Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage

The Turkish ceremony in “Le Bourgeois gentilhomme” has been popular with audiences for almost 350 years and remains one of the best-known scenes of early modern French theatre. This newly researched volume spotlights the Turkish ceremony in its original technicolor, presenting numerous important discoveries that have never before been published. It shows that even in a field as thoroughly investigated as the collaboration between Molière and Lully at the court of Louis XIV, there is still much new source material to be discovered, and many new connections to be made. As the multidisciplinary essays examine the burlesque Turkish scene from a social, political, textual and iconographic view point they unearth, time and again, flaws, omissions and errors transmitted in earlier scholarship. “Ritual Design” is a must-have volume that sets the record straight.