IDT

The IDT project proposes a multidisciplinary research programme on a novel corpus of preliminary texts of French, Italian and Spanish plays of the 16th and 17th centuries. The series of essays, prefaces and dedications demonstrate the process of institutionalisation of theatre in Europe and the circulation of theatrical practices and ideas in the crucial Renaissance and Classical periods. The text edition and research that it leads to underpin a number of deliverables - Online bibliographical database - Online edition of texts - Dictionnary of theatrical terms - Published volume of selected aspects of the corpus - Scholarly work - International workshops and conferences In the days when modern drama was soaring in Europe, a fruitful exchange kept going on in Italy, France and Spain in the form not so much of lengthy theoretical treatises as of innumerable « prefaces », in which authors discussed the issues of the rules and the power of drama as well as the use of sources (since playwrights in the three countries kept adapting the same matter ). Yet these texts, which are capital for the understanding of Renaissance as well as Classical drama, have largely been overlooked by critics and publishers on account of their being scattered and not easily available. Once they are collected together, they will make up the first major multinational corpus devoted to a specific literary genre. Such a data base, which is moreover supplied with a substantial enlightening critical apparatus that can be accessed thanks to specific means, will be an invaluable instrument for the community of scholars. In the electronic edition, the search for words will provide a brand new illuminating approach to the key notions of dramatic theory, which can at the same time be grasped in their various meanings — by looking up their occurrences in a given textual corpus in one of the languages — and be compared with their linguistic equivalents in the other two languages, unless no corresponding term is available as may be the case. This resource will serve as support to the making-up of an annotated trilingual dictionary of dramatic terms entitled « Le Théâtre au miroir des langues ». What is truly innovative about this dictionary is that the comparative translation of words will be the starting-point of an analytical study highlighting the theatrical specificities of each country — including untranslatable notions — together with correspondences in meaning and common practices in all three countries. Once completed, the work will fill a gap in the existing array of lexicons and dictionaries of the Classical language.