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. It employs the traditional morality-play device of a figure representing Mankind, who, however, finds himself torn less between virtue and vice (the usual situation) than between alternative solutions to his inevitably sinful state. A representative of the Old Law (“Rabbi”), who at first prevails, advocates outward conformity and good works; he is opposed by Paul, who preaches the New Law’s (and Luther’s) message of salvation through faith alone.

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 fashions, as well as with forms of what has come to be known as “self-fashioning” but which the author groups under the heading of self-deluding folly (the primary meaning of the title).

The tragedy of Coriolan by Alexandre Hardy presents special interest as an intertext for Shakespeare’s adaptation of essentially the same material (Plutarch’s “Life of Coriolanus”), in Coriolanus (1608), which was probably closely contemporary, though the date of Hardy’s work is less certain.

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 only one of Montchrestien’s six tragedies not devoted to a biblical or classical subject, in taking up the theme of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1587), the play ventures into the fraught territory of nearly contemporary politico-religious controversy that is otherwise associated with frank works of propaganda.