Louis-Charles Caigniez’s Le Jugement de Salomon (1802) and Le Triomphe de David (1805), and the Genre of ‘Biblical Melodrama’

ABSTRACT: In the early nineteenth century, French playwright Louis-Charles Caigniez wrote two melodramas based on popular stories from the Old Testament which challenged conventional approaches to literary Bible adaptation at the time. In Le Jugement de Salomon (1802), Caigniez dramatises the narrative of the Judgement of Solomon (1 Kings 3:16–28) about two women who claim to be the mother of the same infant, culminating in King Solomon’s wise solution to this riddle. Le Triomphe de David (1805), which partly draws on Vittorio Alfieri’s tragedy Saul (1782), deals with the rivalry between the anointed David and his predecessor and antagonist, King Saul. This presentation argues that Caigniez's plays revisit the tensions between Old Testament subject and dramatic form and utilise the stories surrounding Solomon and David for entertainment by sensationalising emotion, thereby removing the relevant narratives from their original functional context to establish the genre of ‘biblical melodrama’.

Sarah Fengler is a doctoral student in Modern Languages at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Jesus College, University of Oxford. She studied Comparative Literature, Scandinavian Studies, and Political Science at Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany), with semesters abroad at the University of Bergen (Norway) and Cornell University (USA). In the academic year 2023/24, she is a guest researcher at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Her doctoral thesis focuses on European Old Testament tragedies in the Age of Enlightenment.