The Theatre of Martyrdom

«In this readable and closely argued study, Charles Stone sheds light on a phenomenon that has baffled generations of scholars: why did plays about Christian martyrs grip seventeenth-century French audiences? After all, these tragedies are not very tragic. Stone unravels this mystery of the plays’ success, showing how martyr-themed plays tackled wider questions of theology, language and performance. In this thought-provoking book, Stone relates not only why these plays mattered to their first sp