Contribution to comedy. of Pierre Corneille

The fame of his “classical tetralogy” has tended to obscure the enormous variety of Corneille’s other drama, and his contribution to the development of French comedy has not always received its proper due. The Roman plays were followed by more tragedies: La Mort de Pompée (performed 1644; The Death of Pompey), Rodogune (performed 1645), which was one of his greatest successes, Théodore (performed 1646), which was his first taste of failure, and Héraclius (performed 1647). But in 1643 Corneille had successfully turned to comedy with Le Menteur (The Liar), following it with the less successful La Suite du Menteur (performed 1645; Sequel to the Liar). Both were lively comedies of intrigue, adapted from Spanish models; and Le Menteur is the one outstanding French comedy before the plays of Molière, Corneille’s young contemporary, who acknowledged its influence on his own work. Le Menteur, indeed, stands in relation to French classical comedy much as Le Cid does to tragedy.

In 1647 Corneille moved with his family to Paris and was at last admitted to the Académie Française, having twice previously been rejected on the grounds of nonresidence in the capital. Don Sanche d’Aragon (performed 1650), Andromède (performed 1650), a spectacular play in which stage machinery was very important, and Nicomède (performed 1651) were all written during the political upheaval and civil war of the period known as the Fronde (1648–53), with Don Sanche in particular carrying contemporary political overtones. In 1651 or 1652 his play Pertharite seems to have been brutally received, and for the next eight years Corneille wrote nothing for the theatre, concentrating instead on a verse translation of St. Thomas à Kempis’ Imitatio Christi (Imitation of Christ), which he completed in 1656, and also working at critical discourses on his plays that were to be included in a 1660 edition of his collected works.

Years of declining power.

Corneille did not turn again to the theatre until 1659, when, with the encouragement of the statesman and patron of the arts Nicolas Fouquet, he presented Oedipe. For the next 14 years he wrote almost one play a year, including Sertorius (performed 1662) and Attila (performed 1667), both of which contain an amount of violent and surprising incident.

Corneille’s last plays, indeed, were closer in spirit to his works of the 1640s than to his classical tragedies. Their plots were endlessly complicated, their emotional climate close to that of tragicomedy. Other late plays include La Toison d’or (performed 1660; The Golden Fleece), his own Sophonisbe (performed 1663), Othon (performed 1664), Agésilas (performed 1666), and Pulchérie (performed 1672). In collaboration with Molière and Philippe Quinault he wrote Psyché (1671), a play employing music, incorporating ballet sequences, and striking a note of lyrical tenderness. A year earlier, however, he had presented Tite et Bérénice, in deliberate contest with a play on the same subject by Racine. Its failure indicated the public’s growing preference for the younger playwright.

Corneille’s final play was Suréna (performed 1674), which showed an uncharacteristic delicacy and sentimental appeal. After this he was silent except for some beautiful verses, which appeared in 1676, thanking King Louis XIV for ordering the revival of his plays. Although not in desperate poverty, Corneille was by no means wealthy; and his situation was further embarrassed by the intermittent stoppage of a state pension that had been granted by Richelieu soon after the appearance of Horace in 1640. Corneille died in his house on the rue d’Argenteuil, Paris, and was buried in the church of Saint-Roch. No monument marked his tomb until 1821.

Legacy

Corneille did not have to wait for “the next age” to do him justice. The cabal that had led the attack on Le Cid had no effect on the judgment of the public, and the great men of his time were his fervent admirers. Balzac praised him; Molière acknowledged him as his master and as the foremost of dramatists; Racine is said to have assured his son that Corneille made verses “a hundred times more beautiful” than his own. It was left to the 18th century, largely because of the criticisms of Voltaire, to exalt Racine at Corneille’s expense; but the Romantic critics of the late 18th century began to restore Corneille to his true rank.

It cannot be denied, however, that Corneille signed much verse that is dull to mediocre. Molière acknowledged this fact by saying: “My friend Corneille has a familiar who inspires him with the finest verses in the world. But sometimes the familiar leaves him to shift for himself, and then he fares very badly.” But the importance of his pioneer work in the development of French classical theatre cannot be denied; and, if a poet is to be judged by his best things, Corneille’s place among the great dramatic poets is beyond question.

Not only did Pierre Corneille produce, for nearly 40 years in all, an astonishing variety of plays to entertain the French court and the Parisian middle class: he also prepared the way for a dramatic theatre that was the envy of Europe throughout the 17th century. His own contribution to this theatre, moreover, was that of master as much as of pioneer. Corneille’s excellence as a playwright has long been held to lie in his ability to depict personal and moral forces in conflict. In play after play, dramatic situations lead to a finely balanced discussion of controversial issues. Willpower and self-mastery are glorified in many of his heroes, who display a heroic energy in meeting or mastering the dilemma that they face; but Corneille was less interested in exciting his audiences to pity and fear through visions of the limits of man’s agony and endurance than he was in stirring them to admiration of his heroes. Thus, only a few of his plays deal in tragic emotion. Nevertheless, because his most famous work, Le Cid, anticipated the tragic intensity of plays by Jean Racine, his younger contemporary, Corneille has often been referred to as the “father” of French classical tragedy; and his contribution to the rise of comedy has, in comparison, often been overlooked. From a 20th-century vantage point, however, it is as a master of drama that he appears, rather than of tragedy in particular.