Etudes Anglaises - N4/2014

Natalie ROULON Music and Gender in All's Well That Ends WellAll's Well That Ends Well may not be the most musical of Shakespeare's works, but the music performed or referred to in the play is important in that it contributes to constructing the strict gender divide which prevailed in the society whose tensions this "problem comedy" reflects. Masculine music is martial, self-centred, and tends to reveal the principal male characters' anxieties about feminine desire. Although the female characters are not presented as musicians, in many productions they are accompanied by soft stringed instruments when they appear onstage. Helen is associated with music in male discourse and is cast as the play's main, albeit paradoxical, harmonising figure. Whereas the King of France's male physicians have failed to restore his health, Helen successfully devises a musical cure for him and is therefore granted her request to choose Bertram for her husband. However, in spite of the immense power Shakespeare has endowed her with, this Orphic woman comes up against a patriarchal structure which leaves limited scope for female agency and gender reversal, hence the lingering doubts, even once the play has ended, as to her ability to attain unalloyed marital bliss.Bien que All's Well That Ends Well ne soit pas la plus musicale des oeuvres de Shakespeare, la musique qui y est interpretee ou a laquelle il est fait reference est importante dans la mesure ou elle contribue a la construction de la division des genres qui prevalait dans la societe dont les tensions se trouvent refletees dans cette problem comedy. La musique des hommes est martiale et narcissique et tend a -mettre au jour l'angoisse qu'eprouvent les principaux personnages masculins a l'endroit du desir feminin. Bien que les figures feminines ne soient pas presentees sous les traits de musiciennes, leur presence est accompagnee d'une suave musique pour cordes dans bien des mises en scene. Helen est associee a la musique dans le discours masculin et son role, quoique paradoxal, est celui de la grande figure harmonisante de la piece. Tandis que les medecins du roi de France ont echoue a le guerir, Helen met au point une therapie musicale qui atteint son but, aussi se voit-elle accorder sa requete de faire de Bertram son epoux. Cependant, en depit des immenses prerogatives que Shakespeare lui a conferees, cette femme orphique se heurte a une structure patriarcale qui ne s'accommode vraiment ni du pouvoir feminin ni de l'inversion des roles sexuels, d'ou une incertitude persistante, une fois la piece achevee, quant a sa capacite a acceder a une parfaite felicite conjugale.Anne-Marie MILLER-BLAISE Ardelia's Voice: Anne Kingsmill Finch and the (Female) Lyrical MomentAnne Kingsmill Finch's most probable authorship of the libretto to the first through-sung English opera, John Blow's Venus and Adonis, does not only elucidate one of the mysteries of the history of music. Considered alongside Finch's other dramatic works, it reverberates on the way the Countess of Winchilsea shapes her own voice in her lyric poetry, thought of in terms of performance. Finch's engagement with Restoration music helps to account for the tension later at work in her poems between gendered song and speech. It may also explain why she has often been misconstrued as a pre-Romantic poet.L'attribution probable du livret du premier veritable opera anglais, le Venus et Adonis de John Blow, a Anne Kingsmill Finch ne resout pas seulement l'un des petits mysteres de l'histoire de la musique. Ce texte, lorsque lu parallelement aux autres oeuvres dramatiques de Finch, eclaire d'un nouveau jour la maniere particuliere dont la comtesse de Winchilsea faconne sa voix, pensee comme performance, dans sa poesie lyrique. L'implication de Finch dans le domaine musical a la Restauration permet de mettre en lumiere la tension qui existe plus tard dans sa poesie entre la parole et le chant, tous deux sexues. Elle elucide peut-etre aussi les raisons pour lesquelles Finch a souvent ete consideree a tort comme un poete preromantique.Pierre DEGOTT Variations on a Reflexive Theme: the Musical Adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1692-1763)This paper focuses on the many rewritings of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the long eighteenth century. It mainly analyses the way reflexive discourse on drama gave way, in a whole spectrum of generic hybrids, to a form of "meta-operatic" discourse dealing with the place of opera on the English stage. If Purcell's The Fairy Queen (1692) celebrates the all-powerful place of music to the point that it actually stages the symbolic dismissal of the poet, Richard Leveridge's adaptations of the play-within-the-play (1716, 1745) signal the generic upheavals brought about by the advent of Italian opera in the 1710s. David Garrick's later adaptations testify to the difficulty of restoring Shakespeare's text by purging it from the Italian influences still pervading native genres.Cet article se penche sur les multiples reecritures du Songe du nuit d'ete au cours du long XVIIIe siecle. Il s'interesse notamment a la maniere dont le discours reflexif sur le theatre a ete transforme, dans une serie d'adaptations toutes hybrides generiquement, en un discours meta-operatique traitant a un degre ou un autre de la place de l'opera sur la scene theatrale britannique. Ainsi, si The Fairy Queen (1692) de Purcell semble thematiser la toute puissance de la musique, jusqu'a mettre en scene la disparition du poete, l'adaptation par Richard Leveridge de la celebre piece-dans-la-piece (1716, 1745) signale, dans un contexte marque par l'apparition de l'opera italien a Londres, un profond bouleversement dans les categories theatrales. Plus tard, les reecritures de David Garrick attestent la difficulte a restaurer le texte shakespearien et a purger le texte des influences italiennes qui continuent a s'infiltrer dans les repertoires dits autochtones.Sabine VOLK-BIRKE Context as Text: Milton's Psalms in Han