This article explores the relationship between gender and history in Nicolas de Montreux’s historical tragedy La Sophonisbe (1601), specifically how the drama uses the historical female figure of Sophonisbe to negotiate what it means to take part in history. By engaging Walter Benjamin’s notion of the chaste martyr and her affinities with history in the German Trauerspiel, the article draws novel attention to historico‐philosophical elements in Montreux’s drama and begins an analytical exploration of the often noticed but unexplored question in modern scholarship of gender in French humanist drama.

Historical life, as it was conceived at that time, is its content, its true object. In this it is different from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not history, but myth, and Ghosting the past: exploring Mark Antony's ghost as an allegory on history in...

Early modern French dramas c.1550–1660 stage a multitude of female figures. Two of the most popular were the Greek‐Egyptian ruler Cleopatra and the Carthaginian noblewoman Sophonisbe who all in all appear in no less than 13 French tragedies from this period including some of the period's most important ones. In this article we undertake the first comparative and structural investigation of both figures' importance within the corpus by combining computationally assisted social network analysis and traditional close reading. By defining importance quantitatively based on four centrality measurements, we substantiate recent scholarship's highlighting of early modern dramatists' gendered interest and question traditional scholarly notions of protagonism.