Les spectacles de la foire, version hypertextuelle

New theatre resource online

List members with an interest in 17th/18thC French theatre may like to know that I have just made available online a complete hypertext version of an important resource for the social and institutional history of French popular theatre.

Emile Campardon's LES SPECTACLES DE LA FOIRE, published in 1877, is a monumental assemblage of primary archival material and scholarly notes addressing the professional and private lives of the people who were engaged in French fairground and boulevard entertainments between 1670 and 1800. This hypertext version tries to compensate for the length and density of the original by using differential fonts and large numbers of internal hyperlinks. Also, for the first time, one can now traverse the archival documents in their chronological order, wherever they occur in the text.

The Campardon takes its place alongside the Parfaicts' MEMOIRES POUR SERVIR A L'HISTOIRE DES SPECTACLES DE LA FOIRE (1743), which is already on line. The two of them together are making it possible to provide considerable enrichment to our developing online study, Le Theatre de la Foire a Paris (http://foires.net), where all these resources are freely accessible.

Specialists may want to note that the most recent addition to the site is the full text of the first fairground play attributed to Louis Fuzelier - THESEE, OU LA DEFAITE DES AMAZONES (1701). This is the 16th play text to have been brought to light by the current project and published freely on the web.

Best wishes,

Barry

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Barry Russell
Virtual Library of Theatre: http://vl-theatre.com
School of Languages, Oxford Brookes University UK
br@INWAVE.DEMON.CO.UK


RA (source: Francofil)