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Racine, Laurent, and the Palais à Volonté

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Roger W. Herzel
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Abstract

It is generally believed that the appearance of Racine's stage never varied, that all tragedies performed in seventeenth-century Paris were staged in a neutral, anonymous setting known as the “palais à volonté.” However, an inventory of stage settings kept by Michel Laurent, the décorateur at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where Racine's plays were first performed, shows that Racine, like Molière but unlike most other authors of tragedy, demanded visual backgrounds that were specific and appropriate to the action of the plays. Abstract and universal decors indeed had a place in the seventeenth-century theater, and they became common after Racine's retirement, but they were used for practical reasons that have little to do with the modern conception of “classicism.”

Type
Cluster on the Poetic: From Euripides to Rich
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 5 , October 1993 , pp. 1064 - 1082
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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