Simon Belyard’s Le Guysien Michael Meere VIOLENCE, REVENGE, AND THE STAKES OF WRITING DURING THE FRENCH CIVIL WARS: SIMON BELYARD’S LE GUYSIEN hen Henri III had the Guise brothers killed, mutilated, and cremated and Wthen disposed of their ashes in the River Loire, the factional violence of the French Civil Wars reached new heights. After the brothers’ deaths, one a duke and the other a cardinal, the ultra-Catholic League was particularly vocal, calling for the king’s excommunication and even assassination.1 This hostile and frantic environment not only fueled violence and revenge between all echelons of society, but also inspired polemicists to use the pen and graphic images as weapons to fght against one another. One representative example is Le Guysien by the vallegeois Leaguer and schoolteacher Simon Belyard (dates unknown).2 This play stages the duke’s assassination in an extremely explicit manner, placing the bloodshed on stage for all the spectators to see in a very graphic way.3 The physicality of the murder scene is especially important since, 1. Much invaluable historical research exists on the complex history of the League and the circulation of pamphlets during the French civil wars. See in particular Frederic J. Baumgartner, Radical Reactionaries: The Political Thought of the French Catholic League (Geneva: Droz, 1975); Jean-Marie Constant, La Ligue (Paris: Fayard, 1996); Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu. La Violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1994); and Nicolas Le Roux, Un régi- cide au nom de Dieu: L’assassinat d’Henri III (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). 2. Le Guysien, ou Perfdie tyrannique commise par Henri de Valois es personnes des il- lustriss. Reverediss. et tresgenereux Princes Louys de Loraine Cardinal, et Archevesque de Rheims, et Henri de Loraine Duc de Guyse, grand Maistre de France (Troyes: Jean Moreau, 1592). No modern editions exist, and very few original copies are extant. The play can be found at the Bibliothèque Municipale d’Aix-en-Provence Méjanes, the Bibliothèque Municipale de Chalons-en-Champagne, and the British Library. It could have been there were not many copies printed, the play was not widely circulated, or, perhaps more likely still, they were destroyed during Henri IV’s attempts to eliminate evidence of texts related to the promotion of the League. On Belyard’s biography, see Bouteille-Meister, “Représenter le présent” 487. 3. While the better-known La Guisiade (Lyon, 1589) by Pierre Matthieu recounts the duke’s assassination, Belyard’s “tragédie nationale d’actualité” stages the duke’s death. The Romanic Review Volume 104 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 46 Michael Meere although no trace of performance has (yet) been found, Belyard claims that a certain Monsieur Pajot “a fait représenter [la tragédie], pour encourager le peuple bien affectionné de toujours persister de bien en mieux à maintenir l’Église, et la patrie contre l’hérétique” (Dedicatory Letter, A ii rº). The actors were probably students from Belyard’s collège,4 and, though it is unknown when M. Pajot had the play performed, the play was likely put on before Henri III’s death, and the staging of the duke’s death would have inspired the audience to take revenge against their “heretical” king.5 In this article, then, the frst step is to consider the performance aspect of the assassination as a cultural artifact of this turbulent time and to place this violent scene in the iconographical context after the duke’s death. In this way, the play serves as a prism to interpret the proper dynamics of the live spectacle and measure what theater can do, as well as its (intended) impact on spectators and readers. From there, the article reads the fnal act of the play between the king and the duke’s mother alongside and against the various political discourses about regicide that circulated in the late 1580s. The fnal section interprets the stakes of writing polemical theater. All three sections suggest how this play would have encouraged a sixteenth-century (Leaguer) spectator or reader to avenge her or his leader. I argue that the three parts are intricately linked, for the performance of the assassination and calls to avenge the duke’s death mirror the self-performative aspect of writing this polemical tragedy. The act of taking up the pen, for Belyard, is a militant act, analogous to the act of taking up the sword, which his readers and spectators would (ideally) have done to avenge their leader’s unjust death. The expression “tragédie nationale d’actualité” comes from Postert (107). However, she only mentions Belyard’s tragedy in passing. We could also call Belyard’s play a “tragédie politique d’actualité,” following Chocheyras’s nomenclature. Richard Hill- man has convincingly argued that Marlowe may have imitated Belyard’s murder scene in his Massacre at Paris. 4. The theater historian Théophile Boutiot has found that, on 2 June 1593, some “joueurs de comédie” asked to enter the city, but the Counsel decided that “n’étant la saison opportune pour se réjouir, il refuse la permission d’entrer en ville pour y jouer la comédie ou autre jeu” (Histoire de la ville de Troyes 4.229). 5. Jacques Clément would kill the king in August 1589, just less than one year after the duke’s death. After Henri III’s assassination, tensions and violence intensifed as Henri de Navarre was in line to become the next king. His succession to the throne was particularly diffcult, for the League adamantly opposed having a Huguenot as the King of France. Henri de Navarre, the future Henri IV, would not be recognized as king until after his conversion to Catholicism in 1593, though his coronation did not take place until 27 February 1594 in Chartres (instead of Reims). Simon Belyard’s LE GUYSIEN 47 Staging the Assassination It will be helpful to briefy summarize the plot up to the assassination scene in act four. The play opens with the fury of Alecto’s eight-page monologue in which she graphically recounts the horrors of civil wars and sets up the action that will ensue; Madame de Nemours, the duke’s mother, foresees her son’s demise in act two; the king and his counselors devise a plan to assassinate the duke in act three. In this act, Henri is radically demonized, along with his right-hand man the duc d’Épernon, and they devise the plan to kill the duke. Guise, a perfect foil for the king, arrives on stage in act four with his mother. This scene is capital, for it is the frst time the duke appears. His ethos is one of innocence and loyalty in stark contrast to the king’s tyrannical nature, a character dynamic that Belyard’s polemical text necessitates. The duke and his mother speak in stichomythic dialogue, exchanging moral commonplaces and debating whether the duke should follow the king’s orders and meet him in his chambers. The use of stichomythia between a worried mother and her naive son also gives Guise a more human character than Henri III, for the latter has only spoken in relentless tirades. During this exchange between the duke and his mother, the former reassures the latter that there is nothing to fear. He must answer the king’s wish to see him; moreover, the duke must arrive without arms so as not to offend the king or show any hostility toward him. Here we come to the scene that stages the duke’s assassination.6 Once the duke arrives in the Blois castle, he has a strangely dark premonition, recalling Thyestes’s bizarre feeling upon returning to his homeland (Seneca ll. 404–20). He then meets L’Archant, the captain of the guards, who speaks ambiguously while leading the duke to the king’s chambers. Guise is about to take leave (“Je ne veux ses bons voeux retarder. Je m’en . .”) when the Chorus (the Quarante- cinq) jump out from behind the curtain and stab him, followed by an ironic insult, shifting from the formal “vous” to a condescending “tu”: “Voilà ce que tu mérites, / Roi Parisien.”7 On the ground, or held up by the Chorus, the duke tries to speak on several occasions, even to say his last prayers to God (“O Dieu, je vous . .”), but his attackers consistently interrupt him by stabbing him, as indicated and underscored by truncated verse. The Chorus declares the duke dead, but L’Archant orders that they start again: “Redoublez!” His dead 6. See the Appendix for a transcription of the entire death scene. 7. This insult refers to the Day of the Barricades (12 May 1588), when the duc de Guise entered Paris despite a royal interdict, and Henri III fed to Chartres. On 13 May, the city offered Guise the crown but he refused it. See Stuart Carroll, “The Revolt of Paris, 1588: Aristocratic Insurgency and the Mobilization of Popular Support,” French Historical Studies 23.2 (2000), 301–37. 48 Michael Meere body is then mocked twice: “Ha! Cap de Dieux, je pense / Qu’il ne nous veut pas mordre”; “Nous lui avons fait faire un tres beau sobre-saut.” The duke’s body has become immobile, inert, before the spectators’ eyes: he is frozen still and silenced. The guards fnally remove the corpse from the stage (“Trainez-le là-dedans”), and L’Archant’s last words emphasize the immoral inhumanity of the king and his men: “C’est bien chose assurée, / notre recompense est deja préparée” (4.51–52).8 I will return to this scene in a moment, but frst I would like to compare it with the many images that circulated after Guise’s and his brother’s deaths, images that acquired “un intense réinvestissement symbolique et fantasmatique dans la littérature ligueuse” (Bouteille-Meister, “Représenter le présent” 449).