Undead Dindenault: economics, theatre, and economic theatre in Rabelais’s Quart livre and beyond

Abstract

This article is primarily concerned with the Dindenault episode (chapters V-VIII) of François Rabelais’s Quart livre, which deals with economic and theatrical themes simultaneously. While previous studies have tackled these themes separately, I outline how they ought to be considered in tandem and, indeed, rely on one another for significance. I argue that in the Dindenault episode, Rabelais’s use of common theatrical structures and motifs serves as a stage upon which to mount socio-economic critique, constituting a performance of theatrical economics, in the context of a broader example of economic theatre. I then turn to one of the nineteenth-century afterlives of Rabelais’s texts – Théodore Labarre’s and Henri Trianon’s 1855 opera Pantagruel – claiming that the interdependence of the Dindenault scene’s economic and theatrical themes is retroactively confirmed by its move into one of its ‘downstream contexts’: the shepherd’s scandalous afterlife on the musical stage of Second Empire France.