Script or Scripture? The Ritualization of Discourse in Marthe Cosnard's Les Chastes Martirs

Dieu m’apprend sur-le-champ ce que je vous récite; Et vous m’entendez mal, si dans cette action Mon rôle passe encor pour une fiction. — Jean de Rotrou, Le Véritable Saint Genest1 The theatre in mid-seventeenth-century France is often viewed as a site of conformity, guided as it is by secularization and Aristotelian convention. A brief flourishing of plays treating Christian martyrological subjects in the 1640s represents therefore a curious, if transient, anomaly. Here is a form that seems to defy many of the rules upon which tragedy is based.2 Such nonconformity makes martyr tragedy a unique lens through which to analyse the nature and role of the stage in early modern French culture. The crucial moment of any martyr play is the point at which the protagonist reveals their Christianity to a disbelieving pagan audience. Genest’s famous avowal in Jean de Rotrou’s 1647 play (quoted in the epigraph...

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