6533b86dfe1ef96bd12c9c2e

RESEARCH PRODUCT

La victime de la ruse : personnage comique et/ou tragique ?

subject

description

Dealing with the dramatic production including both Elizabethan and Spanish Golden Age theatres as well as the French one (later in the century), soon appears (with a strange regularity) the representation of a man unvaryingly victim of trickery. It might be the cause of laughter, and the deception has no other aim than to show a naïve and ridiculous person belonging to the comical genre, but when the victim is an actual member of the ruling power, whether inside the state or in the family, the question is : how can we understand properly the meaning of such a destructive trickery ? One can wonder if it points out only the tragic aspect of a mistake, while the limits between the tragic and the satirical and even comical genre seem rather blurred. Is this about performing the uncertainty of human knowledge or representing the authority brought back to the level of the gull, a farcical victim ? Here lies the problem of a possible link or of a real difference between comical gulls and tragic heroes. On one hand, credulity gives life to the comical character ; yet, from metaphysical to farcical levels, a credulous person is always taken in by appearances without questioning them. On the other hand, trickery works only thanks to the overwhelming power of the passions of a gull, victim and prisoner of his own imagination, which infers some type of anthropological pessimism. Finally, the social status of the victim might point out the indirect questioning of authority when being so ridiculed, while the heavy father (pater familias) or the monarch are on the stage.