ABSTRACT
Genest is an actor in ancient Rome. He is summoned to appear before the pagan emperor Diocletian to give a performance of his finest role: that of the Christian martyr Adrien. But on this occasion fiction merges with reality. The exaltation of martyrdom for the faith was in fact to become a major and central concern of the baroque world. Here it could discharge some of that pent-up energy which the fashionable refinement of conduct and the emotions was tending to tone down. To his fellow Frenchmen, Corneille’s martyr tragedy seemed an unquestionable contribution to the new cult of the exemplary and unblemished hero: a hero who possessed not only the classical pagan virtues of fortitude and self-discipline but in addition exulted in the Christian virtues too. But to Andreas Gryphius, a German poet of sombre yet sensitive outlook and Lutheran background, it raised questions which he resolved to challenge in a martyr tragedy of his own.
