Talking Books – 68.2
Talking Books with Dominique Goy-Blanquet
I am frustrated by language barriers, but I learned the hard way that I do not acquire other languages easily or with competence, no matter how much effort I make. I first learned about the work of Dominique Goy-Blanquet through her wonderful Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, written in English, and wondered what other books she may have written that may be unknown to me and other non-French speaking readers. There are a few, and her first book turns out to be a prize.
Shakespeare et l’invention de l’histoire: Guide commenté du théâtre historique de Shakespeare begins as an overview of England and the English theater in early modern times, then shifts to chronicle plays generally, including quite a bit of detail on each of Shakespeare’s histories and their sources. The book ends with a dictionary of the characters in Shakespeare’s chronicle plays. Professor Goy-Blanquet told me that this volume has “all the relevant information I would very much have liked to find in one book when I began work on the history plays.” It was published by Le Cri in 1997, followed by two augmented editions in 2004 and 2014. I long for an English language edition.
That research very much informs Shakespeare’s Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage from Oxford University Press in 2003. The book is a fascinating study comparing the first tetralogy with its historical and theatrical sources. Goy-Blanquet makes an important argument in the debate about the ideology of these plays, for instead of reading ideology into them, she shows how this material was turned into drama, and not necessarily into argument. Shakespeare emerges as a man of the theatre, not of a faction. Goy-Blanquet also looks forward from these texts to examine noteworthy productions of the plays in the first tetralogy on stage and screen.
Joan of Arc is a pivotal character in the English losses in 1 Henry VI, where she is called Joan Puzel. Shakespeare probably did not write very much of this play and nobody attributes the Joan scenes to him. The play is nevertheless seen by tradition and the First Folio as the anchor of the first tetralogy, and both the play and Joan remain important to the way that many have written about Shakespeare’s early work. That is why Goy-Blanquet’s chapter in Joan of Arc, A Saint for All Reasons: Studies in Myth and Politics seems to fit right in with the previous work. “Shakespeare and Voltaire Set Fire to History” shows the ways that the earliest sources of the Joan story influenced later artists, dwells on 1 Henry VI for a bit, and then moves outward to Voltaire’s 1762 poem “La Pucelle d’Orléans,” usually rendered in English as “The Maid of Orleans.” Of interest to film scholars will be Nadia Margolis’s essay “Rewriting the Right,” which debunks the appropriation of Joan by right-wing French politics between 1824 and 1945, for it is here that Carl Dreyer’s great 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is studied at length, though the helpful “Joan of Arc and the Cinema,” a filmography of Joan as a character by Robin Blaetz, ends the book. The volume has an interesting history. It was first released in 1999 with five essays under Goy-Blanquet’s editorship and in French as Jeanne d’Arc en garde à vue. The English language edition included a new essay, a study of Joan’s image in U.S. drama and literature by Claude Grimal, and was published by Ashgate in 2006, and later acquired by Routledge.
Goy-Blanquet tells me that Côté Cour, Côté Justice: Shakespeare et l’invention du droit “examines the common matrix of law and drama, from pedagogic dialogues and pro et contra arguments to the plays performed at the Inns of Court, and the diverging ways followed by English and French law systems.” It was published by Classiques Garnier, 2016.
Shakespeare. Combien de prétendants? is a response to Lamberto Tassinari’s self-published 2009 book John Florio the Man Who was Shakespeare. Florio was a translator of French and Italian texts, and a tutor at Oxford. Goy-Blanquet decided to fight the good fight by editing a book refuting Tassinari. Former “Talking Books” guest Lois Potter is a contributor, and tells me that “Tassinari’s book was first published in Italian, then in French, and got quite a lot of notice in France in 2016, even managing to convince some people. The essays in [Goy-Blanquet’s] book deal with different aspects of Shakespeare’s authorship.” I hope this book refuting Tassinari unconvinced many. It was published by Editions Thierry Marchaisse in 2016.
Shakespeare in the Theatre: Patrice Chéreau, Arden, 2018, takes a Shakespeare-centered look at the career of the theatre director and filmmaker who died in 2013. It may seem odd that a director with just three professional Shakespeare credits, plus Christopher Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris and Edward Bond’s scathing Lear, should receive a book in the Shakespeare in the Theatre series, but Goy-Blanquet convinces by including Chéreau’s Shakespeare work with students and, most to the point, shows us that Shakespeare was a silent source for much of the director’s work over the decades.
There are also short monographs on Richard II and Richard III written for students preparing to take a public service exam to become grammar school teachers. Richard III was published by Didier érudition in 1999 and Richard II by Armand Colin in 2004.
Goy-Blanquet is also a translator of English books into French. The Shakespeare related translations are John Dover Wilson’s What happens in ‘Hamlet’? (Le Seuil, 1992) and W. H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (Anatolia, 2003), in addition to other non-Shakespeare related translations.
Dominique Goy-Blanquet is professor Emeritus[1] of Elizabethan Theatre at the University of Picardie, a member of the editorial board of La Quinzaine Littéraire, now transformed into En attendant Nadeau, a member of Centre d’Etudes des Relations et Contacts Linguistiques et Littéraires de l’Université de Picardie, a contributor to The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), and as President of the Société Française Shakespeare from 2009 to 2015 was organizer of the France’s Shakespeare 450 event.
MPJ: Shakespeare et l’invention de l’histoire is a great idea for a book. Why did your interest turn to the tetralogy?
DGB: Because it gives a unique, fascinating entry into the young writer’s workshop. His progress, the development of his political thought and artistry can be followed step by step throughout the sequence of eight plays, which stages an exploration in depth not only of England’s still bleeding past but of the institution of monarchy that failed to prevent anarchy. Whether Shakespeare wrote all or only parts of Henry VI, despite minor inconsistencies, it shows a coherence, a sense of history far above what other dramatists were producing at the time. Shakespeare or whoever completed the patchwork gave it a meaningful design and made it an accomplished work of creation. David Riggs’s Heroical Histories showed that there was much Marlovian material in the first Henriad, but I don’t think Marlowe could rise to that level of critical judgment, for reasons that Wilbur Sanders has brilliantly argued in The Dramatist and the Received Idea. And I don’t believe that Part One is an ironical “prequel” or an afterthought. it is too raw, its moral and political lessons too simplistic, to have been composed after two far more sophisticated plays, and it adequately fills its place as the first act of a steadily deteriorating process in the fate of Plantagenet England. As Shakespeare’s technique matures, the scaffolding that holds the structure, the rhetorical peacocking, to use Peter Stein’s phrase, the thematic vehicles of Part One, begin to disappear behind an apparently “natural” concatenation of events.
MPJ: Whose books were most helpful in your research?
DGB: Probably many that I have forgotten, and some I still remember as illuminating. My earliest guides in history and literature were those who introduced me to the anthropological history of monarchy. Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges (tr. The Royal Touch), on the supernatural powers that kings of France and England were supposed to possess, especially the healing of scrofula, which lent them an intangible majesty. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, and his reading of Richard II by the light of its political, religious, and legal sources. These for me would be completed later by Ralph Giesey’s analysis of royal funeral rites in Le Roi ne meurt jamais. Richard Marienstras, Le Proche et le Lointain (tr. New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World), on the ideological context of the plays, based on a variety of contemporary discourses on the laws of the forest, the status of aliens, treason, sacrifice, and sea journeys. Denis de Rougemont, L’amour et l’occident (tr. Love in the Western World) on the origin of romantic love and its death drive in troubadour literature, the struggle between Eros and Agape. Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity on the central archetypes of poetry. Luc de Heusch, Le Roi ivre ou l’origine de l’Etat (tr. The Drunken King), on African founding myths, more rigorous than Frazer’s Golden Bough and as inspiring. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, with its variations from the brightly-lit recognition scene in the Odyssey to the dark corners of Peter’s betrayal of Christ in the Gospel of Saint Mark. Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the sources of Shakespeare’s European culture. Jean-Pierre Vernant & Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et Tragédie en Grèce ancienne (tr. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece), especially the chapter on the historical moment of tragedy, between a still vivid epic past and the onset of skepticism, which could apply equally well, mutatis mutandis, to Shakespeare’s Henriads. Jean Jacquot, Le Théâtre tragique, and the CNRS series Le Chœur des muses that he edited, seminal works in theatre studies. Paul Ricœur, La Métaphore vive (tr. The Rule of Metaphor) helped me understand the link between metaphor and muthos in Aristotle’s Poetics as one between interior and exterior form. Other works offered insights into the medieval mentality, Etienne Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Âge (tr. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages), Jacques le Goff, Saint Louis and Pour un autre Moyen Âge (tr. Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages), from the medieval perception of time punctuated by church bells to the modern world of clocks and impersonal measurements. On early modern politics, Claude Lefort, Le Travail de l’œuvre: Machiavel (tr. Machavelli in the Making), the revolutionary reframing of traditional ideas on virtue and evil; Quentin Skinner, The Foundation of Modern Political Thought, an intellectual history of Europe through major political texts written from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries; Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (tr. Portrait of the King), the violence of power hiding under the veil of justice. On medieval notions of history and historiography, Frank Fussner, The Historical Revolution and Tudor History and the Historians; Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire (tr. Writing History), for whom the main phrase of the historical genre is “It’s interesting.” This could be my motto. It was an article of his on suicide that led me to Maurice Pinguet, La Mort volontaire au Japon (tr. Voluntary Death in Japan), which begins with Cato’s suicide as a gesture of resistance against Caesar, and made me want to read Plutarch in Amyot’s translation.
Closer to the histories, the most ‘interesting’ in my memory, both learned and thought-provoking, were Wolfgang Iser, Staging Politics: The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare’s Histories, a subtle rereading of Foucault on the continuous struggle of order versus freedom, and Shakespeare’s exceptional “phenomenology of politics,” Moody Prior, The Drama of Power, on the balance between Saint Augustine and Machiavelli, Paola Pugliatti’s discussion of the alleged “death of the author” in Shakespeare the Historian, Michael Hattaway’s Cambridge edition of Henry VI, Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea, who brilliantly explores the different political and ethical sensibilities of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Edward I. Berry, Patterns of Decay, on Shakespeare’s anchorage of timeless myths and allegories into the historical reality of fifteenth-century England, Henry A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare’s Histories, who first introduced me to the methods and beliefs of the medieval chroniclers.
And to the theatre, Lois Potter, The Text, the Play and the Globe, by the keenest, most perceptive and experienced theatre-goer I’ve ever met; Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare and the German Stage, a history that repeatedly crossed ours, thanks among others to the strong influence of Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble, the Schaubühne, Heiner Müller, Peter Stein, Klaus Michael Grüber on our most prominent stage directors; Carol Rutter, Enter the Body, another brilliant theatre-goer, on the use of women’s body in a theatre where they were absent; Michael Coveney’s and Irving Wardle’s witty, insightful, well-informed reviews for the Financial Times and The Independent, Peter Holland, Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s, Russell Jackson, Shakespeare Films in the Making, both “incontournables” on film and theatre, as we say in French of works essential to the theme, both awake to a world elsewhere.
MPJ: I see that your favorite theatre and film reviewers are my favorite theatre and film reviewers. How have the French received the history plays?
DGB: There was no French production of Henry V until 1999, when it got a tepid welcome, not because it staged our humiliating defeat at Agincourt, but because, according to its reviewers, French directors had lost the epic fiber after Jean Vilar. Shakespeare is now the most frequently performed playwright in France, superseding Molière, but his conquest of the French stage was a very slow process. In 1945 Simone de Beauvoir could still diagnose “It is Shakespeare they don’t like” after the flop of Charles Dullin’s Lear, “they” being the theatre critics. Apart from Richard II and Richard III, the histories were hardly ever performed, and attracted little critical interest until the 1960s, when isolated scholars joined the anti-Tylliardians in their fights against the “Tudor myth.” Planchon’s Henry IV in 1957, performed in two parts entitled “Le Prince” and “Falstaff”, was a huge success, but did not encourage followers. There were a few unmemorable attempts at Henry VI, like the contracted version staged in 1967 by Jean-Louis Barrault, who declared himself very hurt by its hostile reception. But recently Thomas Jolly brought unprecedented popularity to the first Henriad with an eighteen-hour performance of the full texts that won general applause. Joan of Arc and the Hundred Years’ War were treated in a parodic spirit that raised no complaints. The true heroine of the production was an invented character, “La Rhapsode,” who explained events, connected the episodes, apologized for their young director’s errors, so utterly charming that there was a huge roar of protest in the audience when Richard sneaked behind her and strangled her at the end of Henry VI, Part Three to continue alone the management of the story.
MPJ: Wow, that is fascinating. I really like Shakespeare’s Early History Plays. Can you describe the adaptive habits for these plays?
DGB: I wouldn’t use the word habit, because he tries something new in each play. Part I runs a wild race through thirty years of events, from Henry V’s death to the loss of France, collects, fuses, and redistributes elements of Hall’s chronicle, and borrows his sententious comments on the evils of dissension. The rallying of Burgundy to the French party is a telling example of the method: it concentrates details scattered over fifty pages and seven years in one brief speech by Joan, who played no part in the actual event. Scenes of discord alternate with edifying pictures of union. But the playwright grows increasingly skeptical about the benefits of virtue as he explores the crisis of medieval monarchy. Part II takes a critical distance with Hall’s views, mends his paralogisms, and exposes a highly complex state of affairs through a masterly imbrication of plots. Groups form to seal alliances, and disclose their separate designs at each plotter’s exit. Minute changes significantly alter the facts dramatized, or create causal links between unrelated events. The armorer’s duel, a minor episode in the chronicles, plays a pivotal role in the dramatic collapse of institutions. Part III accelerates the movement of history while keeping the seesaw movement of victory between the two parties, and makes the escalation of violence intelligible through stylized choreographic scenes like the killing of Clifford by the three York brothers. At that point, the playwright seems to have lost interest in Hall’s opinions, and is content with inserting the facts of the chronicle into his own dramatic pattern without significant alterations. Areas of shadow between momentous events create perspective, the working of time in the intervals of the action makes sense of the chroniclers’ linear tales. The passive Henry is transformed into a visionary who sees beyond the cycle of retaliation, and prophesies an end to it by saluting young Richmond as England’s hope. Richard III shows the emergence of a central character, decorates it with Thomas More’s wit, and reverses the pattern of his History: instead of breaking into More’s picture of a merry old England, Shakespeare’s Richard appears as the monstrous offspring of civil war, a living metaphor of disorder. Twelve years of relative peace under his brother Edward’s reign disappear in the steady progress towards his coronation. The political investigation stops with the first Tudor’s entrance, to be continued in the second Henriad and in the Roman plays.
MPJ: You seem to do source criticism right. By starting with fundamentals instead of ideology, you are able to step over at least some of the ideology.
DGB: As I explained at the opening of my book, I began with no opinion on any of the litigious points that were hotly debated at the time, and strove to stick to hard facts, or rather hard copy, the printed texts of plays and sources. I soon disagreed with a postulate that was then gaining ground, that history is essentially fictive, that there is no coherence or sense in ‘facts’ other than the construction we impose on them, that truth is impossible to reach and therefore of no consequence. To me this amounted to irresponsibility. I much preferred, and still do, Edward Said’s definition of the intellectual as someone who attempts to tell the truth at all times and to the best of his abilities.
MPJ: I’m with you. I very much like your explorations of notable productions. How did you research these?
DGB: I saw quite a few, reviewed some for the TLS, and was sometimes able to interview directors, actors, scenographers. These experiences often brought out aspects of the plays I hadn’t perceived before, one of the reasons that made the theatre so exciting, such as how a silent character can make a strong statement on stage, which one cannot feel on the printed page. The directors’ cuts were sometimes as revealing as what they chose to show, just as Shakespeare’s selection of material could be, and helped me to a clearer view of Aristotle’s or Horace’s opinions on what deserved to be shown and what should be reported. Some scenes of the Henriad palpably test both modes, and upset the traditional hierarchy by sometimes making the narrative more moving than the actual show, for instance when characters witness an event and are moved only when they hear how the story of it will be told in the future. On productions I didn’t see myself, I read the press files, and the essays available. Most editions of the plays now include a section on their performance history, and that too was often useful.
MPJ: Whose are the important ideological voices on these plays?
DGB: E.M.W. Tillyard reigned supreme with his Elizabethan World Picture and Shakespeare’s History Plays until some dissenting voices began to make themselves heard in the 1960s: Philip Brockbank (“The Frame of Disorder – Henry VI”), A. P. Rossiter (Angel with Horns) on the scholarly front, expressed doubts about Shakespeare’s orthodoxy. Jan Kott’s best-selling Shakespeare our Contemporary had his kings climb and fall down the grand staircase of history. In his view, Shakespeare spoke to us now, when tyranny on one’s doorstep was again a common experience. On stage Roger Planchon’s Henry IV, Strehler’s Gioco dei Potenti, Barton/Hall’s Wars of the Roses, all strongly politicized, had prepared the way for an onslaught on conservative readings. The next decade or two saw numerous publications on the histories, tearing up most of Tillyard’s assumptions. And, of course, the plays made privileged material for the new historicists and cultural materialists, both intent on tracking the dominant ideologies of the early modern period, and the various forms of resistance, dissent, transgression of the social order, both generally pessimistic about their chances of subverting authority.
MPJ: Have you received much blowback from ideologues over this book?
DGB: I had many heated but friendly arguments with Michael Hattaway, Richard Wilson, Ton Hoenselaars, Keith Brown, some tenser ones with French anti-Tillyard crusaders who thought me too lenient with the enemy. I had at least one enthusiastic reader, Thomas Pendleton in Shakespeare Newsletter, but don’t remember any ideological blowbacks in the reviews. By the late eighties, most French scholars had grown rather tired of the ideological quarrels and critical theories of the earlier decades, and at Stratford conferences we watched with amazement the delegates throw Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Althusser, Bakhtin at each others’ heads like so many missiles. It came to me as a surprise that one of those conferences, on Shakespeare and Politics, should be predominantly concerned with gender. My paper was one of only two about the histories.
MPJ: You write of Thomas Nashe as Shakespeare’s collaborator on 1 Henry VI. The publication of the controversial New Oxford Shakespeare has very much put Shakespeare’s collaborators into conversation, especially the claim that Nashe, Marlowe, and others unknown co-wrote Part One, and Shakespeare just polished it up at a later date. Sir Brian Vickers promotes Thomas Kyd as co-author with Nashe and Shakespeare. Would you write your book differently now in response to these claims?
DGB: I would, of course, discuss them, but I don’t think it would significantly alter my approach of the sources. It is Gary Taylor who promotes Nashe, not me. The identifications depend mostly on stylometric tests, applied to a culture in which borrowing, imitating and sharing common sources were the rule, and their results in the past have sometimes been proved misleading. The numerical analyses do grow to something of great constancy and will probably tell us exactly who wrote what in the not too distant future. Frankly, I am not greatly interested by the problem, though I am aware that even if it should not affect our reading of the plays, it does. As to the radical turn taken by the New Oxford Shakespeare, yes, drama is an art of performance, and necessarily collaborative, but it does not mean we should print the stage version, especially when we have no idea whether it was performed at a children’s birthday party or a noble wedding. To hear an actor swear “by Cerebos” – the name of a brand of salt, probably a joke on Setebos made during rehearsals – in Peter Brook’s Tempest, made me sympathize with Hamlet’s irritation against clowns, and feel I’d rather have the author’s solitary voice than a collective of actor’s voices.
MPJ: Your essay in Joan of Arc, A Saint for All Reasons, love the pun in the title, intersects with 1 Henry VI.
DGB: The pun is Nadia Margolis’s, and the book was the outcome of an invitation to a conference on Joan of Arc by a medievalist colleague. I was intrigued by a line in the play, where Joan claims to be of royal blood. French historians unanimously said that the tale of her royal origin was the invention of a mediocre nineteenth-century playwright, who made her a half-sister of the Dauphin, but they were obviously wrong, since the tale was already there in Henry VI. It was this anomaly that set me off. I couldn’t find any medieval mention of such a rumor, but on the way, I came across another fallacy, which imputes to the Burgundian chroniclers the slanderous tales of her which Hall, Shakespeare and others would repeat. Actually, the real culprit was the London chronicler Robert Fabyan, who turned the high deeds reported by her French admirers into evidence of her devilish ways. This was just the first of the many reversals we followed through our collection of essays, which were Nadia’s inspiration for the punning title.
MPJ: Most people in the United States are not especially conscious of Joan, and when we are, it is through the mediations of Giuseppe Verdi, Carl Dreyer, George Bernard Shaw, a couple of sound films, and for Shakespeareans the Nashe/Shakespeare mediation in 1 Henry VI. Help me understand the place of Joan in French society.
DGB: There is a very active International Joan of Arc Society, based in America, who have undertaken to publish the proceedings and documents related to her trials in the original Latin or French and in English translation. In France, Joan was an uncontested national heroine until the right-wing party of Jean-Marie Le Pen elected her as their patroness and made her feast day the occasion of a march with their supporters. There were various attempts on the left of the political spectrum to retrieve her from this unfortunate connection, especially Jacques Rivette’s 1994 film, Jeanne la Pucelle, mostly drawn from Michelet, with the very popular Sandrine Bonnaire playing her part. There were also mixed feelings about the fact that the Church canonized a warrior with such violent deeds to her account. But her credit with the public at large does not seem deeply affected. A number of books dedicated to her continue to appear regularly.
MPJ: Rivette’s film is on You Tube.[2] It is interesting that the international society is based in America, since I have never heard of them. They are obviously a force in Joan circles, but not in American society, if my ignorance of them reliably indicates this. Before leaving the history plays, what kind of understanding of Richard II and Richard III did the board want students to have that your books supplied?
DGB: At that level, the board will usually let the specialist writing the book choose the form and content that he feels appropriate, so it was more or less left to me. The agrégation is a national competition organized by the Ministry of Education to recruit the students who will teach in grammar schools and universities. The tests include a seven-hour dissertation on one of the currently required books, so the students need to have a good working knowledge of the text, and of its critical history.
MPJ: Tell me about Côté Cour, Côté Justice: Shakespeare et l’invention du droit. How did your interest turn in this direction?
DGB: Since I first read Gorboduc, while researching Henry VI, I felt convinced that the birth of the Elizabethan theatre at the Inns of Court was more than a coincidence, that this original link between law and theatre was the end product of a long process. The Elizabethan theatre had only a short life and no equivalent elsewhere, its memory was erased with the destruction of the Globe, but its drama shared a common past history with the continent, a recycling of texts and political theories across the Channel which I thought worth investigating. For instance, there were similarities in their early days between the theatrical practices of the Inns and the French Basoche, but whereas the Basoche was soon silenced by the government, the society of the Inns has kept up the tradition of theatrical performances to this day. These similarities and dissimilarities reflected the separate paths taken by the political history of our two countries, towards parliamentary monarchy in Britain, towards absolutism in France, and by our legal systems, common law versus droit civil romain.
MPJ: What an interesting idea. Readers will find Gorboduc under Thomas Norton in the bibliography. Whose books were helpful to you as you did your research?
DGB: As with my other books, the most helpful were works of history, by John Guy (Politics, Law and Counsel in Tudor and Early Stuart England), Patrick Collinson (Godly People: Essays in English Protestantism and Puritanism), Norman Jones (Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion 1559), Jacques Le Goff (The Birth of Purgatory), and those by historians of the law, Maitland (English Law and the Renaissance), Geoffrey de Clifton Parmiter (The King’s Great Matter. A Study of Anglo-Papal Relations 1527-1534), John H. Baker (The Third University of England: the inns of court and the common-law tradition), Wilfrid Prest (The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590-1640), Peter Goodrich (Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law), Paul Raffield (Images and Cultures of Law). But quoting just one title feels unfair to some of these scholars to whom I owe several remarkable books. Essays available when I began discussed either the Inns or the plays performed there, but did not spend much thought on their intimate connection and interaction, works like Raffield’s Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution, Oliver Arnold’s Third Citizen or Bradin Cormack’s A Power to Do Justice came later. This gap sent me on a journey back to the sources of the connection between law and theater, both the structural matrixes of drama, especially the pro et contra arguments of legal procedures, the long tradition of pedagogic or polemical dialogues, and their matter, plots, themes, idioms, moral saws borrowed from a large variety of public oratory as well as from actual trials and public events. Shakespeare’s plays are immersed in this legal bain de culture. The question of dynastic right is central to his histories, and it is linked with constitutional theories of succession, but also with common legal problems of inheritance, of matrimony. These and a number of other issues produced a very hefty book, which I am trying to pare down to essentials for an English version. At the time the mass of materials I collected so fired me that I wrote my one and only play (Farewell, King, online at http://shakespeareanniversary.org/2015/farewell-king/) imagining the circumstances of Shakespeare’s sudden departure from the stage.
MPJ: Great news about the English version. Turning to Patrice Chéreau, he too worked on at least parts of the first tetralogy with students. You do not mention if any of the Joan of Arc scenes were included in Fragments.
DGB: No, they were not. Fragments concentrated on the turning point between Henry VI Part 3 and Richard III. Chéreau had already staged extracts with students in one of his earliest productions, especially the scene in Part 3 where King Henry hears the laments of a father who has killed his son and a son who has killed his father in the civil war, and the litanies of the wailing queens in Richard III. He was slightly frustrated in his project. For instance, he had thought to have two actresses cling to each other to interpret the part of Margaret, the new violent cursing woman emerging like a chrysalis from the deprived Queen, and gave up when he found they had difficulty managing their movements. The seduction of Lady Anne, and the wailing queens also absorbed much of his attention. The actor playing Richard lacked confidence, all of them lacked experience, so he could only make them perform part of what he had in mind, and used their youthful energy rather than their subtlety to carry them through the difficulties of the text.
MPJ: I tend to grade productions on how much Margaret and the other women are cut. The play loses too much of its meaning without this chorus of antagonists. The first Shakespeare play Chéreau directed was in 1970. While researching this interview, I read that Richard II was a controversial production because Chéreau imported music-hall, circus, and pankration elements into this history play. Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream famously imported circus elements the same year. Do you think this was a coincidence? Was there something about the time?
DGB: I would say a coincidence. Chéreau wrote abundant notes around his Richard II, arguing with Jan Kott’s and other readings of the histories, but never mentions Peter Brook nor the Dream. It was his infuriated translator, the poet Pierre Leyris, who compared Chéreau’s production to circus, music hall or pankration, more as incriminating features than as actual elements of the show.
MPJ: Thank you for setting me straight on that. Chéreau studied Shakespeare’s texts with the poet Yves Bonnefoy. You show in your book that some of Chéreau’s stage productions and films developed from these readings, even when there is no obvious Shakespeare connection. What are some of these and what are the connections?
DGB: Some of them are pointed out in his notes and in the printed programmes. He contributed an important chapter to Sylvie de Nussac’s Histoire d’un ‘Ring’: der Ring des Nibelungen de Richard Wagner, a collection of essays around his Bayreuth production of the cycle in 1976-80. Wotan stood with his back to the audience, looking at the mirror of Richard II. Lear was also on his mind, Chéreau writes: “Just as Shakespeare’s King Lear had inspired Wagner’s design for Wotan (and Cordelia of course for Brünnhilde), Edward Bond’s Lear which I had staged not long before, and enjoyed working on, got mixed with Wotan and probably with the whole of the Ring.” The fact that the same actor, Gérard Desarthe performed Peer Gynt in 1981 and Hamlet seven years later stressed a continuity between their quests for the self, the range of their acting performances, from intimate psychology to epic. There were similar links, similar parent/child tensions between Hamlet and Elektra, similar anxieties over the pains inflicted on the other and on the self in love relationships. Between these two productions he revisited the father/son conflict in 2003 with Racine’s Phèdre, one of his rare confrontations with the French classics. As Chéreau noted about these characters, they live in a world where fathers are stronger than their sons. He was also well aware that Wagner, Ibsen, and Hofmannsthal had made connections themselves between their characters and Shakespeare’s. As It You Like, on which he was working when he died, was to be about agreement of contraries. During this preparatory work, he remembered La Dispute, its smell of the woods, its protagonists lost in the fog and ghost orchestra, the only French play to offer the liberty of the forest whereas Shakespeare offered it all the time, he commented. There the characters would be reconciled with each other and with themselves.
MPJ: He also seemed to have an affinity for Marlowe.
DGB: As a teenager, he watched Roger Planchon, his first mentor, rehearse Edward II. His early productions concentrated on the violent transitions between eras, on “politics brought down to the level of private interests and the fluctuation of alliances as interest dictates”, he wrote in his notes. He was fascinated by the Saint Bartholomew Massacre, which he staged in Massacre à Paris and filmed in La Reine Margot. “Death to be feared, or to overcome”, was a leitmotiv of his professional practice to the end. To him Marlowe’s Massacre seemed to rehearse “all the manners of dying except in one’s bed.” He read extensively, all he could find about the Valois reigns and sixteenth-century diplomacy, to flesh out Marlowe’s skeletal plot.
MPJ: I want readers to be clear that La Reine Margot is not an adaptation of Marlowe’s play, but of Dumas’s novel with the same title. Your chapter on Chéreau’s films is called “Movable Pictures’’ instead of the usual “motion pictures.” Why?
DGB: As in “a movable feast,” something that escapes fixed frames, and travels light. Because after the expensive Reine Margot, he made intimate films with small budgets and light equipment, one of them entitled Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train, “Those who love me will travel by train.” The moving camera served his obsessive need to come closer to the actor’s face, search the intimacy of body and inner soul of the characters, film their interior drama.
MPJ: Where are the resources for studying Chéreau’s work located?
DGB: At the IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’Ecriture Contemporaine, in the Abbaye d’Ardenne, near Caen. There are also documents kept by the Maison Jean Vilar in Avignon, the Théâtre des Amandiers, Nanterre, and the Odéon.
MPJ: Thank you. Are there books that look at Chéreau’s work outside of the underlying Shakespeare?
DGB: Yes, several, two good ones by Georges Banu and Clément Hervieu-Léger, J’y arriverai un jour, and Anne-Françoise Benhamou, Patrice Chéreau: Figurer le réel, plus a collection of essays, Chéreau à l’œuvre, edited by Marie-Françoise Lévy and Myriam Koutsinas. And a beautiful book, not exclusively about Chéreau, by his scenographer Richard Peduzzi, Là-bas c’est ailleurs. There is also a chapter in the book Une Mémoire by the philosopher François Regnault, who was his dramaturg for years. And the first two volumes of Chéreau’s own writings, Journal de travail, published by Actes-Sud.
MPJ: Oh, that’s exciting. Darn language barrier. In my opinion, too few Shakespeareans are interested in debunking the claims of Shakespeare deniers. Did this interest you before the release of Shakespeare. Combien de prétendants?
DGB: It was the release of the film Anonymous that first got me concerned, when I saw the amount of historical nonsense and ignorance of bare facts it circulates. A number of scholars think it best to ignore these theories, not wanting to give the deniers an opportunity to air their views and denounce the confederacy of “Stratfordians” who plot to suppress them. We did not set out to try and convince deniers, we know it is impossible. Many tried before us, in vain. Thomas Pendleton, whom you miss much, you told me, wrote a very witty article on the subject in a Shakespeare Newsletter of 1994. Our aim was to inform non-specialists who do not know who or what to believe, amateur Shakespeareans, scholars in other disciplines, and parents of our students who worry that their children may be wasting their time studying the works of a fraud.
MPJ: I do miss Tom and am glad you liked that article. Since I do not read French, can you summarize the argument against John Florio?
DGB: Florio is a great linguist, but there isn’t much poetry in him, nor intimate knowledge of the theatre, nor marked interest for English folklore or past history. Inversely, Shakespeare’s plays do not show a deep acquaintance with Italy or Italian culture, even if he quotes Florio’s translation of Montaigne and occasionally borrows from his World of Words. In their background, we find Chaucer more than Dante, the forests of Sherwood and Arden, Piers Plowman, the Mystery Cycles of Coventry, The Mirror for Magistrates, and Tyndale’s Bible, which are no part of Florio’s mental landscape. I find it hard to imagine that Florio would have wasted hours reading English chroniclers and writers for whom, according to Tassinari himself, he had little esteem.
MPJ: Any chance of an English translation? Lois told me that her chapter was written in English, so you are already part of the way there.
DGB: The question would have to be put to English publishers. But they probably don’t think they need us foreigners to do the job. Because of recent claims around the Florio candidacy (reviewed in Le Monde / Sciences of 15 January 2019), our French publisher Thierry Marchaisse thinks it might be worth a new updated edition, with a broader enquiry into the outbreak of this and similar delusional theories, for instance the one asserting that Corneille wrote Molière’s best plays. François Laroque and I are working on it.
MPJ: Publishers should know that I actually wrote the works of William Shakespeare. Royalty checks, please. I had not heard similar claims about Corneille and Molière. My eyes roll. I am curious about your translations. Why Dover Wilson and Auden?
DGB: In both cases, I was asked if I would like to translate those books, and I did, very much. François Regnault had recommended What Happens in “Hamlet” to Chéreau, who wanted a translation so his cast could read it when he directed the play. It was a bonus to be allowed in to some of the rehearsals, without the least idea then I would one day write a book about him. Auden is another story. The publisher had read and liked my translation of Burgess’s autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, and wanted me to translate one of the books on his own list. I turned down several of his offers – Burgess’s book had just taken me two years of hard work, and I didn’t feel tempted to spend so much time with any of those, until he came up with Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare.
MPJ: I think that parts of Dover Wilson’s book are just silly and easily debunked. What in the book appealed to Chéreau, or to ask this another way, what did he want his cast to use?
DGB: A number of British scholars share your opinion and find his book embarrassing, because its view of the Elizabethan stage is obsolete. But it is splendidly written, far more pleasurable to read than a number of more up to date essays, and still very useful, especially to a stage director, on the range of Elizabethan theological debates and beliefs about ghosts, their notions of mental illness (these especially were brought to Desarthe’s attention), the dueling practices. Chéreau thought Dover Wilson did not understand how a director could make spectators watch what he wanted them to see, but he found his reconstruction of the mischief behind “miching mallecho” brilliant. The ghost and the final duel were two crucial parts of his own production.
MPJ: This brings us to a broad question. There must be some great French language Shakespeare scholarship we do not read because we are on the wrong side of the language barrier. What are some of the seminal works?
DGB: To me, the greatest is Richard Marienstras’s Le Proche et le Lointain, an entirely new and original approach of the plays. It has been translated, not very well, I was told, but I haven’t read it in English, so can’t say if some of it is indeed lost in translation. Also translated, François Laroque’s influential Shakespeare’s Festive World around carnivalesque traditions and other seasonal rituals, Gilles Monsarrat’s Light from the Porch on stoicism, Robert Ellrodt’s Montaigne and Shakespeare, Jean-Pierre Maquerlot’s Shakespeare and the Mannerist Tradition, none of which, apart from Laroque’s book, attracted the critical attention they deserved. Many of the books that most helped my research (my answer to your second question) have been translated, but I seldom saw them mentioned by anglophone scholars. Jean Jacquot’s were not, and yet he was the first to my knowledge to investigate the influence of iconography, festive entries, ceremonies, on the stages of medieval and early modern Europe in Les Voies de la création théâtrale, yet he is little known outside France, and seldom given tribute for his pioneering work. Others, Gisèle Venet, Temps et vision tragique: Shakespeare et ses contemporains, a philosophical exploration of the consciousness and sensibility of Elizabethan tragedy from Marlowe to Webster, Michèle Willems, La Genèse du mythe shakespearien, 1660-1780 on the neoclassical rewritings of Shakespeare’s plays, Bernard Sichère, Le Nom de Shakespeare on the so-called “Shakespeare mystery” and his staging of the law of the Father, Yves Peyré, La Voix des mythes dans la tragédie élisabéthaine, which explores the mythological sources of plots and dialogues, Henri Suhamy’s works on prosody and rhetoric, Le Vers de Shakespeare, and his Les figures de style (thirteen editions to this day), to quote a few, made significant contributions to French research but remained untranslated.
MPJ: SNL is sent to marketing departments of the English and American publishers who send review copies to us, so I hope they take note. Are there recent works exploring arguments unaddressed in English language scholarship?
DGB: Most young Shakespeare scholars write and publish directly in English nowadays. I can’t blame them, since that is bound to ensure a larger readership, but I wish they were less eager to emulate the Anglo-American format of conferences, MLA style sheets, gender studies, and so on, which I often find too insular, too focused on narrow specialized areas for my own taste. I like long history, and trans-national areas of research.
MPJ: Are there any books that you refer to frequently?
DGB: Those I have mentioned above remain with me, but my work has moved on to different areas, making me read other books on law and theatre which has been my main theme of research since the histories, on the transmission and reappropriation of characters like Joan, rewritings of texts like Julius Caesar or Coriolanus, nineteenth-century Shakespeare, past and present performance.
MPJ: Are any non-lit-crit books that you have found particularly enriching in your thinking and writing about Shakespeare and early modern theatre?
DGB: Yes, many, some have no direct connection or only a distant one with Shakespeare, but belong to the same imaginative mindscape, some lent ideas, styles and colors to my writing: The Oresteia, Homer, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, Scott’s Ivanhoe and Kenilworth, Alexandre Dumas’ Mes mémoires, Anthony Burgess’s Dead Man in Deptford and Nothing Like the Sun, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, Antony Sher’s Year of the King, Jacques Darras’s Reith Lectures, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey, Chrétien de Troyes, Philippe de Commynes, Morte d’Arthur, Pound’s Cantos, Eliot’s Waste Land, Roland Barthes’s Sur Racine, Tony Harrison’s Mysteries, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Anne Cunéo’s Le Maître de Garamond, Michel Pastoureau’s illuminating studies of color, Rouge, Bleu, Vert, Noir, through the ages.
MPJ: You have mentioned some of my favorite books, and I am especially glad you included Tony Harrison’s sometimes overlooked adaptation of The Mysteries, which is fabulous. Are there any books you’d like to mention, but I lacked the wit to ask about?
DGB: Two excellent essays I read recently and reviewed in En attendant Nadeau. One I would very much like to see translated in French, Andreas Höfele’s No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. And Georges Forestier’s superb Molière, a biography that revisits all the sources and completely upsets the traditional portraits of our favorite playwright.
MPJ: Thanks, Dominique. I really appreciate you consenting to be my guest in this column.
DGB: Thank you for inviting me in. Your questions took me back many exciting years, books, and performances.
MPJ: I am also glad to acknowledge some debts. First to Andreas Höfele, who sent me the text of a Shakespeare Association of America seminar paper he wrote years ago, and later included in one of his books. I thought it might help with some research I was doing at the time, and Prof. Höfele was kind enough to share this then unpublished work with me.
Additional thanks to Thea Buckley, Balz Engler, José Ramón Díaz Fernández, Ton Hoenselaars, Martin Hyatt, and Bruce Young, all of whom contacted me after I sent out a plea for help when Prof. Goy-Blanquet’s campus email address stopped working in the middle of the interview process. Hardy Cook was kind enough let me post a query for an alternate address on his shaksper list.[3] I am grateful to you all.
Bibliography
(Prof. Goy-Blanquet offered multiple translations for certain classics.)
Aeschylus, Les Tragiques grecs. Eschyle. Sophocle. Euripide. Théâtre complet, Victor-Henri Debidour, trans (Editions de Fallois, 1999).
Amyot, Jacques, Les Vies Des Hommes Illvstres Grecs et Romains Compares L vne Avec L’avtre Par Plvtarqve de Chærones (Paris, 1559).
Anonymous, Roland Emmerich, dir., 2011, Columbia Pictures.
Arnold, Oliver. The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
Auden, W. H. Shakespeare, Dominique Goy-Blanquet, trans. (Rocher, 2003).
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Willard R. Trask, trans., (1953, reissued by Princeton University Press, 2013).
Baker, John H. The Third University of England: the inns of court and the common-law tradition (Seldon Society, 1990).
Barthes, Roland. Sur Racine (Editions du Seuil, 1963).
Banu, Georges and Hervieu-Léger, Clément, eds. J’y arriverai un jour (Actes-Sud, 2009).
Benhamou, Anne-Françoise. Patrice Chéreau: Figurer le réel (Solitaires Intempestifs, 2015).
Berry, Edward I. Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare’s Early Histories (University Press of Virginia, 1975).
Bloch, Marc. Les Rois thaumaturges (1924, reissued by Gallimard in 1998).
Boethius, Chaucer’s Translation of Boethius’ ‘De Consolatione Philosophiae’, Geoffrey Chaucer, trans., Richard Morris, ed. (Oxford University Press, 1868).
_____. Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings of Boethius, ‘De consolatione philosophiae’, Plutarch ‘De curiositate’, Horace, ‘De arte poetica’, Caroline Pemberton, ed. (EETS, 1899).
_____. The Consolation of Philosophy, W.V. Cooper, trans. (J.M. Dent, 1902).
Bond, Edward. Lear (Methuen, 1972).
Brockbank, Philip. “The Frame of Disorder – Henry VI,” On Shakespeare: Jesus, Shakespeare, and Karl Marx, and other essays (Basil Blackwell, 1989).
Burgess, Anthony. Dead Man in Deptford (Hutchison, 1993).
_____. Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life (Heinemann, 1964).
_____. Petit Wilson et Dieu le Père: les confessions d’Anthony Burgess, Dominique Goy-Blanquet, trans. (Grasset, 1996).
Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train, Patrice Chéreau, dir., 1998, Téléma.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales, Nevil Coghill, trans. (Penguin Books, 1965).
_____. The Riverside Chaucer, Larry D. Benson, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Chéreau, Patrice. Journal de travail (Actes-Sud, 2018).
_____. “Lorsque cinq ans seront passés” in Histoire d’un ‘Ring’: der Ring des Nibelungen de Richard Wagner, Bayreuth 1976-1980, Sylvie de Nussac, ed. (Robert Laffont, 1980) , pp. 85-177
Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal ou le roman de Perceval (Honoré Champion, 1972).
_____. Le Chevalier de la charrette (Honoré Champion, 1962).
_____. Yvain, Le Chevalier au Lion (Gallimard, 1944).
_____. La Légende arthurienne. Le Graal et la Table ronde Danielle Régnier-Bohler, ed. (Laffont, 1989).
Collinson, Patrick. Godly People: Essays in English Protestantism and Puritanism (A&C Black, 1982).
Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires, (Agora Pocket, 2004).
_____, Memoirs of Philippe de Commynes, Samuel Kinser, ed., Isabelle Cazeaux, trans. (University of South Carolina Press, 1973).
Cormack, Bradin. A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625 (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Cunéo, Anne. Le Maître de Garamond (Bernard Campiche Editeur, 2002).
Curtius, Ernst. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948, reissued by Princeton University Press, 1991).
Darras, Jacques. Beyond the Tunnel of History, revised and expanded by Daniel Snowman (University of Michigan Press, 1990).
Dreyer, Carl, dir. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Société Générale des Films, 1928).
Dumas, Alexandre. Mes mémoires, thirty volumes (Codot, 1852-5).
Eco, Umberto. Il nome della rosa (Bompiani, 1980).
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land, (Horace Liveright, 1922).
Ellrodt, Robert. Montaigne and Shakespeare: The Emergence of Modern Self-consciousness (Manchester University Press, 2017).
Florio, John. Essayes Written in French By Michael Lord of Montaigne Knight of the Order of Saint Michael, Gentleman of the French King’s Chamber: done into English according to the laſt French edition by Iohn Florio (London: 1613).
_____. Queen Anna’s New World of Words Or Dictionarie of the Italian and English Tongues (London: 1611).
Forestier, Georges. Molière (Gallimard, 2018).
Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Macmillan & Co., 1890).
Frye, Northrop, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (Mariner Books, 1963).
Fussner, Frank, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought 1580-1640 (1962, reissued by Routledge, 2010).
_____. Tudor History and the Historians (Basic Books, 1969).
Giesey, Ralph, Le Roi ne meurt jamais. Les obsèques dans la France de la Renaissance (Flammarion, 1992).
Gilson, Etienne, La Philosophie au Moyen Âge (Payot & Co., 1922).
le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of Purgatory, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (University of Chicago Press, 1986).
_____. Saint Louis, Gareth Gollrad, trans. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).
_____. Pour un autre Moyen Âge (Gallimard 1978).
Goodrich, Peter. Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (University of California Press, 1995).
Goy-Blanquet. Dominique. Côté Cour, Côté Justice: Shakespeare et l’invention du droit (Classiques Garnier, 2016).
_____. Richard II (Armand Colin, 2004).
_____. Richard III (Didier érudition, 1999).
_____. Shakespeare et l’invention de l’histoire: Guide commenté du théâtre historique de Shakespeare (Le Cri, 1997).
_____. Shakespeare’s Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage (Oxford University Press, 2003).
_____. Shakespeare in the Theatre: Patrice Chéreau (Arden, 2018).
Goy-Blanquet. Dominique, trans., Pour comprendre Hamlet : enquête à Elseneur by John Dover Wilson (Le Seuil, 1992).
_____. Shakespeare by W. H. Auden (Anatolia, 2003).
Goy-Blanquet. Dominique, ed., Jeanne d’Arc en garde à vue (Le Cri , 1999).
_____. Joan of Arc, A Saint for All Reasons: Studies in Myth and Politics (Ashgate, 2003).
Goy-Blanquet, Dominique and Laroque, François, eds. Shakespeare, Combien de prétendants? (Editions Thierry Marchaisse in 2016).
Guy, John. Politics, Law and Counsel in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Ashgate, 2000).
Harrison, Tony. The Mysteries (Faber, 1985).
Heusch, Luc de. Le Roi ivre ou l’origine de l’Etat (Gillimard, 1972).
Höfele, Andreas. No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Holland, Peter. Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Homer, Iliade, prefaced by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Paul Mazon, trans. (Folio Gallimard, 1975).
_____. L’Iliade. L’Odyssée, Louis Bardollet, Bouquins Laffont, trans. (Bouqins, 1995).
_____. Odyssée, prefaced by Paul Claudel, Victor Bérard, trans. (Folio Gallimard, 1955).
_____. The Whole Works of Homer, George Chapman, trans. Allardyce Nicoll, ed. (Princeton University Press, 1998 and 2000).
Hortmann, Wilhelm. Shakespeare and the German Stage. Two volumes (Cambridge University Press, 1990 and 1998).
Hugo, Victor. Notre-Dame de Paris (Gosselin, 1831).
Iser, Wolfgang. Staging Politics: The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare’s Histories (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Jackson, Russell. Shakespeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Jacquot, Jean, Le Théâtre tragique (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1962).
_____, ed. Les Voies de la création théâtrale (Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, seven volumes, 1970-1987).
Jones, Norman. Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion 1559 (Royal Historical Society, 1982).
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton University Press, 1957).
Kelly, Henry Ansgar. Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare’s Histories (Harvard University Press, 1970).
Kott, Jan. Shakespeare our Contemporary trans. Boleslaw Taborski (W. W. Norton & Company, 1974).
Laroque, François. Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
La Reine Margot, Patrice Chéreau, 1993, Renn Productions.
Lefort, Claude. Le Travail de l’œuvre: Machiavel (Gallimard, 1972).
Lévy, Marie-Françoise and Koutsinas, Myriam, eds. Chéreau à l’œuvre (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016).
Marienstras, Richard. Le Proche et le Lointain: Sur Shakespeare, le drame élisabéthain et l’idéologie anglaise aux XVIk et XVIIt siècles (Minuit, 1981).
Marin, Louis. Le Portrait du roi (Les Editions de Minuit, 1981).
Maitland, Frederic William. English Law and the Renaissance (The Rede Lecture for 1901) with some Notes (Cambridge University Press, 1901).
Mallory, Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur (London, 1485).
Marlowe, Christopher. Massacre at Paris (London, 1600).
Jean-Pierre Maquerlot, Shakespeare and the Mannerist Tradition: A Reading of Five Problem Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
A Mirror for Magistrates, six editions (London: 1559-1610)
Mendelsohn, Daniel. An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (Knopf, 2017).
Monsarrat, Gilles. Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature (Didier-Érudition (1984).
Norton, Thomas and Sackville, Thomas. The Tragedie of Ferrex and Porrex or Gorboduc (London, 1565).
Geoffrey de Clifton Parmiter, The King’s Great Matter. A Study of Anglo-Papal Relations 1527-1534 (Longmans, 1967).
Pastoureau, Michel. Vert. Histoire d’une couleur (Le Seuil, 2013).
_____. Une couleur ne vient jamais seule (Le Seuil, 2017).
Peduzzi, Richard. Là-bas c’est ailleurs (Actes Sud, 2014).
Pendleton, Thomas A. “Irvin Matus’s Shakespeare, IN FACT,” The Shakespeare Newsletter, 44:2, 1994, pp. 21, 26, 28-30.
_____. “Shakespeare’s Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage” review, The Shakespeare Newsletter, 55:3, 2005, pp. 67-8, 76.
Peyré, Yves. La Voix des mythes dans la tragédie élisabéthaine (CNRS Editions, 1996).
Pinguet, Maurice. La Mort volontaire au Japon (Gallimard, 1991).
Potter, Lois. The Text, the Play and the Globe: Essays on Literary Influence in Shakespeare’s World and His Work in Honor of Charles R. Forker (The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016).
Pound, Ezra. The Cantos (Three Mountains Press, 1925 – under the title A Draft of XVI Cantos; New Directions, 1970 – the first 120 cantos under the title The Cantos).
Prest, Wilfrid R. The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590-1640 (Rowman and Littlefield, 1972).
Prior, Moody. The Drama of Power: Studies In Shakespeare’s History Plays (Northwestern University Press, 1973).
Pugliatti, Paola. Shakespeare the Historian (Palgrave, 1996).
Raffield, Paul. Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
_____. Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (Hart Publishing, 2010).
Regnault, François. Une Mémoire. Nouveaux Écrits sur le théâtre (Coedition: Riveneuve/Archimbaud, 2018).
Ricœur, Paul. La Métaphore vive (Le Seuil, 1975).
Riggs, David. Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories: Henry VI and its Literary Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1971).
Jeanne la Pucelle, Jacques Rivette, dir., 1994, France 3 Cinéma.
Rossiter, A.P. Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare (Longmans, 1961).
Rougemont, Denis de. L’amour et l’occident (1939, reissued by Rizzoli, 2006).
Rutter, Carol. Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (Routledge, 2001).
Sanders, Wilbur. The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1968).
Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe (Archibald Constable, 1819).
_____. Kenilworth (Archibald Constable, 1821).
Sichère, Bernard. Le Nom de Shakespeare (Gallimard, 1987).
Shakespeare, William. The First part of Henry VI, Michael Hattaway, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
_____. The Second Part of Henry VI, Michael Hattaway, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
_____. The Third Part of Henry VI, Michael Hattaway, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Sher, Antony. Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook (Methuen, 1985).
Skinner, Quentin. The Foundation of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1768).
Suhamy, Henri. Les Figures de style (Presses universitaires de France, 1981).
_____. Le Vers de Shakespeare (Didier-Érudition, 1984).
Tassinari, Lamberto. John Florio the Man Who was Shakespeare (Giano Press, 2009).
Tey, Josephine. The Daughter of Time (Peter Davies, 1951).
Tillyard, E.M.W. The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton (Chatto & Windus, 1943).
_____. Shakespeare’s History Plays (Chatto & Windus, 1944).
Tyndale, William. The New Testament Of Our Lord And Saviour Jesus Christ: Published In 1526 (London: 1526).
Venet, Gisèle. Temps et vision tragique: Shakespeare et ses contemporains (Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003).
Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Mythe et Tragédie en Grèce ancienne (F. Maspero, 1972).
Veyne, Paul. Comment on écrit l’histoire (Éditions du Seuil, 1971).
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), “La Pucelle d’Orléans” (Paris: 1755).
Willems, Michèle. La Genèse du mythe shakespearien, 1660-1780 (Presses universitaires de France, 1979).
Wilson, John Dover. Vous avez dit “Hamlet“?, Dominique Goy-Blanquet, trans. (Amandiers/Presses universitaires de France, 1988).
[1] Professor Goy-Blanquet prefers this to “emerita,” because the original Latin is ex meritus.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSMRrPotOrE