Robert Garnier and the Themes of Political Tragedy in the Sixteenth Century

Robert Garnier (1545-1590) was an early writer of tragedies in French. He has suffered much from being compared with the great tragedians of the seventeenth century, being taken as a crude predecessor of their mature art. In this 1969 text Mrs Jondorf studies him as a sixteenth-century writer, attuned to the thought and art of his own time. In particular she is concerned with his extension of the Senecan tradition of tragedy, and his pre-occupations with political themes - especially civil war, the rebellious subject, the powers and obligations of the sovereign. These were forced upon him by the times in which he lived, and Mrs Jondorf shows how his views relate to those of the political theorists of his time.