The Queens

Chaurette traces the shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare's theatre and portrayed here in the timelessness of their quest

As Ernst Kantorowicz has said so clearly in The King's Two Bodies, all royal personae exist in two worlds: the private world of their needs and desires; and the public world where they become the emblematic icon of the realm

It is on the ritualized ground between these two worlds where the human drama is seen most clearly in all of its comic and tragic, visceral and political, temporal and metaphysical astonishments

Yet this traditionally male ground has rarely been explored with women's characters, and has even less frequently been presented in the context of the primal mystery it ultimately is - the vision of public majesty in the instant before the death of the private body

"Normand understands implicitly that endings are but beginnings, and so the mystery continues and gathers power in its constant unfolding. Poor shadows. Painted queens. A dream of what we were. A breath. A bubble. I love this play" ~ Peter Hinton

"This is a theatre of allusions, metaphysical playwriting of a literary richness which has yet to find its equal in Québec drama" ~ Robert Lévesque, Le Devoir

First published in English translation by Coach House Press in 1992, The Queens is presented here in a new edition, containing the latest revisions by the author and the translator