With the Great Discoveries of the Renaissance, Europeans encountered new peoples whose appearance, beliefs and lifestyles were so divergent they came to embody the absolute Other: the negative, the antagonist of the then white and Christian Europeans. Theater came to offer the opportunity for those who did not travel to meet this Other, and it is this encounter that we study here, within the French theatrical repertoire, for it was not only a dramatic situation by definition, but became equally an anthropological one, since it endeavoured to summon forth the representation of other continents on stage. Theater, however, is only an artifice, and on stage, the Other is not real since it is created by French playwrights and performed in French by French actors, for a French public. We will study this encounter from the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre to the French Revolution, two critical events in the history of France marked by the violence of religious and social alterity, and which correspond to two periods of renewal for the dramatic arts. We will examine the identity of this strange foreigner, so socially, politically and geographically removed, and how theater captures this most spectacular of Others. Exogenous characters becoming on stage truly multifaceted figures, we will ask whether this approach is not in fact to reach out to the Other with the sole purpose of questioning what is to be oneself. If the Amerindian is savage, is it not to reinforce one's civility? If the Moor is cruel, is it not to be reassured that one is not? Would the Other not simply be a means to discuss oneself?
