Tennis Courts in Seventeenth-Century
Paris
Three of the theatres featured here on this website were housed
in buildings that were originally tennis courts (jeux de paume):
the Théâtre du Marais, the Hôtel
du Guénégaud, and the first Théâtre Français.
For this reason, it is important to understand a little bit about this type
of structure, which is so different from the modern tennis court. The game
of tennis was exceedingly popular in late-medieval France, and by the early
seventeenth century there were at least two hundred tennis courts in Paris
alone. These walled structures were built in roofed and unroofed forms.
The ready availability of these buildings and the ease with which they might
be converted into performance spaces made them very attractive to travelling
companies working in Paris. Specific information about the tennis courts
used by troupes such as Moliere's (which played at the Jeu de Paume de l'Etoile
in the late 1650s, for example) or others converted permanently into theatres
is scarce. However, tthe general size and features of these buildings may
be derived from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books and engravings.
Despite this general information, it is certain that individual tennis courts
differed one from another in detail, and so the model featured here is hypothetical
and not connected with any specific seventeenth-century tennis court.
*Model
by Christa Williford, after research by Jan Clarke and David Thomas
