Abstract
Jean-Marie Maguin passed away on the morning of Saturday 14 May 2022. Born on 31 January 1943, he was Professor Emeritus of Elizabethan Studies at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 as well as a long-time co-general editor of Cahiers Élisabéthains, founded in 1972 by Antoine Demadre.
Jean-Marie co-edited the journal first with Jean Fuzier from 1989 to 1994, then with Charles Whitworth from 1994 to 2001. Cahiers owes him a debt of immense gratitude for his indefatigable will to improve the journal and steadfast efforts to expand its international dimension, and for his leadership and thoroughness as a general editor. Many will remember him for his collegial, amiable, and humble manner in which he worked alongside his co-editors and the entire team. His activities naturally expanded beyond the journal itself (although he had a real knack for finding new and exciting authors for Cahiers everywhere he went). He was a resolute supporter of the Société Française Shakespeare, founded in 1975, for which he served as treasurer for 10 years before becoming its president from 1997 to 2003.
Recruited in 1967 at Université de Montpellier, Jean-Marie co-founded the Centre d’études et de recherches élisabéthaines (CÉRÉ) with Antoine Demadre and Jean Fuzier in 1970, when the university split into three faculties including Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, and at a time when research centres were flourishing in French universities. In 1977, he defended his seminal Doctorat d’État, or professorial thesis, on ‘La Nuit dans le théâtre de Shakespeare et de ses prédécesseurs’ [Night in the theatre of Shakespeare and his predecessors], published in 1980 and which articulated the Shakespearean night scenes with their classical precedents and their medieval interactions, thus anticipating current discussions that challenge the divide between the medieval and Renaissance periods. Vigorous and determined, he and Fuzier worked tirelessly to have CÉRÉ officially associated with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), ultimately succeeding in 1980. In 1994, CÉRÉ became the Centre d’études et de recherche sur la Renaissance anglaise (CERRA), before merging in 2003 with the Centre d’études du XVIIIe siècle (CEDIM), also associated with CNRS, to become the Institut de recherche sur la Renaissance, l’âge Classique et les Lumières (IRCL).
During his year-long appointment in 1970 as a Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, Jean-Marie forged close links with the Shakespeare Institute, co-creating with Fuzier the annual ‘Montpellier-Stratford’ seminar, which is still running strong to this day. For over half a century, the spring seminar has introduced generations of students to early modern theatre in performance and to the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), helping students discover theatrical practice through workshops with RSC artists, but also acquainting them with the specialised activity of theatre reviewing, their experiences reflected in the dozens of collective reviews found in the pages of Cahiers over the decades up to the present day. Members of CÉRÉ, and later, CERRA, remember the iconic blue Renault 16, in which he used to transport students to the seminar, returning with a boot full of books, the fruits of his judicious bargain-hunting in the bookshops of Stratford. The books would then enrich the shelves of the Montpellier research centre library. A magnificent small-scale model of an Elizabethan theatre made by the students of the Master's seminar he taught with Fuzier still stands in its glass case in the halls of IRCL.
In parallel to this seminar, Jean-Marie set up and organised a 10-day ERASMUS course at the Shakespeare Institute that took place from 1990 to 1997, with a consortium of nine European universities coordinated by Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. This programme paved the way for a landmark ERASMUS agreement between Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and the University of Birmingham – an exchange that continues to flourish in spite of Brexit.
Jean-Marie's dedication to his students was exemplary. Teaching at all levels in the fields of literature and translation, he was intensely involved in the preparation of the agrégation, or the competitive examination for civil service in the French public education system. His seminars, which seamlessly integrated colleagues and students, were places of discovery, investigation, innovation, transmission, and highly fruitful exchanges.
Among the many works of this passionate and prolific researcher, besides of course his writings for Cahiers, we should mention the biography of Shakespeare that Jean-Marie co-authored with his wife Angela and published in 1996, as well as the two volumes of Théâtre élisabéthain, co-edited with Line Cottegnies and François Laroque and published in the ‘La Pléiade’ series by Gallimard in 2009. In 2017, he published Shakespeare and the Rhetoric of Elocution, which explored his lifelong interests in the relationship between the Elizabethan dramatic corpus and the stage as well as the semiotic, poetic, and rhetorical dimensions of plays.
Jean-Marie and Angela retired in 2001, but both maintained a keen interest in Cahiers, with contributions on the page and behind the scenes, and in the activities of IRCL. He took part in the conference/festival ‘Night Scenes’ in 2014, the proceedings of which appeared the following year in the journal Arrêt sur Scène/Scene Focus. He also participated in the social outreach programme ‘A Year with Shakespeare’, which celebrated the quadricentennial of Shakespeare's death in 2016. He willingly lent himself to the interviews we requested between 2019 and 2021 on the history of CÉRÉ and CERRA, within the framework of the ‘Hépistéa’ project led by Anne Page and Sophie Vallas of the LERMA research centre at Université d’Aix-Marseille.
Jean-Marie's intellectual rigour, his remarkable erudition, his visionary imagination, and his extraordinary strength and energy were truly admirable. We at Cahiers will miss his jovial companionship, his sometimes-caustic humour, his sense of hospitality, and his willingness to pass on his exceptional knowledge.
Our affectionate thoughts go to Jean-Marie's wife and loving accomplice Angela, his children, and grandchildren.
The Cahiers Élisabéthains editorial team