Scrambled Astronomy in Fatouville’s French Scenes for Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune

Abstract

ABSTRACT:In Paris in 1684, Louis XIV’s troupe of commedia dell’arte performers staged scenes in French alongside their improvised Italian-language comedy routines in Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune [Harlequin, Emperor in the Moon]. The playwright Anne Mauduit de Fatouville composed and contributed these scenes, appropriating the era’s vocabulary of astronomy. These scenes take up, scramble up, and redeploy contentious ideas about the moon and stars in a satirical attack on astrology and pedantic stargazers. Fatouville’s writing, coupled with standout performances by actors like Domenico Biancolelli, helped make the production an immense success. This article suggests that the show’s achievement also grew out of three main comedic strategies that it used to create a singular psychological impact on its first audiences. These theatrical devices led certain viewers to confront, laugh at, and temporarily repress anxiety about possible omens in the starry sky, and imagined extraterrestrials lurking on the moon.