Finding Guns in Early Modern French Plays

This presentation shares a teaching module that asks students to think about violence and guns in early modern French plays. Classical French theater has its corpus of famous swords. But where are the guns? And what can we learn by identifying where firearms are present and where they aren’t in early modern plays in French? This module engages students in using digital tools to quantify and contextualize the presence (and absence) of guns in French plays published in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, drawing on a data set constructed from the Théâtre classique database. Designed for courses in literature and theater (with modalities for teaching in French or in translation), this unit guides students in analyzing the presence of guns in playtexts and in reflecting on the values and violence performed by guns in early modern French theater.