The body and the body politic in Robert Garnier's Roman plays

Three of Robert Garnier's tragedies tell stories from Rome's civil wars. These "Roman" plays, according to Garnier himself, present an appropriate example for France because of her own civil conflict. Rome's story, told in Porcie, Cornelie and Marc Antoine, permits Garnier to teach lessons which are particularly apt for his century and in a dramatic form which reflects the new ideals of the Renaissance.;This study seeks to discover the reasons for Garnier's portrayal of these Romans, not as distinct individuals but as members of the body politic who contain within themselves equal shares of their nation's collective strengths and weaknesses and who share equally in the collective experience of Rome as it is torn apart by civil discord. Whether the title character serves as a metaphor for a personified Rome or as a metonym, one member who contains both the individual and collective qualities of the nation, Garnier's use of body imagery reveals that he did not view these Roman citizens as distinct from their peers but as members of one community, one body whose members must cooperate for their common good. Garnier's depiction of Rome and Romans shows what happens to the body politic and its individual members when they do not cooperate.;This study begins by examining the allegory of the body, especially as it was used in political propaganda, to reinforce the idea that the body politic shares the experience of the human bodies of the characters. The study continues through a brief examination of the implications of this allegory for Garnier's portrayal of Rome and Romans and concludes with detailed analysis of the imagery in each play and the particular lessons Garnier hopes to teach his contemporaries.;But, although his tragedies are written in French and are based on classical sources, they still resemble medieval allegories because the characters are not any more psychologically complex than those in morality plays. Each of the Romans whose stories he tells can be viewed as a representative of the state, a sort of "Every Roman," and their personal experiences in the course of Rome's civil wars are representative of the Empire's political crises.