Les héroïdes en scène. Adaptations dramatiques des lettres des héroïnes d’Ovide dans la France des XVIe et XVIIe siècles

[Machine translation] Ovid's Heroids enjoyed exceptional success in 16th and 17th century France, becoming the subject of literary and theatrical translations, imitations and adaptations. Literary and theatrical historians have long recognized the role played by Heroids in the elaboration of Jean Racine's tragic poetics, and over the last few decades a certain consensus has crystallized around the use of the category of “heroid” to define the eligiac heroines of the tragedies of the late seventeenth century. However, beyond the case of Racine (already extensively studied), and beyond the post-Racinian “heroids” (whose direct links with Ovid's work are often uncertain, if not inconsistent), there are numerous tragedies, tragicomedies and musical works that propose, in different forms, real theatrical rewrites of the Ovidian Heroids. This volume deals with the systematic study of 27 plays composed between the middle of the 16th century and the end of the 17th century that bring to the stage the heroines and heroes of the Ovidian epistles, organizing them into thematic groups (Heroid I: Penelope; IV: Phaedra; V and XVI-XVII: Aenone, Elena and Paris; VI and XII: Isifile and Medea; VII: Didone; X: Arianna; XIV: Hypermnestra; XVIII-XIX: Ero and Leandro) and, within each nucleus, in order logical. This approach makes it possible (1) to detect cases of direct or mediated adaptation of the Ovidian model, analyzing the rewriting practices of the individual authors and (2) observing the relationships of imitation that link together various pieces of the corpus; (3) to establish a periodization of the theatrical adaptations of the Heroids, which tend to go hand in hand with the publication of the main translations in verse and prose of the Heroids themselves in the French seventeenth century; (4) to show how the Ovidian treatment of the female figures of the myth is revived by the French playwrights of the XVI-XVII centuries in order to mitigate the responsibilities of heroines whom the tragic and epic tradition portrayed as fully criminal (such as Phaedra or Medea), thus returning a less flattering portrait of male characters; (5) to consider Ovid's problematic status in the eyes of French theater authors: less prestigious than ancient tragic and epic poets, but more akin to modern sensibility, Ovid is a generally hidden (and sometimes explicitly denied) source exploited by the playwrights of the early Modern Age.