The Drama of Regicide

Abstract

This chapter examines the transcultural response to the first regicide on French soil since Merovingian times: Jacques Clément’s assassination of Henri III on 1 August 1589. The historical details (such as they can be recovered) read as a drama of deception and confusion, culminating in the trial of Clément’s corpse; the procès au cadavre hastily enacted to ensure that the dead villain still underwent legalized torture. The symbolic significance of Clément’s supreme villainy was conveyed to the French and European public via numerous estampes that depicted the scene of the assassination. In England, the regicide constitutes the grim dénouement of Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris: a crowd-pleaser on London’s stage of the 1590s that dramatized twenty years of violence, tyranny, succession, and religious fanaticism in France.