Les Plaideurs

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Data
Title: Les Plaideurs
Genus: comedy
Original language: French
Author: Jean Racine
Literary source: The wasps , Aristophanes
Publishing year: 1679
Premiere: 1668
Place of premiere: Hotel de Bourgogne , Paris
people
  • Dandin , judge
  • Léandre , son of Dandin
  • Chicanneau , citizen
  • Isabelle , daughter of Chicanneau
  • The Duchess
  • Petit Jean , doorman
  • Intimate , secretary
  • A prompter

Les Plaideurs ( The Litigants ) is the only comedy by the French tragedy poet Jean Racine . The premiere took place in November 1668 in the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris . The play is based on the comedy The Wasps by the Greek poet Aristophanes , but without its political implications. It contains three acts and, like the rest of Racine's stage works, is written in paired rhyming Alexandrian verses.

action

1st act

The play takes place in a town in Lower Normandy . Petit Jean ("Little Hans"), doorman of the judge Perrin Dandin, reports that he has to supervise his master because he constantly wants to lead senseless trials. Léandre, the judge's son, is supported by his secretary, Intimé, and the porter in an effort to dissuade the judge from his addiction to trial. He tries to escape his guards by jumping through the window. With the help of the secretary, Léandre also wants to establish a relationship with Isabelle. Her father Chicanneau (derived from the word for chicane ) is only interested in dealing with lawyers and is therefore against this connection. The first act ends with an argument between Chicanneau and the Duchess of Pimbesche before Judge Dandin, during which insults are exchanged.

2nd act

Since only servants of the law are allowed to enter Chicanneau, Dandin's secretary disguises himself as a bailiff and passes Isabelle a love letter to Léandres. When Chicanneau appears, he gives him a warning on behalf of the Duchess, according to which he must withdraw the insults he had previously expressed. Léandre has Chicanneau sign a document issued as a record, which is in fact a promise of marriage . The Duchess' appearance creates a general mess. At the end of the act, Petit Jean announces that the house dog has eaten a capon , which triggers another process.

3rd act

The third act is mainly dedicated to the burlesque trial against the dog Citron. Petit Jean and the secretary act as lawyers for the two contending parties and outdo each other in incorrectly worded scholarly quotations without any reference to the current situation, which have a drowsy effect on the judge. The secretary's plea for mercy for the fatherless young dogs wakes Dandin, who first sentenced Citron to a galley penalty. When his son presented him with the promise of marriage signed by Chicanneau, he changed his mind, agreed to the marriage, pardoned the dog and looked forward to further trials.

Style and literary allusions

In spelling, this comedy differs from both Racine's tragedies and the comedies of his contemporary and rival Molière . In contrast to his tragedies, Racine often uses colloquial expressions here and does not shy away from grossness: in the third act, pissing young dogs come up, which means "See our tears!" is commented on. In contrast to Molière, Racine does not write a character study, but only wants to shine in his comedy through puns . The characters appearing have hardly any life of their own and are only sketched like a puppet .

In the foreword "To the Reader" the author first mentions The Wasps of Aristophanes as his source of inspiration and concludes with the remark: "I am a little proud that I wrote it without my being a single one of these dirty misunderstandings and dishonest jokes which is now so easy for most of our writers to find. ”This is a reference to Molière's comedy The School of Women , which had been performed with great success six years earlier and sparked a heated discussion of its literary and moral worth would have.

The piece itself contains numerous ironic allusions to classical and contemporary authors, from Cicero's plea Pro Quinctio to Ovid's Metamorphoses and Pausanias to Pierre Corneille . The famous tragedy Le Cid of the rival is parodied in some parts of the comedy , to which Corneille is said to have reacted very irritated.

Impact history

The piece has had very different levels of success over the centuries.

The premiere in November 1668 in the Hôtel de Bourgogne received extremely little response. Les Plaideurs was only given twice and was soon replaced by a comedy by Thomas Corneille . Since the Comédie-Française was founded in 1680, the piece has become an integral part of the repertoire . By 1900 Les Plaideurs was Racine's most played piece with a total of 1,224 performances, compared to 987 performances by Phèdre and 859 by Andromaque .

In the course of the 20th century the piece was increasingly forgotten and has held the last rank of Racine performances since 1951, with the exception of the two first works La Thébaïde and Alexandre le Grand .

Web links

Wikisource: Les Plaideurs  - Sources and full texts (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Original French: Je me sais quelque gré de l'avoir fait sans qu'il m'en ait coûté une seule de ces sales équivoques et de ces malhonnêtes plaisanteries qui coûtent maintenant si peu à la plupart de nos écrivains.
  2. ^ André Durand: “Les plaideurs” (1668), p. 8. Published on http://www.comptoirlitteraire.com/
  3. ^ André Durand: “Les plaideurs” (1668), p. 13. Published on [1]