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French tragedy of the same period (sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) was likewise experiencing rapid change, transformed within a generation from an academic pastime into a fully-fledged profession. Initially performed within the collège (university) communities, Seneca entered the repertoire of touring companies and was translated for outdoor performance on temporary stages by playwrights such as Robert Garnier and Jean de La Taille. With the establishment of the first permanent venues in Paris, the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Théâtre du Marais, companies began to take advantage of the scenography and special effects now available to fuse Senecan tragedy with baroque spectacle. Whereas English playwrights tended to apply senecan features to different plots, Senecan plays in their entirety were performed much more frequently in France.

In the generation after Artaud, many directors attempted to put the maxims of Cruelty into practice. These included Jean-Louis Barrault, who applied Artaud’s ideas to a 1942 production of Racine’s Phèdre. Whereas Artaud had eschewed formal speech, Barrault returned to Racine’s poetry with a new sense of its musicality. His protégé Jorge Lavelli did the same with a translation of Seneca’s Medea some twenty years later. At the same time, Peter Brook was applying the principles of Cruelty to Seneca’s Oedipus. But while Seneca was experiencing something of a revival in the theatre industry, academic consensus (still under the sway of Schlegel) was of the opinion that Seneca’s plays could not be staged. The most prominent exponent of this position was Otto Zwierlein in Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas, whose detailed analysis of Seneca’s ‘flaws’ as a dramatist was predicated entirely on outdated assumptions of stage naturalism.

Chapter 1 serves as the cornerstone of this book, against which all the other chapters can be read. It explores a singular play, Pierre Corneille’s 1634 Médée. Often read as generic precursor or holdover, as failed experiment or primitive attempt, Médée is utterly unique for its era in its subject matter and politics. This chapter shows how its Médée is framed not by excess, passion, or inconstancy, but by moderation, knowledge, and attachment, in both positive and negative forms. Médée’s own “self” is a surface self, existing in counter-distinction to the complex self-possessed individual grounded in an interior, the hallmark of the eighteenth century. The contrast between the Medean surface self and the Medean art of destruction as one of cleaving to and cleaving from compels a meditation on how the self emerges in relation to others and what is sacrificed when we see the self as autonomous. Analogously, instead of seeing Médée as Corneille’s first tragedy, and so a primitive or premature form of what will come after it, this reading positions it at the undisclosed heart of the tragic project, as it reverberates in both its past and its future.