La machabee : tragoedie du martyre des sept freres & de Solomone leur mere.

Rouen : Raphaël du Petit Val, 1598.

1 volume ; 139 x 79 x 7 mm

This is a PRELIMINARY RECORD. It may contain incorrect information. Please email catalog@folger.edu for assistance.

France -- Rouen, -- publication place.

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From dealer's description: "VIREY, Jean de, Sieur de Gravier. Machabee. Tragèdie du martyre des sept fères & de Solome leur mère. Rouen: Raphaël du Petit Val, 1598. First edition of a macabre play composed by a 25-year veteran of the French Wars of Religion, Jean de Virey. The playwright chooses as his story the graphic Biblical tale of the Woman and her Seven Sons (2 Maccabees 7), in which the mother, Solomonia, and her seven sons are arrested by during the Antiochian Persecutions of the Jews. The sons are commanded by Antiochus IV to eat pork to prove their fealty, but refuse; each son is tortured and killed, one by one, under the eyes of the mother, who does not reveal her agony. Solomonia is killed after all her sons are executed. The story of her martyrdom occurs in the Talmud, Midrash, and the Josippon. It was regularly illustrated in early Christian and Jewish art, but supressed during the Reformation. De Virey retells the story in the contemporary context of the author's harrowing wartime experiences. We cannot do better than the University of Poitier's scholar Corinne Meyniel's descriptive analysis of the text: This work is exceptional for the macabre nature of its staging, which seems to directly echo the author’s experience during the massacres of the Wars of Religion. Various tortures and killings are described in great detail: one of the protagonists is beaten to a bloody pulp, another is stretched out on a wheel, others are thrown into the fire, mutilated, flayed, gutted, scalded, tied to a post, dismembered, crushed under a press, hung upside down, roasted, pierced in the side, or fed to a cheetah. The action of the tragedy could not be more stripped-down: it has the simplicity of a summary execution. After an edifying preamble, the playwright, accustomed to wars, experiments on stage with all possible forms of violence: the psychological violence of imprisonment, the physical violence of torture, violence beyond death through the destruction of the corpse, visual and emotional violence, since the brothers are the first spectators of the death of their loved ones. Through the duration and variety of the torments, he also experiments with everything that can be done to a body. Virey constructs an astonishingly modern aesthetic by shifting the tragic stakes: death is no longer a peril or denouement, it is no longer just one of many issues, it is the main object of the dramatic system. Proving before time that you can “make theater of anything,” Virey makes theater with death—long, painful, breathless and bloody, as loquacious as it is commented on. The eight protagonists never stop dying, and even more than death itself, it is its slowness that builds the play. Paradoxical if ever there was one, death here is not the end of life, it is action, and even theatrical action: it is a living death, a performing death (tr. © Julien Comellas). The play was written in 1596, and appears here in its first edition of 1598. It was performed at least once, in Valognes, the year it was first printed, and was evidently a success (see Meyniel). The play was dedicated to the Madame la Mareschal de Matignon, whose husband De Virey had served under. A strange literary outlier, worth renewed study. A single copy known in public collections worldwide (BnF). $5,500 12mo, 139 x 79 x 7 mm (binding), 137 x 77 x 4 mm (text block). A-C12; 71 [1] pp. Modern vellum over thin boards, unlettered, new endpapers. Interior: light staining; head margin a bit precious; outer third of leaf A12 torn vertically, affecting text r and v, but mended without loss. Soleinne 874. Meyniel, Corninne "Le Martyre des Macchabées de Jean de Virey, spectacle à sensation ou tragédie sacramentelle?" Littératures classiques, 2010, vol. III, (N° 73), pp.133-141." Ordered from W.S. Cotter Rare Cotter D9756, 2024-07-22, email quote

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