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Abstract

As the previous chapter has shown, our knowledge about the performance of tragedies in seventeenth-century France is confined in the main to Paris, with one principal theatre at the beginning and another towards the end of the century, and at no time more than two playing tragedy with any regularity. Since we know little about the repertory and acting conditions of itinerant companies working the provinces and even less about those who came to see their plays, it is on the evidence of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, supplemented, where appropriate, by details of the Palais-Royal theatre where Molière’s troupe were the main performers, that we have to rely for information about theatre audiences.