The tragedy of Coriolan, by the enormously prolific and popular playwright Alexandre Hardy, offers an outstanding example of French tragic treatment of antique historical material in the baroque period. It also presents special interest as an intertext for Shakespeare’s adaptation of essentially the same material (Plutarch’s “Life of Coriolanus”)
This tragedy, intriguingly poised between the humanist model and the emerging baroque aesthetic, is based on a story narrated by Helen, Queen of Corinth, in the Arcadia of Philip Sidney (bk. I, chap. 11). Indeed, it has a claim to be the first substantial French adaptation of an English literary work
MARESCHAL, André Introduction and English Translation by Richard Hillman Publié le 05/12/2017Scène européenne, « Traductions introuvables » This dramatic adaptation of the Arcadia of Philip Sidney – a work well known in France, thanks largely to two published translations – was commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu and carries a political message: its treatment of the schemes of the wicked…
Although published in Protestant Geneva and disparaging the Roman Catholic church on the grounds of both doctrine and practice, this moral allegory privileges instruction over polemic.
MONTREUX, Nicolas de
Introduction, Edition of the French Text and English Translation by Richard Hillman
Publié le 12/01/2014Scène européenne, « Traductions introuvables »
Nothing is known of the stage history (on the reasonable presumption that it had one) of the dramatised pastoral fable that Nicolas de Montreux (as always under his anagrammatic pseudonym of “Olénix du Mont Sacré”) appended to the third volume of his popular Bergeries.
DESMARETS DE SAINT-SORLIN, Jean Introduction by Michel Bitot, English Translation by Richard Hillman Publié le 11/01/2011Scène européenne, « Traductions introuvables » The Visionaries achieved enormous popularity with Parisian audiences during its author’s (long) lifetime (1595-1676), before tastes changed with the advent of neo-classicisism. The irony is that the comedy itself is concerned with the vanity of literary…