ABSTRACT
The performance of Etienne Jodelle’s Cleopatre captive by a group of students in Paris in the winter of 1552-3 has been held traditionally, and on the whole rightly, to mark the beginning of native tragedy in France. The movement had originated in Italy in the previous century when humanist scholars began the rediscovery of the Greek tragic dramatists. It may be said to have reached France in 1506 with the publication in Paris of Latin translations by Erasmus of two of the tragedies of Euripides, Hecuba and Iphigenia. The twenty-year-old Jodelle’s tragedy can be seen as an experiment launched by this young group, very probably under the guiding influence of Muret and perhaps more distantly that of Buchanan. Indeed early humanist tragedy placed no conscious restrictions on its subject-sources, though inevitably it drew heavily on its models in Greek and Roman tragedy.
