The Maid Servant as “The Hole in the Social Cell”: Representations of the maid Francisquina in the Recueil Fossard

This paper offers a new reading of selected woodcuts from the famous Recueil Fossard collection featuring the maid Francisquina in scenes that establish a pictorial record of  Italian commedia dell’arte performers in France during the 1580s. It begins by outlining recent discoveries by different art historians about possible sequencing of a certain  group of 18 of the woodcuts first published by Duchartre and Beijer in 1928.  It then discusses the hypothesis advanced by Peg Katritsky as to the significance of the arrangement of the last five of the woodcuts. My presentation will show how the positioning of the characters, their actions and gestures, and the accompanying dialogue provided in the captions can be read together to create an artist’s rendition of what might have been an act from a typical scenario in which the maid Francisquina is circulated between Harlequin and Pantalone. Although this record of Tristano Martinelli as Harlequin has been noted by several scholars, Francisquina’s role has not been given the same attention. Looking at the woodcuts in sequence reveals how commedia dell’arte scenarios used the maid’s role to critique the new technologies of gender and class coming into existence to support the establishment of the early modern bourgeois household. I suggest that the artist reveals a Francisquina whose self-reflexivity signals to the spectator her awareness that she is, as Cixous named her, “the hole in the social cell.”

See also Women & Canadian Theatre Panel