SOURCE: "Providence by Indirection in Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy," in Themes in Drama, Vol. 5, 1983, pp. 39–51.

In the following excerpt, Gethner discusses the use of moral and religious conventions in seventeenth-century tragicomedy.

The seventeenth century, called the golden age of French drama, was not conducive to the development of religious theatre. Except for two brief periods of interest in the 1640s and 1690s, plays on religious themes virtually disappeared, and the handful of acknowledged masterpieces produced during those few years failed to initiate a national tradition. At the same time, France produced some of her most brilliant religious writers, and general interest in spiritual matters is known to have been intense. This astonishing development had, to be sure, quite a number of causes, such as the Church's hostility to all forms of theatre, increasing sophistication of the audiences with a marked effect on popular taste, and the proscription in classical theory...