F <scp>rançoise</scp> P <scp>ascal</scp> , M <scp>arie-</scp> C <scp>atherine</scp> D <scp>esjardins</scp> , A <scp>ntoinette</scp> D <scp>eshoulières</scp> , and C <scp>atherine</scp> D <scp>urand</scp> , <i>Challenges to Traditional Authority: Plays by French Women Authors 1650–1700</i> . Edited and translated by P <scp>erry</scp> G <scp>ethner</scp> PascalFrançoise, DesjardinsMarie-Catherine, DeshoulièresAntoinette, and DurandCatherine, <i>Challenges to Traditional Authority: Plays by French Women Authors 1650–1700</i> . Edited and translated by GethnerPerry. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 477; The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 36.) Toronto: Iter Academic Press, 2015. xi + 308 pp.

Perry Gethner’s translated edition is appropriately included in a series dedicated to publishing male- and female-authored works that championed women and are little known to anglophone audiences. Gethner includes four plays by seventeenth-century female dramatists: Françoise Pascal’s Endymion (1657), Mme de Villedieu’s Nitétis (1663), Antoinette Deshoulières’s Genséric (1680), and Catherine Durand’s Comédies en proverbes (1699). He has selected these particular playwrights because they all pioneered developments in women’s contributions to theatre: Pascal was the first woman to have her plays staged publicly by a professional troupe; Villedieu the first to have her plays staged by a professional company in Paris; Deshoulières’s Genséric pioneers a ‘reflection and refusal of the Racinian model’ (p. 170); and Durand was one of the first women to publish in the genre of ‘proverb comedies’. This study provides a general overview of the context for women’s dramatic writing in the second half of the seventeenth century, a time when women writers began to gain ‘popular and critical recognition’ for their plays (p. 3), which were intended for the first time for public performance. It includes an introduction to the genres of tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy; each play is prefaced with a short introductory biography of its author and details of the play’s context, although, as Gethner explains, the ephemeral nature of many of the sources — little is known about whether Pascal’s or Durand’s works were performed nor about how many runs Villedieu’s play enjoyed — mirrored at times by the paucity of information about their authors’ lives, makes full detail impossible. Collectively these plays span different genres (tragicomedy, tragedy, comedy): given the traditional nature of these genres, Gethner suggests, their authors’ originality can be better assessed. Indeed, Gethner argues that uniting all these plays is a distinctly ‘female perspective’ (p. 1), which manifests itself in representations of character (for instance, Endymion has the characteristics expected of a virtuous woman); in modifications of historical or mythological plot (Nitétis is deliberately focused on a woman); or even in genre (Durand’s work, published as part of the comtesse de Murat’s novel, Voyage de campagne (1699), represented the first time that what was traditionally a salon game akin to charades was included in a novel). Underpinning these ‘challenges to traditional authority’ is the influence of the social and aesthetic code of galanterie: this influence is particularly evident in the generic hybridity of many of these works. Some stylistic features have been retained in translation, although Gethner transforms alexandrine rhyming couplets into blank-verse iambic pentameter. The vocabulary and register are modernized, with poetic devices simplified (e.g. ‘fire’ for ‘passion’) — no doubt with performance in mind, as Gethner stresses the importance of making these works ‘as readable and as stageworthy as possible’ for a contemporary audience (p. 19) — and a careful balance is struck between the accessible and the literary. The plays are accompanied by useful explanatory notes, making this book a very important introduction both to French women playwrights and their context for an English-speaking audience.

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