The spoken theatre of Philippe Quinault (1653-70): reaction and innovation

许多重要的法国剧作家在拉辛和莫里埃尔主导的时期及其之前创作了喜剧、悲喜剧和悲剧。近年来，人们对其中几位剧作家的作品进行了研究，但没有人研究过菲利普·奎诺特的作品，他的口语剧本可以追溯到1653年至1670年。造成这种忽视的主要原因有三个。首先，比起其他任何人，他是一个被评论家们所引用的聪明的格言所定义的作家，尤其是布瓦洛，他经常在他的讽刺作品中获得喜剧优势，诙谐地、残酷地、非常有效地指出奎诺特不是拉辛。（i je pense exprimer un auteur sans dsamufaut）， （La reason dit Virgile, et La rime Quinault）。)甚至现代评论家也喜欢用包罗万象的评价来概括他，所有这些都可以追溯到布瓦洛早期对他的攻击。该项目表明，这些判断经不起分析。其次，由于评论家们明显不愿意与材料本身接触，一小部分公认的智慧也没有受到挑战，根据这些智慧，他所有的戏剧都表现出同样的特征，比如对浪漫爱情的关注——“doucereux”这个词一次又一次地出现在他的作品中，大致意思是“病态的甜蜜”，我从未见过它被应用到其他人的作品中。同样是这些无聊的概括，指责他无法提供政治评论或达到历史准确性，过度依赖二维人物，以及随意插入与主要主题无关的情节。该项目表明，这种公认的智慧要么是完全错误的，要么充其量是一种从个别到一般的错误结论。第三，1670年后，奎诺停止为口语戏剧写作，转而投身于蓬勃发展的歌剧亚流派，他在1673年至1686年期间表现出色。作为吕利最喜欢的剧本作家，他在接下来的三十年里定义了剧本写作的“自由艺术”，更广泛地说，他的影响持续了一百年左右；连格拉克都很尊敬他。他作为剧作家的卓越成就转移了评论界对口语戏剧的关注，除非这些戏剧以一种历史决定论的方式被视为未来伟大歌剧剧本的学徒作品。因为所有的剧本都是在他成为自由作家之前写的，所以这个项目明确地省去了这些考虑。从积极的方面来看，我们在考察口语戏剧时发现，它是一个适合于自身优点的语料库，而且在当时是有影响的。奎诺的作品成功地跨越了从喜剧到悲喜剧再到悲剧的广泛领域，他的戏剧体现了精心的情节，刻画同情和不同情的能力——但最重要的是，可信的——人物，对舞台上的作品的明显意识，明确的社会和政治评论，不是华里华气的说教，而是很好地符合“演奏和乐器”的主流文学目标。我们还发现了一位从自己的经历中学习、改编自己的作品并与时俱进的剧作家：他首先是一位取悦大众的人，但同时也是一位机警的人，他的作品仍有很多话要对我们说。该项目将分析戏剧本身的权利，并在同一时期其他剧作家的作品和当代理论家的工作背景下，提出一种新的观点，即放弃现成的判断，提供合理的批评，解释和评价。它将把他的作品定位在17世纪法国戏剧的主流现代意识中，目前它被排除在外。

A number of important French playwrights wrote comedy, tragi-comedy, and tragedy in and just before the period dominated by Racine and Molière. The work of several of these has been examined in recent years, but no one has studied that of Philippe Quinault, whose spoken plays date from the period 1653 to 1670.There are three principal reasons for this neglect. First, more than any other, he is an author defined by clever aphorisms visited upon him by critics, not least Boileau, who frequently gained comic advantage in his satirical work by pointing out, wittily, cruelly, and all too effectively, the truism that Quinault was no Racine. ('Si je pense exprimer un auteur sans défaut, / La raison dit Virgile, et la rime Quinault.' ) Even modern critics prefer to sum him up in all-embracing judgements, all of which can be traced back to the early attacks by Boileau. The project shows that these judgements do not stand up to analysis.Second, as a result of critics' evident unwillingness to engage with the material itself, a small corpus of received wisdom also remains unchallenged, according to which all his plays exhibit the same characteristics, such as a concentration upon aspects of romantic love - the word 'doucereux' appears in relation to his work again and again, roughly meaning 'sickly sweet', and I have never seen it applied to anyone else's. The same idle generalisations charge him with the inability to present a political commentary or to achieve historical accuracy, over-reliance upon two-dimensional characters, and the liberal insertion of episodes unrelated to the principal subject. The project shows that this received wisdom is either simply wrong or, at best, represents a bad case of concluding from the particular to the general.Third, Quinault ceased writing for the spoken theatre after 1670 and turned to the burgeoning sub-genre of opera, in which he excelled in the period 1673 to 1686. As Lully's favourite librettist, he defined the 'art poétique' of libretto-writing for another thirty years and, more generally, his influence was felt for a hundred years or so; even Gluck revered him. His very eminence and excellence as a librettist has deflected critical attention from the spoken plays, except in so far as they are seen in a historically deterministic way in which they serve as apprentice pieces for the great opera librettos to come. Since all the plays were written before he became a librettist, the project explicitly dispenses with such considerations.On the positive side, what we find when we examine the spoken plays is a corpus fit to stand on its own merits and one which was, moreover, influential in its day. Quinault worked successfully across a wide range from the comic via the tragi-comic to the tragic, and his plays exemplify careful plotting, the ability to draw sympathetic and unsympathetic - but above all, believable - characters, a palpable awareness of what works on stage, clear social and political comment which is not showily didactic but accords well with the prevailing literary objectives of 'plaire et instruire'. We also find a playwright who learns from his experience, adapts his work, and moves with the times: a crowd-pleaser, first and foremost, but an alert one, whose work still has much to say to us.The project will analyse the plays both in their own right and within the context of other playwrights' work in the same period and the work of contemporary theorists, and will put forward a new view of Quinault that dispenses with off-the-peg judgements and offers a reasoned criticism, explanation, and evaluation. It will position his work within the mainstream of modern awareness of seventeenth-century French theatre, from which it is currently excluded.