been unfairly treated by the critical tradition, and deserves to be taken seriously as a significant edition of the poems. This chapter goes back to the question of Benson’s interventions as an editor of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to interrogate the limits of editing and question early modern notions of censorship. I will show that we need to historicize both our notions of editorial intentions, and the reception of the miscellany to understand its significance. As will become apparent, the importance of the paratext and the material history of the book need to be foregrounded for us to reassess an edition all too easily dismissed as flawed, but whose historical importance has been tremendous.

The art of statuary in the Elizabethan and Jacobean era has suffered from the repercussions of several centuries of political and religious instability. However, early modern England proved particularly interested in, if not totally fascinated by, Italian and Flemish artists famous for their artistic and theoretical approach to sculpture. Although many studies have already been made on painting and the problematic place of images in Reformation England, only a few books have focused on three-dimensional images and on their reception.My dissertation therefore seeks to analyze the political, religious and cultural context in which the statues were inscribed at the time, on the one hand, and to precisely reassess the ways in which they appeared on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, on the other hand.First, I pay attention to the historical events and texts in which statues have had a prominent place, taking into account the legal aspect related to the production of early modern images. This leads me to study from a more literary perspective major plays from the Shakespearean corpus such as Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale. Finally, I seek to highlight the art of stasis and statuary in the Jacobean drama by focusing on the moments of immobility and petrification of the characters in George Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess.The double objective of this thesis is, in fine, to compare the impact of the statue and its representations on stage on two different types of audience both belonging to the early modern era (one Elizabethan, the other Jacobean), and to prove the importance of the statuary within the dramatic universe of Shakespeare and his contemporaries., L’art de la statuaire à l’époque élisabéthaine et jacobéenne a subi les contrecoups de plusieurs siècles d’instabilité politique et religieuse. Cependant, l’Angleterre de la fin du XVIe et du début du XVIIe siècle a fait montre d’un intérêt – pour ne pas dire d’un engouement – tout particulier envers des artistes italiens et flamands célèbres pour leur approche tant artistique que théorique de la sculpture. Si maintes études ont déjà été réalisées sur la peinture et la place problématique des images dans l’Angleterre de la Réforme, peu d’études, en revanche, ont été consacrées aux images en trois dimensions et à leur impact sur le public.Mon travail de thèse s’efforce donc d’analyser le contexte politique, religieux et culturel dans lesquels s’inscrivaient les statues à l’époque, d’une part, et de définir précisément la manière dont elles apparaissaient sur la scène élisabéthaine et jacobéenne, de l’autre.Dans un premier temps, j’ai souhaité inventorier les événements historiques et les textes dans lesquels les statues ont eu une place prépondérante, sans négliger l’aspect juridique relatif à la production des images. J’ai ensuite analysé sous un angle plus littéraire des pièces majeures tirées du corpus shakespearien telles que Roméo et Juliette, Jules César, Antoine et Cléopâtre et Le conte d’hiver. En dernier lieu, j’ai cherché à mettre en lumière l’art de la stase et de la statuaire dans le théâtre jacobéen en prenant pour objets d’étude les moments d’immobilité et de pétrification des personnages dans Bussy d’Amboise de George Chapman, La duchesse d’Amalfi de John Webster, et Une partie d’échecs de Thomas Middleton.Le double objectif de cette thèse est, in fine, de comparer l’impact de la statue et de ses représentations sur scène sur deux publics de la première modernité, l’un élisabéthain, l’autre jacobéen, et de prouver la réelle importance de la statuaire au sein même de l’univers théâtral de Shakespeare et de ses contemporains.

International audience

International audience

International audience; This chapter is devoted to the rediscovery of Lucretius in the early modern period. Even though Shakespeare had no access to writings by Epicurus, there is a strong likelihood that he knew the De rerum natura by Lucretius, were it only via Montaigne’s Essays. It is Jonathan Pollock’s contention that the prevalence of weather imagery in Shakespeare’s later plays not only results from his propensity to cloud-gazing but also from his interest in Lucretius’s use of meteorological models in order to explain the creation and disintegration of material objects and living beings. Epicurean science recognizes only (atomic) matter and void, it denies the reality of a spiritual “substance” (God or an immortal soul). It would seem that Shakespeare uses Lucretian doctrine as a means of establishing dialectical oppositions: set against Lear’s naive paganism or Cordelia’s redemptive figure, for instance, atomism portrays a world without Divine Providence of any sort, subject to purely material forces.

The Beginnings of Protestant Academies (Lausanne, 1537 and Strasburg, 1538 – Geneva, 1559) and the circulation of the model.In the 1530s the Reformation reacted to the challenges posed by agitated circumstances and created new educational institutions. These obviously stood outside the medieval universities but nonetheless enjoyed an official status, and, like the Collège Royal or the Italian Academies, were supported by the political authorities. These institutions which emerged in the wake of the restoration of the sacred colleges of the Antiquity, were part of a new culture that they were eager to promote. This volume has gathered contributions from subject specialists in order to put forward not only the theological renovatio, but also the renewal of liberal arts, in particular the three arts of speech, rhetoric, dialectics and poetics, as well as the new dialogical pedagogy, the study of the three ancient languages and the founding of libraries. The prospect of the book is to revise the full scope of the question and to set in its historical context, starting with the impulse of Zürich’s Schola tigurina, and continuing with the foundation of the Academy of Lausanne and its influence on the three Southern Academies of Nìmes, Die and Orange, and that of the Academy of Strasburg, one year after Lausanne, and its influence in Southern Germany, then Holland and Central Europe, and finally the growth of a Protestant network in the Black Sea countries., A la suite d’événements mouvementés, la Réforme se dote, dans les années 1530, de lieux d’enseignement nouveaux, évidemment hors de l’Université médiévale, mais avec néanmoins un statut d’institution officielle, soutenus, à la manière du collège royal ou bien des académies italiennes, par le pouvoir politique. Dans la mouvance de la restauration des anciens collèges sacrés, ces institutions sont inscrites dans une nouvelle culture qu’elles désirent promouvoir. Ce livre a fédéré des spécialistes afin de mettre en valeur non seulement la renovatio théologique, mais également celle des arts libéraux, en particulier des trois arts du langage, la rhétorique, la dialectique et la poétique, de même que la nouvelle pédagogie dialogique, sans oublier l’enseignement des trois langues anciennes ni la fondation de bibliothèques. Le propos est de renouveler la question dans toute son envergure en l’actualisant dans l’histoire : vient d’abord l’apport zürichois de la Schola tigurina, puis la fondation de l’Académie de Lausanne, et son influence sur les trois académies méridionales de Nìmes, Die et Orange, et celle de l’Académie de Strasbourg, un an après Lausanne, et son influence dans le sud de l’Allemagne puis en Hollande et dans l’Europe centrale jusqu’à la constitution d’un réseau protestant de la Mer noire.

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

In The Invention of Solitude (1982), a strange autobiographical text which Paul Auster published just before the novels that made him famous, the official task Auster assigns to himself is first to evoke the recently deceased father, Samuel, and to tear him away from too violent a death thanks to a desperate and awkward biographical attempt («Portrait of an Invisible Man»). But in the second part of this peculiar book («The Book of Memory»), which partakes of the extensive self-analysis, of the philosophical essay and the literary reflection, Auster, who now refers to himself as «A.» and has just separated from his wife, turns to his two-year-old son, Daniel, and weaves his moving image into a whole gallery of dead, sometimes iconic children whose portraits he lyrically conjures up. As the text develops, Daniel is more and more closely associated with Anne Frank, Anatole Mallarmé and others, and the reader becomes aware of A.’s fascination with the unbearable yet tormenting possibility of the death of his son. This paper aims at analyzing how this taboo phantasm, the death of one’s own child, haunts the text. The duty of erecting a literary tomb for the dead father turns into the awesome possibility of becoming the necrologist of the son. By alluding to Mallarmé’s heartrending poems written by the bed of his dying son, by using Collodi’s Pinocchio as a recurrent intertext, A. develops a reflection both on writing as an ex-voto and on the inconceivable death as a dreadful, yet powerful driving force for writing., Vallas Sophie. Les portraits d’enfants morts dans «The Book of Memory» de Paul Auster (The Invention of Solitude) ou la tentation du nécrologue. In: Interfaces. Image-Texte-Langage 31, 2011. Images of Fear / Les Images de la Peur. pp. 69-82.