The subject of this book is sixteenth-century French tragedy, which is variously referred to as 'humanist tragedy', 'Pléiade tragedy', 'learned tragedy', 'early regular tragedy', 'rhetorical tragedy', or 'pre-classical tragedy'. Anyone interested in this tragedy owes a great debt to early explorers of the field such as Gustave Lanson, Eugène Rigal, and numerous German scholars (including Karl Böhm, Fritz Holl, Paul Kahnt, and Otto Reuter), as well as to the notable contributions of Raymond Lebègue, to more recent works by Richard Griffiths, Donald Stone Jr, John Street, Françoise Charpentier, and to the editors of the various modern editions which have prompted me to write this book.

Those who work on humanist tragedy have long pleaded for it to be judged by appropriate criteria, preferably its own; but it has always tended to be seen (often by the very people who have made the plea) in relation to the classical tragedy of the seventeenth century. One manifestation of this is to see in these texts (particularly in the plays of Robert Garnier) a quarry from which Corneille and Racine extracted some beaux vers, and with their superior skill turned them into proper seventeenth-century poetry. A. Maynor Hardee, in the introduction of his edition of Montchrestien's La Reine d'Escosse (1975a), praises Montchrestien for poetic qualities which 'annoncent parfois l'art de Racine', or for his 'heureux emploi de la stichomythie… [qui] oriente la tragédie sur la voie où s'affirmera plus tard la glorieuse maîtrise de Corneille' (16).