Pierre Corneille (
French: [pjɛːʁ kɔʁ.nɛj]; 6 June 1606 – 1 October 1684) was a French
tragedian, and one of the three great seventeenth-century French
dramatists, along with
Molière and
Racine.
As a young man, he earned the valuable patronage of
Cardinal Richelieu,
who was trying to promote classical tragedy along formal lines, but
later quarrelled with him, especially over his best-known play
Le Cid about a medieval Spanish warrior, which was denounced by the newly-formed
Académie française for breaching the
unities. He continued to write well-received tragedies for nearly forty years.
Coat of arms of the Corneille family, dating back to 1637
Biography
Early years
Corneille was born at
Rouen, France, to Marthe le Pesant de Boisguilbert and Pierre Corneille, a distinguished lawyer.
[1] His younger brother,
Thomas Corneille, also became a noted playwright. He was given a rigorous
Jesuit education at the then named
Collège de Bourbon[2] which has been known as the
Lycée Pierre-Corneille
since 1873. At 18 he began to study law but his practical legal
endeavors were largely unsuccessful. Corneille’s father secured two
magisterial posts for him with the Rouen department of Forests and
Rivers. During his time with the department, he wrote his first play. It
is unknown exactly when he wrote it, but the play, the
comedy Mélite,
surfaced when Corneille brought it to a group of traveling actors in
1629. The actors approved of the work and made it part of their
repertoire. The play was a success in Paris and Corneille began writing
plays on a regular basis. He moved to Paris in the same year and soon
became one of the leading playwrights of the French stage. His early
comedies, starting with
Mélite, depart from the French farce
tradition by reflecting the elevated language and manners of fashionable
Parisian society. Corneille describes his variety of comedy as "une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens" ("a painting of the
conversation of the gentry"). His first true
tragedy is
Médée, produced in 1635.
Les Cinq Auteurs
The year 1634 brought more attention to Corneille. He was selected to write verses for the
Cardinal Richelieu’s visit to Rouen. The Cardinal took notice of Corneille and selected him to be among
Les Cinq Auteurs ("The Five Poets"; also translated as "the society of the five authors"). The others were
Guillaume Colletet,
Boisrobert,
Jean Rotrou, and
Claude de L'Estoile.
The five were selected to realize Richelieu's vision of a new kind of
drama that emphasized virtue. Richelieu would present ideas, which the
writers would express in dramatic form. However, the Cardinal's demands
were too restrictive for Corneille, who attempted to innovate outside
the boundaries defined by Richelieu. This led to contention between
playwright and employer. After his initial contract ended, Corneille
left
Les Cinq Auteurs and returned to Rouen.
Querelle du Cid
In the years directly following this break with Richelieu, Corneille produced what is considered his finest play.
Le Cid (
al sayyid in Arabic; roughly translated as "The Lord") is based on the play
Mocedades del Cid (1621) by
Guillem de Castro. Both plays were based on the legend of
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (nicknamed "El Cid Campeador"), a military figure in
Medieval Spain.
The original 1637 edition of the play was subtitled a
tragicomedy, acknowledging that it intentionally defies the classical
tragedy/
comedy distinction. Even though
Le Cid was an enormous popular success, it was the subject of a heated argument over the norms of dramatic practice, known as the "
Querelle du Cid" or "The Quarrel of Le Cid". Cardinal Richelieu's
Académie française acknowledged the play's success, but determined that it was defective, in part because it did not respect the
classical unities
of time, place, and action (Unity of Time stipulated that all the
action in a play must take place within a 24-hour time-frame; Unity of
Place, that there must be only one setting for the action; and Unity of
Action, that the plot must be centred on a single conflict or problem).
The newly formed
Académie was a body that asserted state control over cultural activity. Although it usually dealt with efforts to standardize the
French language, Richelieu himself ordered an analysis of
Le Cid.
Accusations of immorality were leveled at the play in the form of a
famous pamphlet campaign. These attacks were founded on the classical
theory that the theatre was a site of moral instruction. The Académie's
recommendations concerning the play are articulated in
Jean Chapelain's
Sentiments de l'Académie française sur la tragi-comédie du Cid (1638). Even the prominent writer
Georges de Scudéry harshly criticized the play in his
Observations sur le Cid
(1637). The intensity of this "war of pamphlets" was heightened
severely by Corneille's boastful poem Excuse À Ariste, in which he
rambled and boasted about his talents, while Corneille claimed no other
author could be a rival. These poems and pamphlets were made public, one
after the other, as once "esteemed" playwrights traded slanderous
blows. At one point, Corneille took several shots at criticizing author
Jean Mairet's family and lineage. Scudéry, a close friend of Mariet at
the time, did not stoop to Corneille's level of "distastefulness", but
instead continued to pillory Le Cid and its violations. Scudéry even
stated of Le Cid that, "almost all of the beauty which the play contains
is plagiarized."
This "war of pamphlets" eventually influenced Richelieu to call upon
the Académie française to analyze the play. In their final conclusions,
the Academy ruled that even though Corneille had attempted to remain
loyal to the unity of time, "Le Cid" broke too many of the unities to be
a valued piece of work.
The controversy, coupled with the Academy's ruling proved too much
for Corneille, who decided to return to Rouen. When one of his plays was
reviewed unfavorably, Corneille was known to withdraw from public life.
He remained publicly silent for some time; privately, however, he was
said to be "troubled and obsessed by the issues, making numerous
revisions to the play."
Response to the Querelle du Cid
After a hiatus from the theater, Corneille returned in 1640. The
Querelle du Cid caused Corneille to pay closer attention to classical dramatic rules. This was evident in his next plays, which were
classical tragedies,
Horace (1640, dedicated to
Richelieu),
Cinna (1643), and
Polyeucte (1643). These three plays and
Le Cid
are collectively known as Corneille's "Classical Tetralogy". Corneille
also responded to the criticisms of the Académie by making multiple
revisions to
Le Cid to make it closer to the conventions of classical tragedy. The 1648, 1660, and 1682 editions were no longer subtitled "
tragicomedy", but "tragedy".
Corneille’s popularity grew and by the mid 1640s, the first
collection of his plays was published. Corneille married Marie de
Lampérière in 1641. They had seven children together. In the mid to late
1640s, Corneille produced mostly tragedies,
La Mort de Pompée (
The Death of Pompey, performed 1644),
Rodogune (performed 1645),
Théodore (performed 1646), and
Héraclius (performed 1647). He also wrote one comedy in this period,
Le Menteur (
The Liar, 1644).
In 1652, the play
Pertharite
met with poor critical reviews and a disheartened Corneille decided to
quit the theatre. He began to focus on an influential verse translation
of the
Imitation of Christ by
Thomas à Kempis,
which he completed in 1656. After an absence of nearly eight years,
Corneille was persuaded to return to the stage in 1659. He wrote the
play
Oedipe, which was favored by
Louis XIV. In the next year, Corneille published
Trois discours sur le poème dramatique (
Three Discourses on Dramatic Poetry), which were, in part, defenses of his style. These writings can be seen as Corneille’s response to the
Querelle du Cid.
He simultaneously maintained the importance of classical dramatic rules
and justified his own transgressions of those rules in
Le Cid. Corneille argued the
Aristotelian
dramatic guidelines were not meant to be subject to a strict literal
reading. Instead, he suggested that they were open to interpretation.
Although the relevance of classical rules was maintained, Corneille
suggested that the rules should not be so tyrannical that they stifle
innovation.
Later plays
Even though Corneille was prolific after his return to the stage,
writing one play a year for the 14 years after 1659, his later plays did
not have the same success as those of his earlier career. Other writers
were beginning to gain popularity. In 1670 Corneille and
Jean Racine,
one of his dramatic rivals, were challenged to write plays on the same
incident. Each playwright was unaware that the challenge had also been
issued to the other. When both plays were completed, it was generally
acknowledged that Corneille’s
Tite et Bérénice (1671) was inferior to Racine’s play (
Bérénice).
Molière was also prominent at the time and Corneille even composed the
comedy Psyché (1671) in collaboration with him (and
Philippe Quinault). Most of the plays that Corneille wrote after his return to the stage were tragedies. They included
La Toison d'or (fr) (
The Golden Fleece, 1660),
Sertorius (1662),
Othon (1664),
Agésilas (1666), and
Attila (1667).
Corneille’s final play was the tragedy
Suréna (1674). After this, he retired from the stage for the final time and died at his home in Paris in 1684. His grave in the
Église Saint-Roch went without a monument until 1821.
Works
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La Place royale, 1637 edition.
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L'Illusion comique, 1639 edition.
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Sophonisbe, 1663 edition.
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E-texts
See also
References
Further reading
- Ekstein, Nina. Corneille's Irony. Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 2007.
- Harrison, Helen. Pistoles/Paroles: Money and Language in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy. Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 1996.
- Hubert, J. D. Corneille's Performative Metaphors. Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 1997.
- Nelson, Robert J. Corneille: His Heroes and Their Worlds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963.
- Yarrow, P.J. Corneille. London: Macmillan & Co., 1963.
External links
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Works by Pierre Corneille
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Media related to Pierre Corneille at Wikimedia Commons
French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Pierre Corneille
Quotations related to Pierre Corneille at Wikiquote
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