Jean de La Taille

Jean de La Taille (born c. 1540, Bondaroy, Fr.—died c. 1607, Bondaroy) was a poet and dramatist who, through his plays and his influential treatise on the art of tragedy, helped to effect the transition from native French drama to classical tragedy.

While studying in Paris La Taille came under the influence, shown in his minor poems, of Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay. His chief poems, prosaic but forceful, are a satire, Le Courtisan retiré (“The Retired Courtier”), and Le Prince nécessaire, a portrait of an ideal monarch.

A collection of his works appeared in 1572, including his tragedy Saül le Furieux (1562) and De l’art de la tragédie, the most important piece of French dramatic criticism of its time. La Taille wrote for the limited audience of a lettered aristocracy, depreciated the native drama, and insisted on the Senecan model. In his preface to the collection of works he enunciates the unities of place, time, and action; he maintains that each act should have a unity of its own and that the scenes composing it should be continuous, and he objects to death on the stage as unconvincing and requires as a tragic subject an incident that is moving and developed by skillful intrigue. Although in Saül he did not completely carry out his program, the action is exciting and the principal character ably developed.

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A second collection (1573) included a lesser tragedy, La Famine, ou les Gabéonites, neatly plagiarizing Seneca’s Troades, and two comedies, Le Négromant, translated freely from Ariosto, and Les Corrivaux (“The Rivals”), remarkable for its colloquial prose dialogue. La Taille continued to write minor prose works, but the attribution to him of the political pamphlet Histoire abrégée des singeries de la Ligue (“A Short History of the Antics of the League”), often published with the Satire Ménippée, is questionable.