The three dramatisations of the perennially fascinating story of Antony and Cleopatra translated here (two for the first time) amount to a significant sub-genre within the current of sixteenth-century French tragedy generally termed “humanist”. Étienne Jodelle’s Cleopatra Captive (Cleopatre captive), first performed before Henri II in 1553, is widely recognised as the first neo-classical tragedy in French. It also served as a reference point for the subsequent treatments of Robert Garnier (1578) and Nicolas de Montreux (c. 1592), which likewise extract from the classical narratives (principally Plutarch) a triangular dynamic of love and power among the three protagonists (Antony, Cleopatra, Octavius Caesar). That dynamic proves susceptible to varying emphases and ambiguous interpretations in a way that documents the developing potential of humanist tragedy itself.

The primary interest of the present plays for specialists of English literature is the complex but compelling issue of their contribution to the sequence of early modern English dramas beginning with the translation of Garnier’s tragedy by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (Antonius, 1592). That work was supplemented, at her own request, by Samuel Daniel’s The Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594, slightly revised in 1599), which, in turn, is generally taken to have contributed directly to the culminating achievement of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7).

Yet despite the resurgence in critical interest in early modern English representations of Cleopatra over recent years, the three French precursor texts have been relatively neglected by English-language scholars. Even where a specific debt is recognised, there has been a general reluctance to engage with them as texts in their own right, as Elizabethans and Jacobeans may sometimes be shown to have done. Intriguing intersections with the work of Montreux have been completely neglected. And if Mary Sidney’s translation of Garnier, the pre-eminent case of direct engagement, has acquired quasi-canonical status within English literary history, this has arguably come at the expense of obscuring its original. It has therefore seemed  appropriate to present Garnier’s work in a new translation, which, apart from the greater accessibility of its modern English, is more respectful of the original, in both form and key details, than was the Elizabethan version.  

The full-text translations presented here aim to encourage pursuit of the intertextual relations involved, hence of French-English dramatic connections more broadly. At the same time, the three French plays merit renewed attention both in themselves and in relation to each other, inviting comparative study of their divergent dramaturgical approaches to their essentially identical source material. And because the tragedy of Montreux has been relatively neglected even by specialists of French drama, also included is the first edition of is original text since its own era, when it was widely diffused.

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