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Dancourt's Regency Plays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Spire Pitou
Spire Pitou*
Affiliation:
University of Delaware, Newark
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Abstract

All but one of Dancourt's extant regency plays remain unexamined and unappraised despite the acknowledged importance of this author's contribution to the French classical theatre. An inquiry into the nature of his last comedies reveals that, despite his imminent retirement from membership in the royal troupe, his talents continued to prove effective in the enthusiastic atmosphere accompanying the revival of the dramatic arts in Paris after the death of Louis XIV and the closing of Versailles. Le Prix de l'arquebuse (1717) reflects the gay spirit of the era in the provinces and re-creates events attendant upon a rural shooting meet. Les Dieux comédiens (1717) is inspired by Plautus' Amphitryon but relies for its comic effects upon the wit and ingenuity of the French playwright. La Déroute du pharaon is largely a satire on gamblers, and it holds up to ridicule a recent decree against gambling by the government. Dancourt's work continued to be popular and timely after 1715 because of his ability to adjust to the demands and tastes of regency audiences, but the bulk of his work and the best of his plays were written during the reign of Louis XIV, despite the persistent tendency of literary historians to consider him an eighteenth-century personage.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 1 , January 1971 , pp. 90 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Note 1 in page 99 For Dancourt's plays before 1701, see H. C. Lancaster, A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, Md., 1929–42), iv, 577–95, 768–817. For his work 1701–15, see Lancaster, Sunset: A History of Parisian Drama in the Last Years of Louis XIV, 1701–1715 (Baltimore, 1945), 150–84. No separate analysis of Dan-court's regency plays is furnished by Ch. Barthélémy, La Comédie de Dancourt, 1685–1714 (Paris, 1882), by Joseph Brutting, Das Bauer n-Franzosich in Dancourts Lustspielen (Altenburg, 1911), by Jules Lemâitre, §// Comédie après Molière et le théâtre de Dancourt (Paris, 1882), or by Eugène Lintilhac, Histoire générale du théâtre en France (Paris, 1904), iv, 180–82. As for contemporary interest in the 1715–23 period in France, the regency was recently the subject of a symposium held at Aix-en-Provence. For the program, see Studi Frances/, 35 (maggio-agosto 1968), 399–400.

Note 2 in page 99 Spire Pitou, “Observations on Dancourt's VEclipse,” MLQ, 22 (1961), 149–52.

Note 3 in page 99 See H. C. Lancaster, The Comédie-Française, 17011774: Plays, Actors, Spectators, Finances (Philadelphia, 1951), p. 648.

Note 4 in page 99 See Spire Pitou, “The Comédie Française and the Palais Royal Interlude of 1716–1723,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 64 (1968), 260–63. \.

Note 5 in page 99 For the actors' trips to the Louvre, see their unpublished Registres 58, 60, 61, 64. Notations of their excursions to the Tuileries are found in Registres 68, 70, 71, 73.

Note 6 in page 99 See Clarence D. Brenner, The Théâtre Italien (Berkeley, Calif., 1961); Thomas Simon Gueullette, Notes et souvenirs sur le Théâtre-Italien au XVIIle siècle (Paris, 1938), pp. 2628; and Lintilhac, iv, 9–10.

Note 7 in page 99 See Georges Mongrédien, Dictionnaire biographique des comédiens français du XVlIe siècle (Paris, 1961), p. 54.

Note 8 in page 99 See Anecdotes dramatiques (Paris, 1775), m, 137.

Note 9 in page 99 Histoire du théâtre françois depuis son origine jusqu'à présent (Paris, 1749), xv, 54–55.

Note 10 in page 99 See H. C. Lancaster, pp. 651, 656–57.

Note 11 in page 99 Lancaster, pp. 648–78.

Note 12 in page 99 Pp. 70–72. For reports on this type of contest in the Mercure, see the issues for Aug. 1680, pp. 66–103; June 1681, pp. 69–73; Oct. 1685, pp. 55–76; Oct. 1686, pp. 7383; June 1687, pp. 193–206; April 1688, pp. 56–87; June 1688, première partie, pp. 127–32.

Note 13 in page 99 Marcel Braunschvig, Notre littérature étudiée dans les textes (Paris, 1921), H, 215; Ch-M. Des Granges, Histoire de la littérature française des origines à nos jours (Paris, 1949), p. 733; Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française (Paris, 1952), p. 658; William A. Nitze and E. Preston Dargan, A History of French Literature (New York, 1922), p. 425; L. Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française des origines à 1900: Dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1898), pp. 567–70; Philippe van Tieghem, Histoire de la littérature française (Paris, 1949), pp. 240–41; C. H. Conrad Wright, A History of French Literature (New York, 1912), p. 478; J. Calvet, Manuel illustré d'histoire de la littérature française (Paris, 1938), pp. 464–65; Ferdinand Brunetière, Histoire de la littérature française classique, 1515–1830 (Paris, 1924), m, 25–27; René Doumic, Histoire de la littérature française (Paris, 1947), p. 551; Joseph Bédier, Paul Hazard, Pierre Martino, Littérature française (Paris, 1949), n, 40–41. Most relevant, perhaps, is Cardinal Georges Grente, Dictionnaire des lettres françaises; le dix-septième siècle (Paris, 1954), p. 324: “DANCOURT, voir: XVIIIe. siècle.” Finally, C. Lénient, La comédie en France au XVIIIe. siècle (Paris, 1888), pp. 102–21, devotes his fifth chapter to Dancourt, and Clarence S. Brenner and Nolan Goodyear include his Le Chevalier à la mode (1687) in their anthology, Eighteenth-Century French Plays (New York, 1927), pp. 5–37.