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years produced almost a play a year: La Toison d'or (1661), Sertorius (1662), Sophonisbe (1663), Othon (1664), Agésilas (1666), Attila (1667), Tite et Bérénice (1670), Psyché (in collaboration with Molière and Philippe Quinault, 1671), Pulchérie (1672), Suréna (1674). Thus for nearly 40 years in all-continuosly for 20 years froml63o and for nearly 15 years after 1660 - this astonishing production of elegant drama had provided the main entertainment of the French court and of the Parisian middle class and in so doing had created a new art form, with a European reputation (of which Dry den’s Essay of Dramatick Poesy. 1665, is but one witness) and had won for its author an immense personal prestige. If modem research shows Corneille as grasping in the “Querelle” and ungenerous toward his younger rival, it should be remembered that the whole story is not known and that what is known is insignificant beside the fact that he perfected and created a dramatic instrument which could be used, ready-made so to speak, by one of the great tragic poets of modem times, Jean Racine (q.v.). Corneille died in Paris, Oct. 1, 1684. Corneille’s theory of drama, as found in the essays of 1660, is disappointing, since it gives contemporary polemic rather than his own real principles. But it is fairly clear from his practice what those principles were. Time after time he would take a subject which would provide him with a minimum of physical action and almost a maximum of moral or mental conflict. These subjects he found chiefly in Roman and Byzantine history (which was not so unknown to his public as to most modem persons, as the history taught in French schools in his day was ancient history, not French history). All his plays move around a single central crucial point, usually of rivalry in love or war. In all of them the action is conveyed within a strict form; nothing is left to music or physical action, everything is said, elegantly, rhetorically, in the grand style and in Alexandrine verse. This last feature is used with amazing dexterity as an instrument to convey all shades of expression: irony, anger, soliloquy, repartee, epigram. Such a play as Polyeucte has lovely lines (“Honteux attachements de la chair et du monde...”) and equally impressive stichomythy: ‘(lmaginations .-Célestes vérités.Etrange aveuglement.-Éternelles clartés...” which convey a clash, not so much between actors as between concepts. Action in this drama is reaction. It concerns not what is done, but what is resolved, felts, suffered. Its formal principle might be

sáid to be symmetry; presentation, by a poet who was also a lawyer, of one side of the case, then of the other, of one position followed by its opposite. In play after play Corneille uses a dramatic situation leading to a discussion of controversial issues; and it was more than anything else perhaps the skill with which he gave expression to contemporary problems that made so many of his hearers think with Saint-Évremond that “dans la tragédie Corneille ne souffre point d’égal” (“in tragedy Corneille has no equal”) and with Voltaire that he was called “le grand Corneille’ not so much to distinguish him from his brother as from all other men. Seen from a 20th-century vantage point he appears as a master of drama rather than in particular of tragedy. He excels in showing personal and moral forces in conflict rather than in calling up visions of the limits of human endurance. Only in one or two of his masterpieces can he be said to have evoked the real atmosphere of tragedy. But his greater plays are so famous with his own people that some account of their themes should be given here. Le Cid has been called an exciting overture to his work, but it is classical in that it presents not the adventures of the young Cid as in the Spanish source but a single situation created by the young man’s duty to avenge his father against an insult by the father of his beloved Chimène. Hence the “wit,” in the 17th-century sense, in lines that point the claims of honour and of love Rodrigue kills Chimène’s father: Chimène’s demand his life in return. The paradox of pursuing what one loves best is put in lines that have not yet lost their hold on French audiences. Horace presents the combat of the Horatii and the Curiatii as told by Livy (book i, ch. 24) but without the combat. The champions are reduced from six to two, and the father and two women are included to allow a sort of crescendo of possible reactions to war. After the patriot has murdered his pacifist sister, the whole case is argued before the king. Voltaire said that never before had convictions been expressed with such sublimity on the stage. Cinna has been called Corneille’s most perfect dramatic machine; it centress around a conspiracy against Augustus. Cinna himself is a reluctant conspirator, dominated by his violent lover Emilie who is seeking revenge for a murdered father. Augustus chekmatcs the plotters by granting a political pardon instead of violence. The boast of the emperor that he is strong enough to be merciful (“Je suis maître de moi comme de

l’univers”) is a dramatic climax rather than a clue to Corneille’s view of character. In Polyeucle the Christian convert welcomes a martyr’s death (“Je consens ou plutôt j’aspire à ma ruine”) but his wife Pauline, pressed by a former pagan lover Sévère, insists that marriage makes claims as important as those of religion. The two are as irreconcilable as patriotism and pacifism, and the fanatical Polyeucte echoes the fanatical Horace: “Je ne vous connais plus si vous n’êtes chrétienne.” Rodogunes shows the steps whereby ambition brings Cléopatre to crime. She poisons all rival claimants to power and finally herself: “Je fai défait d’un père, et d’un frère, et de moi.” Corneille’s favourite play, it became a storm centre in the 18th century and was attacked by Lessing, who tried to show that its counterpart. Shakespeare’s Richard 111. was morally less objectionable. In Nicomède. a drama of dynastic succession, the forthright prince Mi-

comède fights for the throne and the lady against his weak father Prusaias, a mother-in-law and a half-brother. These contrasts have certain features of comedy and the play was acted by Molière, in 1659 it was thought to suggest the atmosphere of the German occupation, as in 1651 it had been taken as referring to Louis II de Bourbon, prince of Condé. □ Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Willim Bentor-Volume VI, London, 1963