Teaching Early Modern Spectacle through Film: Exploring Possibilities, Challenges and Pitfalls through a French Corpus

Abstract

While research on the history of drama as a branch of literature can be conducted largely through texts, the history of spectacle relies on images of all kinds – sketches for sets and costumes, playhouse blueprints, frontispieces, paintings and engravings, and so on – which must necessarily be used in any course that covers more than literary analysis. Unfortunately, a teacher whose background does not specifically include theatre and stagecraft history may find locating and selecting such documents challenging; interpreting them in a manner that is both accurate and appealing may prove near impossible. Therefore, recreations of stage shows featured in motion pictures offer an enticing, ready-made alternative to primary visual resources, because they help students gain an immediate, vivid sense of what spectacle events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries looked and sounded like.