Collection

Hector is widely regarded as Montchrestien’s most accomplished achievement within the conventions of turn-of-the-century neo-classical French tragedy, following in the line of Robert Garnier but with increased distance from any topical political application.  Certainly, on these terms it is a powerful piece of poetic theatre.

MONTCHRESTIEN, Antoine de

Introduction and Translation by Richard Hillman

Publié le 22/10/2018Scène européenne, « Traductions introuvables »

Among the author’s limited dramatic productions over his brief literary career, The Queen of Scotland stood out in its own time, as it continues to do.

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