The Theatre of Martyrdom

«In this readable and closely argued study, Charles Stone sheds light on a phenomenon that has baffled generations of scholars: why did plays about Christian martyrs grip seventeenth-century French audiences? After all, these tragedies are not very tragic. Stone unravels this mystery of the plays’ success, showing how martyr-themed plays tackled wider questions of theology, language and performance. In this thought-provoking book, Stone relates not only why these plays mattered to their first spectators but also why they should matter to us.»

(Professor Paul Scott, University of Kansas, USA)

This study examines the genre of tragedy through the lens of one of its most curious manifestations: the martyr play. The equation of Christianity with tragedy has often been seen by literary and theological scholars as specious at best, sacrilegious at worst. During the mid-seventeenth century, however, a group of French playwrights saw fit to produce tragedies that drew not on Roman or Greek mythology, as was the norm, but on stories of Christian heroism.

The author examines a broad corpus of plays ranging from the famous works of Pierre Corneille to near-forgotten examples of female-authored tragedy. Drawing on the writings of Michel Foucault as well as a host of contemporary and modern-day theologians, the author shows the martyr to be a major figure in theatrical performance and religious thought alike, exposing the porosity of the boundary separating the spaces of stage entertainment and church worship. The martyr plays, whether they threaten to destabilize the genre or define it, are ultimately shown to be integral to our understanding of what constituted tragedy in early modern France.