Abstract
While representations of the warrior queen go a certain way towards challenging the construction of government and power as exclusively male prerogatives, the most radical challenge to that construction can be found in plays where the emphasis is on government as an androgynous moral and intellectual activity Between 1644 and 1689, seven plays dramatize the reality of a female capacity to rule with intelligence and patriotism: Racine’s Alexandre le Grand (1666), Bernard’s Laodamie (1689), Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée (1644), Sertorius (1662), Pulchérie (1673), and du Ryer’s tragicomedies Dynamis (1653) and Nitocris (1650).1 When viewed collectively it is clear that not all of the queens concerned are given the same degree or type of virtue or political skill—a panoply of qualities are highlighted, from the moral virtues of rulership to a capacity for reason of state politicking to dogged patriotism—but through a mise-en-scène of capable self-determined female monarchs, juxtaposed in some cases with an exploration of the dilemma that marriage represents for the queen regnant, all these plays dramatize the exercise of political virtue by women and explode the myth of gender-differentiated sexual ethics.
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Notes
References are to Jean Racine, Œuvres complètes, ed. Georges Forestier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), I;
Pierre Corneille, Œuvres complètes, ed. Georges Couton, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1980–1987);
Catherine Bernard, Laodamie in Perry Gethner, ed., Femmes dramaturges en France (1650–1750). Pièces choisies (Paris, Seattle, Tübingen: PFSCL, 1994);
Pierre du Ryer, Nitocris, Reyne de Babylone (Paris: A. de Sommaville, 1650);
Pierre du Ryer, Dynamis, Reyne de Carie [1653], ed. Jean Rohou (Exeter: University of Exeter Press 1992).
See Forestier, Corneille. Le Sens d’une dramaturgie (Paris: SEDES, 1998), p. 46, n.13.
see, for example, Jean-François Senault, Le Monarque ou les devoirs du souverain (Paris: P. Le Petit, 1661), pp. 262, 417–419.
see Derval Conroy, “The Displacement of Disorder: Gynsecocracy and Friendship in Catherine Bernard’s Laodamie (1689),” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, 67 (2007), 443–464 (pp. 447–450).
See James F. Gaines, Pierre du Ryer and His Tragedies: From Envy to Liberation (Geneva: Droz, 1988), p. 182.
Richelieu, Testament politique, ed. Daniel Dessert (Paris: Complexe, 1990), Part II, Ch. 8;
Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Le Prince [1631], ed. Ch. Leroy (Paris: La Table ronde, 1996), Ch. 5;
Pierre Le Moyne, L’Art de régner (Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1665), IV.I.viii.
Nicolas Faret, Des Vertus necessaires à un prince pour bien gouverner ses sujets (Paris: Toussaint du Bray, 1623), p. 43;
Jean de Lartigue, La Politique des conquerons (Paris: Guillaume de Luyne, 1662), Ch. XVIII;
(see H. C. Lancaster, Du Ryer: Dramatist (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1912), p. 142).
see Eléonore M. Zimmermann, “La Bérénice de Cornei1le: Pulchérie,” in Sylvie Romanowski and Monique Bilezikian, eds. Homage to Paul Bénicbou (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1994), pp. 93–111 (p. 99).
Simone Ackerman, “Roxane et Pulchérie: autorité réelle et pouvoir illusoire,” Cahiers du dix-septième, 2.2 (1988), 49–64;
Huguette Gilbert, “Pouvoir et féminité dans Pulchérie” in Yvonne Bellenger et al., eds., L’Art du théâtre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), pp. 101–100;
Domna Stanton, “Power or Sexuality: The Bind of Corneille’s Pulchérie,” Women and Literature, 1 (1980), 236–247.
see Marianne Béthery, “L’Athénaïs de Mairet, une tragi-comédie à sujet religieux: voie nouvelle ou impasse?” Littératures classiques, 65 (2005), 155–166.
see Harriet R. Allentuch, “Reflections on Women in the Theater of Corneille,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 21 (1974), 97–111 (p. 100).
see Timothy J. Reiss, The Mean ing of Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 98–99,
see David Clarke, “African Temptresses and Roman Matrons: Female Roles on the Paris Stage, 1634–1643,” in Keith Cameron and Elizabeth Woodrough, eds., Ethics and Politics in Seventeenth-Century France (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), pp. 201–210 (p. 208).
see Valerie Worth, “The Shape of Things to Come: Racine’s Revisions of Alexandre (1666–1697),” Vrench Studies, 44.4 (1990), 385–402.
see Alain Couprie, Marquise ou la “Déhanchée”de Racine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), pp. 181–185.
(Paul Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 179–180).
see Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–1100 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, eds., Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
see Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1995).
see Philippe Lacroix, “Le langage de l’amour dans A lexandre le Grand de Racine,” XVIIe siècle, 146 (1985), 57–67 (pp. 60–65),
see Sylvie Requemora, “L’amitié dans les Maximes de La Rochefoucauld,” XVIIe siècle, 205 (1999), 687–728 (pp.720–721).
see Perry Gethner, Femmes dramaturges en France (1650–1750). Pièces choisies, tome II (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2002).
Joseph Marthan, Le Vieillard amoureux dans l’œuvre cornélienne (Paris: Nizet, 1979), pp. 69–70, 76–83.
André Stegmann, L’Héroïsme cornélien. Genèse et signification, 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968), II, pp. 517–527
see Michel Prigent, Le Héros et l’État dans la tragédie de Pierre Corneille (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), pp. 385–404.
My own emphasis on Viriate as stateswoman is similar to Liliane Picciola’s approach in Corneille et la dramaturgie espagnole (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2002), pp. 335–349.
See also Rathé, La Keine se marie. Variations sur un thème dans l’œuvre de Corneille (Geneva: Droz, 1990), Ch. IV, “Demi-succès ou échecs déguisés?” pp. 53–68.
see Monique Bilezikian, “Divorce, désordre et légitimité dans Sertorius de Corneille,” Cahiers du dix-septième, 3.2 (1989), 1–16 (pp. 10–12).
See Georges Couton, La Vieillesse de Corneille (Paris: Maloine, 1949), pp. 221–222.
to the best of my knowledge, although it is eluded to in passing in Octave Nudal, Le Sentiment de l’amour (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 5;
in Judd Hubert, “De l’écart historique à la plénitude théâtrale: Pulchérie et Suréna,” in Claire Gaudiani with Jacqueline Van Baelen, eds., Création et Recréation: Un dialogue entre littérature et histoire (Tübingen: G. Narr, 1993), pp. 55–65, n.6,
see Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elisabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996), p.130.
As the Scottish ambassador James Melville put it: “Your Majesty thinks, if you were married you would be but Queen of England; and now you are both King and Queen” (Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhill (London: Routledge, 1929), p. 94).
see Philip Sidney’s A Letter to Queen Elizabeth… touching her marriage with Monsieur (1579?)
in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, eds., Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 46–57.
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Conroy, D. (2016). Dramatizing the Female Prince: Virtue, Statecraft, and Virginal Wives. In: Ruling Women, Volume 2. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137568489_4
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