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Theatre History and Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract This article takes as its starting point the epochal contributions of René Bray and Roland Barthes to the thinking of theatre history: Bray for the insistence, radical in his day, upon Molière's essential theatricality; Barthes for the exploration of the constraints of disciplinarity. The compartmentalization of scholarship has been particularly unfortunate for theatre history, torn between literary studies and the stage, and accordingly particularly subject to marginalization and lack of cohesion. Further, its subject matter, the staged performance, is itself intentionally ephemeral, and, in order to know it, scholars must sometimes depend upon residual fragments of theatrical life, often difficult of interpretation. For the seventeenth-century French stage, the very reason for study, the pointing up of historical strangeness, can be hidden by the invisible cloak of incremental change, in contrast, for example, to the radical disjunctions to be observed in the history of the English stage. The body of contributions to a history of the theatrical experience has nevertheless been gradually converging with literary scholarship, to the improved health of each, and the article ends by outlining trends in the field: an interest in the experience of the audience, theatre reconstruction both actual and virtual, historical performance, and the perception of the costumed actor.