Jean Yeuwain is a little-known writer from the city of Mons. His Hippolyte, which was not published during his lifetime, has previously been studied in a 1933 critical edition by Gontran Van Severen. However, Van Severen was mainly interested in the history of the Yeuwain family. Mathilde Lamy-Houdry provides a modern edition that makes Yeuwain’s work available to a wider readership and offers a substantial analysis of this early modern translation of Seneca’s Phaedra.

Lamy-Houdry’s well-designed introduction contextualizes Yeuwain’s Hippolyte, showing its place and originality within the rich tradition of translation and imitation of Seneca’s tragedies that developed in sixteenth-century France, beginning with Pierre Grosnet’s 1539 Les tragédies très-éloquentes du grand philosophe Sénèque, and culminating with the works of La Péruse, Garnier, and Brisset. The significance and importance of Yeuwain’s efforts are best understood, the editor shows, in light of the quarrels on the rules and aims of translation that were fostered by the treatises of many a French humanist. Indeed, it appears that Yeuwain is closer in spirit to Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, who promoted Seneca as a model to be imitated along with the great ancient Greek playwrights, than to Peletier du Mans, who deemed the Roman author “ponderous and obscure, although imitable with good judgment.”

Yeuwain’s Hippolyte can be compared to Italian versions of Seneca’s play by Zara (1558), Dolce (1560), and Trapolini (1576), and, naturally, to Garnier’s 1573 Hippolyte. Since we have little information about Yeuwain’s possible connections with the French humanist circles of his time, it is difficult to determine whether he had read Garnier’s Hippolyte. However, Lamy-Houdry mentions, among possible commonalities, the Belgian translator’s use of the adjective dédalizé, which echoes Garnier’s Dedalique, as well as Yeuwain’s attribution of a parœmia to the nurse instead of Phaedra in act 2 of his version. Garnier’s tragedy, Lamy-Houdry reminds us, is an original creation. With its 2,384 lines (compared to Seneca’s 1,280 in Phaedra), its opening monologue recited by Aegeus’s ghost (as well as several other monologues absent from the Roman play), Garnier’s addition of the nurse’s suicide, and his suggestion that Neptune might refuse to fulfill Theseus’s wish, it is first and foremost representative of the type of tragedy conceived by sixteenth-century French humanists. To a lesser extent, Yeuwain’s Hippolyte is a re-creation of Seneca’s Phaedra rather than a faithful translation of the play. Recent criticism has been mixed concerning Yeuwain’s contribution, yet his modern editor shows that his Hippolyte contains several important structural and stylistic innovations. With its 2,226 lines, the Belgian’s version considerably amplifies its Roman model. Yeuwain creates vivid images, restructures the play as needed, and adds original moral maxims. Following the Pléiade poets’ recommendations, he often coins compound words. The style of the play is inconsistent: written in alexandrine verse, it contains many Latinisms and archaisms. Overall, Hippolyte can be read not only as a translation, but also as an interpretation of the Senecan model: as Lamy-Houdry points out, Yeuwain—as opposed to Garnier—is the only French translator who kept the final membra disjecta scene from the Roman play.

Although the editor reminds us that the Belgian translator’s model criminalized mythological protagonists in order to give them a destiny more suitable to the universe of tragedy, and notes that Yeuwain adds a connection between scenes that acknowledges the spectator’s gaze in act 2 of his version, she does not fully address the question of his ambition as a writer. One wonders whether his Hippolyte was conceived mainly as an exercise in translation, rhetoric, and poetry, or as a play to be staged and watched.

This critical edition will allow readers to rediscover an important link in the history of French translations and imitations of Seneca’s Phaedra that culminated with Racine’s famous 1677 tragedy. Lamy-Houdry must be commended for her excellent work of annotation and presentation of Yeuwain’s text. Her notes on the historical and mythological allusions in the play are substantial and enlightening; she also provides a useful glossary and a list of all deviations from the source text in this book that will interest all those involved with studies in early modern translation, poetry, theater, and the history of humanism.