L'allégorie théâtrale au début du XVIe siècle: le cas des pièces «profanes» de Marguerite de Navarre

In the sixteenth century, allegory was old, but allegorical drama was relatively new. This is both a hermeneutical and a stylistic phenomenon that has not yet led to re-consideration of Marguerite de Navarre’s “secular” plays. These works are generally considered atypical, in the sense that she uses outdated “medieval” dramatic forms in order to formulate new contents. But this is only partially true, as our study of the context of Le Mallade shows, because these forms were neither “old” nor “medieval.” Marguerite was engaged, in her own way, in the general adventure of theatrical allegory, and the separation of form and content is a critical fallacy. This article also argues that the combined form and content of Marguerite’s plays might have been determined by the situations in which they were represented