Theater was France’s pre-eminent art form from the seventeenth- through the early nineteenth centuries. Theater was also a public, collective social experience as well as a cultural institution often in contention with other institutions—religious and political.

We will study some major plays of the 17th and 18 th centuries (Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Marivaux, Voltaire, Beaumarchais). We will seek to understand some of the important literary and aesthetic stakes of these works, as well as to investigate the social and political history of the theater (organization of theater troupes, audiences and their social composition, censorship practices, etc.). We will think about the role
and the effects of genre (tragedy vs. comedy; the rise of “drame”). We will study contemporary debates about the theater and trace theater’s importance as a crucible for the formation and expression of public opinion. We will study censorship—an ever-present force that shaped French theater. We will discuss
representations of class and of gender. We will also study the representation of cultural others—e.g. Islam, the New World. We will examine anti-theatrical discourse and seek to understand how theater was simultaneously a sign of the French monarchy’s hegemony and a practice of dangerous subversion.