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- Title
False Frocks: Chénier's Charles IX and the Debate on Religious Costume in Parisian Theater, 1789-90.
- Authors
Curulla, Annelle
- Abstract
Marie-Joseph Chénier's Charles IX is among the best known plays of the French Revolution. Even so, few scholars have recognized that this play triggered intense debate over representations of Roman Catholic vestment and character in the public theater. This article examines that debate in the 1789-90 theater season, when the Parisian municipality still exercised preventative theater censorship. Critics, censors, and audiences expressed a range of responses to increasing portrayals of Catholic clergy and rituals in theatrical productions. While some affirmed that the freedom to represent Catholic costume on stage was linked to theater s civic role in the new French state, others worried that representations of Catholic character and garb would provoke further division and even incite violence among different political factions. This debate, I argue, marks an important episode in post-absolutist anti-theatrical discourse, for it helped define new norms for theatrical representations of religious characters and costume even as their meanings underwent a massive change outside the playhouse walls.
- Subjects
PARIS (France); FRANCE; CHENIER, Marie-Joseph, 1764-1811; CHARLES IX (Theatrical production); CATHOLIC bishops; THEATER; REIGN of Louis XIV, France, 1643-1715
- Publication
Restoration & 18th Century Theatre Research, 2014, Vol 29, Issue 1, p97
- ISSN
0034-5822
- Publication type
Article