Using a range of approaches drawn from literary analysis, pedagogical suggestions for utilizing theater in classroom settings, and recent critical interventions on performance, performativity, and affect, this panel considers the intersection of affect and performance on the Early Modern stage (and in classroom explorations of such) in three French-language plays.

‘Au gué!’ Killjoy nostalgia in Molière’s Le Misanthrope

In Act 1, Scene 2 of Molière's Le Misanthrope, the titular atrabiliaire critiques Oronte's modish sonnet and recites a ‘vieille chanson’ which he declares more moving and natural. Critics often situate the scene within a broader problematization of the 'art de plaire' in the play, claiming that Molière calls this dominant relational and aesthetic mode into question. In this paper, I build from a new reading of the sonnet scene to displace the critical focus on the 'art de plaire' in favor of an understudied affective current: joy. I argue that Alceste's performance is joyful and, as such, gestures towards new aesthetic and relational models.

I begin by reevaluating Alceste as an essentially joyful figure who derives pleasure from his killjoy persona. In the opening scene, Alceste performs and sanctions an extreme form of antisocial joy which sets the tone for the rest of the play. Reading his performance alongside early modern accounts of comedy, I show that Alceste’s extreme joy is proper to the comedic art and serves as a formal model for subsequent interactions. No sooner has he sanctioned this comedic mode, however, Alceste dreams of alternatives. His ‘vielle chanson’ represents an attempt to rescue joy from its more debasing qualities, by performing nostalgia for communal and festive forms of positivity that he believes to have faded from view. Ultimately, I show that Molière uses Alceste’s killjoy nostalgia to gesture beyond ‘the art de plaire’ to a new social and comedic ethic, grounded in joy.

Performative Ruin(s): On Captivity, Captivation, and the “corps tractable” in Jodelle’s Cléopâtre captive

Taking the frequent references to ruins, degraded monuments (broadly understood), and forms of entombment that are articulated by various characters throughout Jodelle’s Cléopâtre captive as the point of departure, this paper focuses on the play’s understanding of corporeal malleability and corporeal fixity—that is, the “corps tractable” versus the solidity of stone, the ephemeral soul and tenebrous shadow versus the bleeding wound, total liberty versus the deranging ‘exercise’ of “toutes bourrelleries” over body and mind, the lofty thought versus the corrupted “entrailles,” for example—that numerous characters articulate in surprisingly nuanced mentions of the constitutive parts of the body and how they combine (or disintegrate) to abet (or undermine) political, agential, and amorous control.

In particular, given the attention that Cléopâtre gives to her own firmness, to her enmeshment with Antoine whom she describes as her “moitié,” and given how her constancy is paradoxically fueled and undermined by distance and separation (“Constante suis; separer je me sens”), the contextual implications of political, amorous, and affective captivity as well as ruins and the spoils of war serve as a helpful backdrop for better understanding how she negotiates bodily flexibility. In commentary ranging from descriptions of the spoils of war, ruins, and sepulchers, to laments about declining bodies, illness, inconstancy, and mortal spoils alongside citations of classical exempla of ‘ruined’ heroes, captivity, enchantment, and the corporeal limits that physical and affective restraint impose also help show how Cléopâtre (and other characters) negotiate the connection between descriptive accounts of such tensions and their performative enactment.

Turkish Habits: History, Fiction, and Authentic Representation in Jean Racine’s Bajazet

Dramaturge Pierre Corneille criticized his contemporary and rival Jean Racine’s 1672 play, Bajazet, saying: “Il n’y a pas un seul personnage qui ait les sentiments qu’il doit avoir et que l’on a à Constantinople ; ils sont sous un habit turc, le sentiment qu’on a au milieu de la France.”How do we prepare students to both read Bajazet and to suitably evaluate Corneille’s criticism? In this paper, I suggest a toolkit to help students navigate the play. I argue that putting the play into dialogue with France’s long history of ‘representing the Turk’ produces the most fruitfuconversations and analyses.