SOURCE: "Baroque or Burlesque? Aspects of French Comic Theatre in the Early Seventeenth Century," in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 79, No. 4, October, 1984, pp. 797–809.

[In the essay that follows, Caldicott examines several common "burlesque" features of seventeenth-century comedy.]

It is, of course, quite paradoxical that the term 'baroque' should still be widely used in literary criticism when nobody is entirely sure what it means. Following in the footsteps of Wölfflin and romantic criticism (which found an affinity with the baroque), Eugenio d'Ors took it to be an eternal element in the cycle of alternation in art between the regular and the irregular—an unending diastole and systole; in other words, there would always be a baroque and always a classical mode of creation. The existence of the one notion always implied the presence of the other. Jean Rousset, on the other hand, explored a more strictly defined period in La Littérature de l'Âge baroque en France (1954), citing the 'année climatérique 1629—1630' and giving a thematic description of the literature of the period which vindicated the subtitle of his book, Circé et le paon, by highlighting qualities of transformation and display. It would be self-defeating to attempt to summarize all that has been written on the baroque in literature since then, particularly after the syntheses theses of Claude-Gilbert Dubois. But there remain some specific points to be made.

Rousset's original book on the baroque should not be read without its sequel, L'Intérieur et l'extérieur (1968), with its rather sad last section entitled 'Le Baroque en question': there he bravely contemplates his work of fourteen years earlier and concedes that it was only 'un premier temps de l'investigation', which had to be followed by the 'méthodes éprouvées de la recherche érudite et de la philologie'. As if in confirmation of this, the philologist Kurt Baldinger, a companion of von Wartburg, comments helpfully on my own work with a reminder of the importance of the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch in any appraisal of the qualities of French language in the early seventeenth century. Rousset's lucid second book was published only shortly after Gérard Genette's important Figures I (1966) and undoubtedly benefits from it; in his final evaluation of the work done on the baroque, Rousset quotes Genette: 'La pensée moderne s'est peut-être inventé le baroque comme on s'offre un miroir'. In the meantime, the Journées Internationales d'Étude du Baroque soldier on into their twentieth year at Montauban; in a recent review of the work accomplished there, no less a person than Henri Lafay writes:

Alors que l'epithète et le substantif 'baroque' sont désormais passés dans l'usage du langage critique courant et qu'on se réfère tranquillement à la notion correspondante, les réflexions des plus grands spécialistes: littéraires, historiens des civilisations, historiens de l'art, philosophes ne sont parvenues à un accord ni sur une définition du concept de baroque, ni sur une périodisation reconnue par tous.

And that after twenty years of discussion.

All labels are misleading: it is clear that none could be more so than the term 'baroque' in literature; it really tells us more about its antonym—classical literature—than about itself. It retroactively presupposes that classical literature is a goal in itself, a point at which everything reaches a proper maturity. It must presumably be a judgement of a later period on the earlier one: unlike the term 'burlesque', 'baroque' was not used in critical language in the seventeenth century. The term 'burlesque' can be found in all standard dictionaries of the time: Cotgrave (1660), Ménage's Les Origines de la langue française (1650), Richelet (1685), Le Grand Dictionnaire de l'Académie Françoise (1687), and Furetière (1690). The term 'baroque' on the other hand, is found only in the two last-named works, and then only with the following restricted meaning:

Le Grand Dictionnaire: baroque: adj. se dit seulement des perles qui sont d'une rondeur fort imparfaite: Un collier de perles baroques.

Furetière: baroque: terme de joaillier: qui ne se dit que des perles qui ne sont pas parfaitement rondes.

One might have been able to buy a necklace of irregular baroque pearls before 1690, but certainly not a baroque play: nobody would have understood that particular application of the word. The judgement of the later period is, of course, the enduring one, stifling and obscuring from us any form of pre-classical self-perception. As a critical, often pejorative, construct of a later period the term is profoundly dissatisfying. The definition of the 'baroque' by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says it all: 'a florid style of late Renaissance architecture prevalent in the 18th c[entury].' One essential difference between the 'baroque' and terms such as 'classique' and 'romantique' is that the latter were born of their own times. Worse still, the favour accorded to the term 'baroque' in critical language during the last twenty years has greatly complicated the difficulties entailed in trying to reach an understanding and a contemporary self-appraisal of the early seventeenth century in France. The evidence that something like a 'dissociation of sensibility' occurred under the reign of Louis XIV, to be institutionalized by Voltaire in Le Siècle de Louis XIV, leads one, in a paraphrase of T. S. Eliot, to look for 'something which had happened to the mind of France between the time of Thèophile or Scarron and the time of Hugo and Gautier'. The persistence of eighteenth-century perceptions and misapprehensions obscures the real seventeenth century, the first half of which could legitimately be defined as a late Renaissance period.

The urgency of the need to return to the texts of the period is best demonstrated with a few figures: of the thousand or more plays printed in France in the seventeenth century there are, at most, thirty preserved and performed regularly in the modern French theatre. Of these 1,000 plays, approximately 300 are comedies, of which nearly eighty date from before 1650. These numbers would be considerably increased if one-act comedies, farces, and comedies not printed in Paris were to be included. Although almost no comedies were published in the period 1600–1619, nearly seventy appeared in the years 1620–1650; in the wake of that, following the success of Scarron, thirty comedies were printed in the year 1650–1659. In other words, approximately one-third of the total number of comedies written in the seventeenth century were printed in the period 1620–1660. With the exception of some of Corneille's work, all the seventeenth-century comedies retained in the modern French repertoire date from the second half of the century, the classical period. It could perhaps be objected that as we advance in time the selection of older plays retained in the repertoire of modern theatres is bound to diminish. If one could feel confident in the criteria of selection and in the availability of printed versions of these early plays, this argument would seem more palatable and the wall of indifference constructed in the reign of Louis XIV less harmful. Corneille is the only dramatist of the first half of the century to get past that wall; perhaps this is because he remained ready to adapt his early work to the tastes of the second half of the century. The Examens of 1660 are remarkable for the readiness shown by the author to criticize his own work. Rotrou, Mairet, Thomas Corneille, and Scarron are sometimes performed, but it could hardly be said that they command a safe, unchallenged place on this side of the wall. Others excluded from cisalpine recognition include Scudéry, Gougenot, Rayssiguier, Charles Beys, André Mareschal, Pierre du Ryer, Le Metel d'Ouville, Guérin de Bouscal, Boisrobert, and Claude de l'Estoille. These are all dramatists who, to the best of my knowledge, have never been performed since the seventeenth century, unless, of course, one takes into account the plagiarism of Dancourt. The ostracism of these dramatists was so complete, yet their work was so good, that in the early eighteenth century Dancourt was able, with impunity and profit, to present plays by Du Ryer (Les Vendanges de Suresnes) and Guérin de Bouscal (Le Gouvernement de Sanche Pansa) as his own. Molière's own favourite comic reprises—that is comedies not written by himself (because, of course, he continued to perform plays by other dramatists throughout his career)—were Dom Japhet d'Arménie (1650) by Scarron and Le Gouvernement de Sanche Pansa (1642) by Guérin de Bouscal. He presented and performed each of them thirty times or more. If they were good enough for him, we are tempted to ask…. He certainly borrowed material from these dramatists (and from Le Metel d'Ouville, Cyrano and others) and seems to have learned from them.

A final example of the virtual exclusion of the first half of the century from the literary (if not the philosophical) life of the Grand Siècle can be found in the error-ridden histories of the French theatre which appeared early in the eighteenth century. These, it should be added, may often be manifestations of an attempt to correct the record and to put things right. The earliest history of this kind is that of Beauchamps, Recherches sur les théâtres de France, published in three volumes in 1735. All honour to Beauchamps for having produced such a work and for having tried to delve into the history of the theatre in that remote and barbaric age which preceded the reign of Louis XIV. That there should be so many errors in his work, all concentrated in the first half of the century, is perhaps just a measure of the impermeability of Louis XIV's France to the artistic life of Louis XIII's kingdom; after a hundred years of neglect, the historic records would have been difficult for Beauchamps to reconstitute. In an unjustly forgotten article, Carrington Lancaster drafted an inventory of the number of mistakes known to him in Beauchamps's work: he found an error rate of 16% sixty years ago. The number of identifiable mistakes has, of course, increased considerably since then with the amount of research completed. One example of consequence is that of Guérin de Bouscal: baptized 'Guyon' by Beauchamps, with his death dated in 1645, this most interesting dramatist was in fact called Daniel and he lived till 1675. Archival and textual research shows that Molière knew his work and probably met him in 1653, eight years after his supposed date of death. That information could not have been established by relying on Beauchamps and the names and dates he gives. The significance of Beauchamps is that he is the first theatre historian in field, and that most subsequent historians copy his errors (the frères Parfaict, de Léris, the chevalier de Mouhy, for example) thereby enshrining them in a seriously flawed history of French theatre. Such errors of detail have contributed to, and derived from, the misrepresentation of the first half of the seventeenth century: the belittling of Descartes by Voltaire and the inclusion by him of Pascal's Lettres Provinciales in the reign of Louis XIV set the seal on the process. By a curious coincidence, Lancaster's searching little article appeared only one year after Eliot's influential essay on the metaphysical poets. If only the two Americans had pursued their ideas together!

In using the term 'burlesque' instead of 'baroque' one is at least taking a few steps nearer an intact contemporary view. The term 'burlesque' has, it is true, unfortunate connotations. Like the term 'metaphysical' at the time of Eliot's essay, it has 'long done duty as a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste' but there are definitions on which to build. The term was known to the scholars, creative writers, and critics of the period in question, it is found in every dictionary of the time, and it constitutes a precise literary term. The term is, however, used to define the use of language in all contexts—poetry and the novel as well as the theatre: my concern here, of course, is the theatre.

The first full dictionary definition I have discovered is that of Ménage in Les Origines de la langue française:

Burlesque—De l'italien burlesco qui a esté fait du verbe burlar qui signifie railler … Il n'y a pas si longtemps que ce mot burlesque est en usage parmi nous; et c'est M. Sarasin qui le premier s'en est servi. Mais c'est M. Scarron qui le premier a pratiqué avec réputation ce genre d'escrire.

Ménage maintains a modest silence about his own excursion into the burlesque with La Requête des dictionnaires (1637). The 1660 edition of Cotgrave offers as translation/definition of burlesque: 'jeasting; or in jest, not serious; also mocking, flouting'.

Boileau scoffs at the burlesque, 'que ce stile jamais ne souille votre ouvrage', he advises. To understand how the author of Le Lutrin can, in all honesty, say such things, one must turn to a more dispassionate view, that of Charles Perrault in his Parallèle for example:

Le Burlesque, qui est une espèce de ridicule, consiste dans la disconvenance de l'idée qu'on donne d'une chose avec son idée véritable … or cette disconvenance se fait en deux manières, l'une en parlant bassement des choses les plus relevées, et l'autre en parlant magnifiquement des choses basses.

This, of course, introduces the distinction between burlesque and mock-heroic. The stance of ironic distance is the same in each, but the effect differs: a poltroon playing the part of a hero can be vulgar, but a Boileau, talking in elevated style about a mere lectern, may be trivial, but is not, in fact, using base language. This is the 'new' burlesque. Brunot makes much of this distinction in his Histoire de la langue française, but it will be seen that in the theatre only the principle of distance matters.

Robert Garapon offers confirmation of this, even if his definition of the baroque leaves us groping: 'L'auteur baroque', he informs us, 'ne peut refuser à chaque mot, à chaque phrase qu'il écrit, la plénitude de son autonomie expressive', while the burlesque 's'amuse à employer le langage comme un instrument malicieusement faussé, emphatique pour les sujets triviaux, trivial pour les sujets sublimes'.

There is thus a development of incongruity between style and subject in the French burlesque theatre. This works both on horizontal and on vertical planes, as a contrast in styles between the characters in any given play, and as a contrast between a given character and what is normally expected of him (a poltroon acting the part of a hero). One therefore finds a keen sense of linguistic self-awareness in the play. In addition, there is frequently a sense of complicity established with the audience on the vertical plane—in the understanding that is created of the extent to which the poltroon (for example) misrepresents the norms of behaviour expected. There is a gap which is knowingly opened and exploited between the character on stage and the rôle he/she so comically mis-represents, between the text and the meta-text. This frequently leads to pastiche (Le Cid was a contemporary play which lent itself to endless pastiche), and to an aspect of the burlesque noted by Charles Sorel in his La Bibliothèque française (1664): 'Le burlesque est un style particulier à l'auteur, qui est de faire raillerie de tout, même dans les narrations où il parle luimême'. The complicity created in the shared understanding of a comic role subverting a widely-known model leads, then, to explicit authorial intervention: as a novelist, Sorel would offer Cervantes's Don Quixote as an example, or perhaps his own Le Berger extravagant. The consequence, or perhaps the cause, of this authorial intervention in the theatre is that one finds, in Garapon's words, 'une relative indifférence à l'égard de la psychologie chez les auteurs'. Character is still essentially language, and more particularly the comic contrast of language; as such, it should more frequently be regarded as a playful exercice de style than as parody.

It is perhaps time for a few examples. Corneille's comedies set off a number of contrasts in style: none more so than Mélite (1629), his first work. In the first scene of the play we are offered a dialogue between Tircis and Eraste: Eraste the soulful lover of the pastoral tradition declaims his adoration of his loved one thus:

Le jour qu'elle naquit, Venus, bien qu'immortelle
Pensa mourir de honte en la voyant si belle.
(I.i. 73–74)

After Eraste has continued at some length, the dry Tircis comments:

Tu le prends d'un haut ton, et je crois qu'au besoin
Le discours emphatique irait encore bien loin.
(I. i. 79–80)

The contrast in their styles, a frequent device in Corneille's comedy, is typical of the linguistic self-awareness which has been alluded to. These aspects are even more evident in Mareschal's Le Railleur (1636), one of the finest comedies of the period. The railleur Clarimand is out of the same stable as the Tircis of Mélite (they both derive from the Hylas of L'Astrée) and he mocks the style boursouflé of the lovers in similar fashion:

Que de cérémonie et de sourds compliments!
Voyons-les, écoutons leurs discours de romans!
(I. ii)

or, in even more caustic alexandrines, 'Ce stile est de haut prix, et pour les mieux chaussés' (I.ii). The world style recurs often and its explicit use is significant. There is, for example, a poète à gages named Lyzante who boasts of having found the juste milieu in his verse: 'passé le bas stile et fuy le pédant!', he exclaims (II iii). But then the contrast of styles on the horizontal plane continues. There is the miles gloriosus, the Capitan Taillebras 'L'Alcide occidental et l'honneur des Pyrénées'. He is as florid in his style as the filou Beaurocher is subtle and insinuating. This is how the railleur expresses his admiration of Beaurocher's epistolary skill:

J'apprends qu'également un double feu t'alume,
Et celuy de l'épée et celuy de la plume,
Que tu scais doucement sur un stile flatteur
Escrire en cavallier en non pas en auteur.
(V. i)

The lovers, the railleur, Lyzante the poet, Taillebras, and Beaurocher offer us five different styles, but there is a sixth, that of the elegant but cynical courtesan la Dupré. Cold and calculating, well informed of what is happening at court, she strikes a different note of realism when talking of the lesbians in the retinue of Anne of Austria:

Et se faignant par jeu ce qu'en effet nous sommes,
Elles se font l'amour ne l'osant faire aux hommes.
(IV. iii)

There are few characters in seventeenth-century theatre who go as far in realistic social commentary as she does.

The contrast in styles to be found in Le Railleur is taken to extreme lengths by Desmarets in Les Visionnaires (1637). A few examples will suffice to illustrate the self-conscious differentiation of levels of language. The conceited but attractive Hespérie interprets so literally the high-flown compliments of her many suitors, her mourants, that she announces: 'Le monde va périr si on me laisse vivre' (I. vi), and then:

On compterait plutôt les feuilles des forêts,
Les sablons de la mer, …
Que le nombre d'amants que j'ai mis au tombeau.
(I. vi)

In a literary discussion with her theatre-mad sister Sestiane, Amidor the poet comments: 'Cette pièce est sçavante et d'un stile fort haut.'

The contrast across a horizontal plane in these plays also includes a development of well-known models on a vertical plane. The ironic commentary of the Clarimands and Tircis develops the position of Hylas, the well-known cynic of d'Urfé's L'Astrée, while the new, realistic urban setting of Paris in these plays invites comic contrast with the idyllic sylvan background of the pastoral. In Les Visionnaires, the metatexts are numerous and alluded to explicitly, creating pastiche. In tuning his voice, Amidor the pretentious poet resorts to a pastiche of Ronsard:

Desja de toutes parts j'entrevoy les brigades
De ces Dieux chevre-pieds et des folles Menades
Qui s'en vont célébrer le mystère Orgien
En l'honneur immortel du père Bromien.
(I. iii)

One of the most brilliant examples of pastiche in the theatre of the time is to be found in Le Gouvernement de Sanche Pansa of Guérin de Bouscal. After an extraordinary take-off of the récit of Rodrigue's battle against the Moor by a filou talking about a trivial street fight, with the same cadences, the same historic present and sometimes the same rhyme as Le Cid, concluding:

Il appelle ses gens, je ramasse les nôtres
Il anime les uns, j'encourage les autres.
(III iv. 1013–14)

the author gives us echoes of Horace, Polyeucte, and then Rabelais. Sancho then intervenes: 'Mais parlons par escot: que vouliez-vous qu'il fît?' That parlons par escot [écot] is taken from Frère Jean in Rabelais's Cinquième Livre. The original line is: 'Mais parlons un peu par escot, docteur subtil.' But at the same time as he has Sancho quoting Rabelais, the dramatist is intervening playfully in the text with a resounding pun: the écho = É-C-H-0 = of the original escot = E-S-C-O-T = constitutes a statement in itself of the comic device being employed, before your very eyes, by the dramatist. This sort of echo reverberates, if sometimes less self-consciously, throughout the comic theatre of the time. The sense of complicity, playfulness, and authorial intervention are all here. The pastiche, even parody of Corneille later became such a feature of the performance of Scarron's comic hero Jodelet that he became known as l'anti-Rodrigue. The best-known feature of burlesque language is, however, the neologism, the creation of entirely new comic language; examples are too numerous to list, but it is important to remember that the linguistic virtuosity of Scarron and his contemporaries does extend beyond the repeated imitation of contemporary masterpieces.

The comic verve and invention so often expressed in neologism have often been held to be the only positive qualities of burlesque writing, the first manifestation of preciosity. The recognition of verve and linguistic flair then often leads in a rather facile way to an assumption

of carelessness and lack of control. As Dufresny's reflection on the burlesque in the Parallèle d'Homère et de Rabelais (1710) was later to show, verve and invention are not necessarily incompatible with careful writing. The skill with which the techniques of comic writing were inserted into the theatre and into the traditional canons of rhetoric will be examined shortly, but it is important to counter the all-too prevalent charge of carelessness with the early observation that there are, in fact, very few comedies of the first half of the century which do not show considerable skill and balance in the grouping of characters, the reversing and virtual doubling of roles. Rotrou's La Bague de l'oubli (1635) is remarkable in this respect, as are du Ryer's Les Vendanges de Suresnes (1635) and Mairet's Les Galanteries du duc d'Ossonne (1636). The delicate choreography of Rotrou, the finely-observed distinctions between le bourg and la ville of du Ryer, and the innovative use of scenic space by Mairet all create a sense of fresh, lively, but controlled experiment. There is an identifiable early group of dramatists, including Mareschal, du Ryer, Guérin de Bouscal, Gougenot, Rayssiguier, and Claude de l'Estoille, who have much in common, and who probably even worked together; like Corneille and Rotrou, they were all trained in law and were thus sensitive to conventions of language. As will be seen, work at the bar imposed rigorous criteria of rhetorical decorum.

The work of these writers constitutes a particularly bold and innovative change of direction in French comedy. They were modernists, appreciative of Malherbe's proposals and ready to experiment with language. The subsequent 'Spanish' generation of burlesque dramatists, led by the extraordinary Le Metel d'Ouville and including Scarron, Boisrobert, and Thomas Corneille, benefited considerably from the earlier experiments in theatre. Their adaptations of Calderón and Lope de Vega sometimes even run the risk of appearing repetitive in their systematic application of the trouvailles of 1633–1643; this should not, however, be a hindrance to recognition of their ability and the merit of their formula. The liveliness of their language matches that of their predecessors, and their contemporary success is testimony to the importance of the earlier experiments in burlesque writing. Their sudden eclipse in the second half of the century probably stems less from literary considerations than from the matrimonial and political accidents of Louis XIV's liaison with Mme de Maintenon ('la veuve Scarron') and his desire to obliterate all associations with the humiliating period of the Fronde. Mention of the name of Scarron was prohibited in his presence, while the political imagery of Latona and her lonely protection of her child Apollo, which is incorporated in the gardens of Versailles, confirms his mauvais souvenir of the years of his minority.

Kibédi Varga has suggested that the burlesque is a manifestation of the monde à l'envers of the Carnival: he quotes Marmontel's Eléments de littérature in support of this view: 'Le but de ce genre d'écrits [le burlesque] est de faire voir que tous les objects ont deux faces; de déconcerter la vanité humaine.' This may sometimes be the case, and Marmontel's contribution to the subject is a useful reminder that the burlesque is not an isolated, ephemeral phenomenon; it is important to note the survival of a medieval théâtre de participation, as distinct from the théâtre du regard of the later neo-classical period. Since its terms of reference do not go beyond the world of literary creation, the burlesque theatre cannot as a rule, however, be said to be as committed as Varga suggests. It is more purely playful in its spirit.

There is the sense of realism which sometimes comes from the ironic contrasts with the world of the pastoral, and there is another realism of a more subtle nature which emerges from the burlesque theatre. It is of the kind that Anne Righter has traced in her Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play: she shows how the tradition of audience participation in the soties and sermons joyeux of the Middle Ages ultimately gave way to the metaphor of theatre—'All the world's a stage … '. An early example of this audience participation is the thirteenth-century play Le Garçon et l'aveugle, in which the audience, solicited by the blind beggar for money, become participants in the play: the onlookers really do become the crowd from whom he begs alms and 'in whose sight he is gulled by the boy Jehannet'. There is a pretence that the actors share a common reality with their audience. This is constantly to be found in burlesque comedy: the conspiratorial wink in the direction of the audience when an obviously exaggerated send-up of a recognized, illustrious source is introduced explains the success of the many literary pastiches used in the plays of the period. Furthermore, the linguistic self-awareness and the multiplicity of styles which are so evident in the burlesque can often find sophisticated theatrical expression in a multiplicity of masks, creating a jeu de rôles and le théâtre dans le théâtre. There, the illusion of reality, if rather particular, is complete.

The deliberate confusion of the notions of illusion and reality constitutes one of the most recurrent and successful paradoxes of the burlesque theatre. L'Illusion comique (1635–36) of Corneille is perhaps the most familiar example with which to illustrate the point, although the same device is used more successfully in several other plays of the time. It is also the device used by Molière in Les Précieuses ridicules. In these plays we are candidly shown a play within a play and invited to watch the inner play as a play, alongside Alcandre and Pridamant (or La Grange and du Croisy) for example, sharing a bench with them in the framing outer scenes as if we were one of them. The exposure of the play as a play and of the actor as an actor makes the distinction between illusion and 'reality' very difficult to make, impossible in fact. In exposing the inner workings of the work of art the dramatist assumes an air of realism; pretending to have abandoned illusion, he in fact extends it. This is what happens in the two plays entitled La Comédie des comédiens, one by Gougenot (1633), the other by Scudéry (1635). It is also found in Le Gouvernement de Sanche Pansa (1642), L'Illusion comique as we have seen, and in all the plays of Scarron where a particularly well-known actor, Jodelet, with identifiable traits known to the audience, pretends to adopt a disguise required by the plot, and where he is simply seen as Jodelet playing a part and being himself in an uncongenial role. When he comes on in Molière's Les Précieuses ridicules he does not fool anyone, and his deliberately ill-adjusted 'performance' as a vicomte is enjoyed by all. The device is an essential part of the commedia dell'arte and, in fact, in Scudéry's La Comédie des comédiens, where a troupe of actors engagingly discusses its problems, there is a role for Harlequin. It is historically the case, then, that the devices of role-playing and the play within the play are given new life by play and experiment with contrasting levels of language; indeed, it would seem to be the case that role-playing is a natural theatrical consequence and expression of experiment with language. It is thus all the more extraordinary that, having noted the proliferation of le théâtre dans le théâtre in the seventeenth century in his Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du XVIIe siècle, Georges Forestier should fail to comment on this evolution from burlesque language to jeux de rôle, from language to character.

To recapitulate, it does not seem possible to divide, as some critics have, the adequatio and aletheia of burlesque theatre, saying for example that at such and such a date adequatio disappears in favour of aletheia…. The elements of illusion and reality are systematically confused with each other in many plays of the time, creating one of the most appreciated paradoxes in this theatre of paradox. In addition, there is a rising tide of official approval for the theatre, as confirmed by: (a) the creation of a royal troupe of actors (1630), (b) the creation of the company of les cinq auteurs (1635), (c) Rotrou's dedication of La Bague de l'oubli to Louis XIII (1635), and (d) Louis XIII's own edict of 16 April 1641, affirming the dignity of the actor's profession. This would seem to offer some encouragement to dramatists to promote the theatre as a metaphor for life, as did Corneille, for example, in L 'Illusion comique. The energy, confidence, and progress of the burgeoning comic theatre of the time command attention: it is astonishing that it should have been neglected for so long by publishers, theatre directors, and critics.

The ingenuity deployed in reorganizing the scenic space to contain the play within the play also created considerable freedom for the dramatists. If one is offered a play within a play, freely presented as such, then one is inclined to admit the 'reality' of the performance and suspend criteria of vraisemblance—because, after all, it is only a play. Similarly, the illusion of reality is enhanced by the coincidence of stage time with real time, an important consideration for theorists such as l'Abbé d'Aubignac who later recommended it in his Pratique du théâtre (1657).

The play within a play is, of course, a universal device which goes back to Pathelin and reaches to the present, but it is important to observe how it develops in the seventeenth century from the burlesque juxtaposition of contrasting styles of language: language having eventually become character, the burlesque use of contrasting styles inevitably creates jeux de rôle, with the consequent effect of le théâtre dans le théâtre. The initial impetus for this so-called 'baroque' device is thus linguistic rather than visual. It is also important to remember that, although apparently swept aside in the second half of the century in the name of bienséance and vraisemblance, these lively, inventive comedies of the first half of the century created for themselves their own theoretical justification for roaming free in time and space; the play within which the often eccentric inner performance takes place has, as its precise location and confines, the here and now of the theatre within which you currently find yourself. This is an essentially theatrical experience which has been created universally by too many dramatists to be confined to the outhouse of the 'baroque'. The answer is perhaps to say that the theatre of the time was so lively that other art forms became theatrical.

'Je ne sçay qui t'ameine icy, toy qui es la plus inutile pièce d'un poème', says the Prologue to the Argument in Scudéry's La Comédie des comédiens. 'Et je ne sçay qui t'y peut conduire, toi qui est la moins nécessaire', replies the Argument. Iconoclastic, playful too, Scudéry is above all resolutely modern in his approach, as are most of his contemporaries; he does, however, take the precaution of staging his inconoclastic excesses in the inner play, L'Amour caché par l'amour, of his production. The sense of care and responsibility shown in their work by the earlier generation of dramatists is best understood, perhaps, in the case of Pierre du Ryer. A lawyer and one of the most active translators of the classics of his day, he translated the works of Cicero and brought his specialized legal rhetorical training to this quite particular interest in language; he was probably the leading figure of a circle of writers and wrote a number of encouraging liminary pieces for his contemporaries. The homage he wrote for Rayssiguier's pastoral tragi-comedy L'Aminte du Tasse (1632), the first dramatic adaptation of Aminta in French, is revealing:

Amy, par ta seule industrie
Qui nous a charmés tant de fois
Aminte a quitté sa Patrie,
Et se vient rendre bon François:
Si les habiles de la France
Admirent la persévérance
Qui le porta dans le danger
Ils s'estonnent bien davantage
D'apprendre aujourd'hui leur langage
D'un simple pasteur estranger.

Rayssiguier, too, was a lawyer; he also adapted L'Astrée and in 1633 wrote the burlesque comedy La Bourgeoise ou la promenade de St Cloud. The translation and adaptation of the chivalric romances seem frequently to have been part of a cycle of experiment, vulgarization, and then original comic creation. It is particularly interesting that this work should also have been the work of lawyers. Marc Fumaroli has called attention to this in his recent work on seventeenth-century rhetoric, referring to a 'véritable ruée de jeunes avocats vers le théâtre' in the 1630s. Why should this be?

The manual and model of parliamentary and legal style—the Stilus Curie Parlamenti by Guillaume du Breuil—had been established since the fourteenth century; re-edited in the sixteenth century by the Parisian jurisconsulte Charles du Moulin, it was quoted as an authority by Loisel in 1604. Urging gravity of gesture and bearing, and smiling only in moderation, the chapter entitled De modo et gestu quern debet habere advocatus seems a long way away from the verve, gaiety, and apparent improvisation of the burlesque. Fumaroli suggests that the burlesque is a manifestation of the basoche at play, but even at play the basoche can be careful and scholarly….

Incitement to clever linguistic experiment was bound to follow in the wake of the Reformation and the Erasmian reformulation of rhetorical canons; the impact of his copia verborum has been carefully studied by Terence Cave. Rhetoric was also, of course, an essential part of the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, established by the edict of 8 January 1599: quite how much experiment there was in the vernacular in their colleges falls outside the domain of this study, but François de Dainville, himself a Jesuit, has underlined the regrettable tendency in seventeenth-century France to complete one's studies under the Jesuits with rhetoric without going on to the final year of philosophy. Knowledge and science were sacrificed to the study of rhetoric, giving to literary studies based on rhetoric a 'primauté abusive'.

In this context, plays which deliberately insert an eccentric register of language into the theatre (as is evident in such titles as the Comédie de proverbes (1618), Comédie des académistes (1637), Comédie des chansons (1639), and L'Intrigue des filous (1648)) can be seen as a modern, educated, playful response to old precepts and to the antiquated commedia sostenuta. As we have seen, they evolve gradually and naturally towards the presentation of eccentric characters—the visionnaires, imaginaires, or inappropriately disguised main characters who are so much a stock-in-trade of later seventeenth-century comedy. Updated versions of the pastoral romances, whether it be Tasso according to Rayssiguier or L'Astrée according to Corneille, also offer opportunity for experiment. Fumaroli has even gone so far as to show how Alcandre follows formal phases of rhetorical deliberation to plead for and save Clindor in Comeille's L'Illusion comique: 'Organisant un jeu savamment ambigu où rhétorique et dramaturgie s'entrelacent et se soutiennent.' In an exchange in Gougenot's La Comédie des comédiens, Turlupin and Mlle Boniface claim that the famous Roman actor Roscius was really a French citizen and 'c'est luy qui enseigna Cicéron l'art de bien réciter un discours'. Cicero and Roscius, rhetoric and theatre, the associations in the seventeenth century are constant, leading, appropriately enough, to the final paradox enunciated by Genette:

L'esprit de la rhétorique est tout entier dans cette conscience d'un hiatus possible entre le langage réel … et un langage virtuel … qu'il suffit de rétablir par la pensée pour délimiter un espace de figure. … La figure est un écart par rapport à l'usage, lequel écart est pourtant dans l'usage

…, le signe est défini par l'absence de signe.

In this sense every burlesque speech assumes the status of a performance, overlaid with several strata of virtual and actual, veiled and explicit, meanings. The discovery (or rediscovery) of this tremendous potential of language to share a moment of conspiracy with an audience, and then to progress beyond the intellectual game towards portrayal of a diversity of characters is obviously an important specific moment in the history of comic theatre: it is the achievement of a much-neglected body of writers and yet it provides the basis for contemplation of the function of the actor by Molière. It also confirms a substantive difference in dramatic language between comedy and tragedy: comic dialogue offers a rich diversification of language in Molière (e.g., Horace in L'École des femmes, Don Juan, the marquis in Le Misanthrope, not to mention the numerous peasant dialects)—the mould having already been broken by the burlesque writers. As Beaumarchais said of his own comic characters, 'Chacun y parle son langage; eh! que le dieu du naturel les préserve d'en parler d'autre.' But the dramatic language of tragedy remains, in essence, unchanged: tragic characters thus continue to be positions for study, vehicles for argument, drawing their means of expression from the same seam of elevated, universal language as each other. Bearing in mind the essential difference between the substance of a speech and its means of expression, it can be said that heroes and villains, men and women, all use the same codified means of expression in seventeenth-century tragedy. If the characters of French tragedy sometimes appear less complete on stage than those of comedy it is because they rarely express themselves in their own individually diversified language; this is perhaps another way of measuring the special contribution made to French comedy by comic writers in the first half of the century. Garapon contends that the burlesque disappeared with the arrival of Molière and the development of the comedy of character; it should be remembered that, far from putting an end to the burlesque, Molière harnessed and maintained its main devices. He frequently performed the work of its talented exponents who, although relegated to the obscure realms of the 'baroque', still provide refreshing distraction from the admirable but unending heroic statuary of the reign of Louis XIV.