Background: 17 th Century French Classicism

10.1.1. France in the 17^th century

As Queen Elizabeth I was renowned for her relative tolerance towards both Catholics and Protestants during her long reign (keeping, for example, at limbo until her death in 1603, the infamous “Lambeth Articles”, in which Calvinists were wishing to introduce the dogma of pre-destination into Anglicanism), in 1598 Henry IV of France (“Henry of Navarre”, reigning between 1589-1610; who declared that Paris was “worth a mass” but remained a Protestant at heart, and was cruelly assassinated by Jesuits in 1610) passed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, putting, for a while, an end to the religious wars in France between 1562-1598, and granting religious and civil liberties to Protestants. Though the Edict was officially revoked (by Louis XIV) only in 1685, what followed, after 1610, was the slow establishment of a totalitarian regime in terms if religion and politics, yet in many ways it was also a kind of “golden age”

for science, philosophy and literature, often associated with the name of Cardinal Richelieu, who was, as the principal minister of Louis XIII, in (absolute) power between 1624 and 1642, destroying the influence of the Huguenots and, for a while, making France the principal political force in Europe. Though, after Richelieu’s death, “universal peace” was disturbed, in two waves (1648-49, 1650-53), by the famous “fronde” (‘sling’: the insurgent parliamentarians likened to saucy schoolboys with slings) against the ministry of Cardinal Mazarin and Anne of Austria in the reign of Louis XIV (roi soleil, the Sun King, 1638-1715, reigning betw. 1643-1715, effective ruler from 1661), France, in the middle of the century, could witness to the emergence of a ‘literary audience’ and a kind of consensus. While in England the theatres were closed in 1642 and, until 1660, a Puritan-Protestant absolutism (Oliver Cromwell) ruled after a decaying period during the reigns of James I and Charles I, in France this is the century of “literary saloons” (as, for example, the Marquise (marchioness) Rambouvillet’s “blue room” from the 1620s, a great fan of Italian and Spanish literature), the founding of the French Academy (in 1635 by Richelieu, assembling a group of important writers as well – in England the Royal Academy was chartered only in 1660 by Charles II), of literary journals (such as the Mercure galent, edited by Thomas Corneille, Pierre Corneille’s brother, also a playwright), and of the establishment of certain norms. One of the most important documents of this norm is the Remarques sur la langue française [Remarks on the French Language] by Vaugelas in 1647, providing the first normative grammar of the French language, authorised and protected by the Academy. Thus, debates about tragedy, such as the famous “Le Cid-dispute”, initiated by Richelieu himself, and theoretical discussions of tragedy in general, was part and parcel of an age greatly concerned with norms on the one hand, and deeply interested in questions of strength, will and discipline as the highest human values, on the other.

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9.1.2. Background: Renaissance drama in France

The French Renaissance inherited a kind of drama which was a strange mixture of sermons and farce (the word farce coming from the French verb farcir, ‘to stuff, to interpolate passages’): serious stories, such as e.g. The Acts of the Apostles (1452-1478), combining allegory, scholastic debate and lament, were often accompanied by farcical scenes, verging on vulgarity. In 1548, the Parlement de Paris even banned the performance of all mystery plays, objecting to the burlesque quality of religious drama. In France, Humanists had access to classical Greek and Latin drama (Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca) and they translated Greek tragedy into Latin (François Tissard, 1450?-1500?, George Buchanan, 1506-1582, etc.) to emphasise the gravity and dignity of classical drama in opposition to the shapeless, popular dramas of the Middle Ages. In 1537 Lazare de Baïf even translated Sophocles’ Electra into French. The result was dramas with religious themes, but in their form they mirrored classical tragedy, especially Seneca (e.g. Buchanan’s Jephthes sive votum [Jephthah, or the Vow, 1539?1544?] and the remarks of Donatus on the difference betw. comedy and tragedy, yet Aristotle’s Poetics is not available to French Humanists till 1561). Etienne Jodelle (1532-1573) not only composed the first tragedy in French (Cleópâtre captive [Cleopatra Captured, 1552]) but in a book called The Defence and Illustration of the French Language (1549) he even argued that tragedy and comedy should be restored to their original dignity. The first four acts of the Cleopatra-play are written in alexandrines (a metre becoming compulsory for later tragedies – an iambic line of six feet [12 or 13 syllables], often applied in rhyming couplets), the remainder (Cleo’s death, Act V) in decasyllabic verse. Antony is only a ghost (appearing at the beginning of the play) and the tragedy closely adheres to the unity of place, time (one day) and action – Jodelle in facts treats what Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra will put into the 5^th act. There is not much conflict, not even between Octavius (Ceasar – Augustus) and Cleopatra, rather the play is Cleopatra’s postponement of her deed (without even inner conflict, i.e. hesitation). Though the Chorus refers to Cleopatra’s “fault” (in Act II), which is basically pride, no attempt is made at interpreting this flaw as the source of her fate, the source of her tragedy.

In 1561 Scaliger published Poetices libri septem [Seven Books of the Poetics] which brought Aristotle’s Poetics into the literary consciousness of the times. Interestingly, however, Scaliger’s brief and fragmentary remarks on tragedy were read as a justification of the already existing practices of dramatic composition instead of bringing about revolutionary changes.

Scaliger – notoriously – reproduces Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in Greek, yet he provides – in Latin – not a translation but his own definition: “A tragedy is the imitation of the adversity of a distinguished man; it employs the form of action, presents a disastrous denouement, and is expressed in impressive metrical language”. Ironically, both Jodelle or even Donatus would subscribe to this definition. So the discovery of Aristotle (though Scaliger also defines peripeteia and lists the six parts of tragedy according to Aristotle, and even mentions catharsis, though negatively, since, for him, not all subjects will produce it) at that time contributed little to the formulation of French classical drama to come. The principal playwrights of the time, ironically mostly Protestant Humanists, avoiding love-themes and continuing to dramatise Biblical stories (the stories of David and Saul were especially popular), interpreted Aristotle highly selectively in their prefaces to their tragedies; André de Rivaudeau (1540?-1580) insists on the unity of time but little else; Jacques Grévin (1538-1570) only remarks that he made his chorus speak in prose instead allowing it to sing because this makes the play stylistically more even, and it is only Jean de La Taille (1540?-1608) who discusses dramatic technique in detail in his De l’Art de la tragédie [On the Art of Tragedy, 1572?]. He insists on the necessity of the unities of place and time, he claims that tragedy should be devoid of allegorical figures and “edifying” theological arguments and, further, he

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insists that the stories of Abraham or Goliath are not fit for tragedy, since the hero should neither be too virtuous, nor too wicked. Even Robert Garnier (1545?-1590), the most talented writer of 16th c. tragedies not effect significant changes in the concept of tragedy. (Garnier’s Marc Antoine [Mark Antony] (1578) was translated into English in 1592, which Shakespeare also knew.)

10.1.3. French Classicist Tragedy

The term “classicism” is usually applied to French writers who reached maturity between 1660 and 1700 (Moliére set up his theatre in the Théâtre du Petit Bourbon in 1659, his mature plays came in the 60s – Tartuffe was produced in 1669) and who sought transparency, symmetry, and discipline in form, clarity and simplicity in expression and were interested in psychological and moral action. However, the golden age of the French stage began around 1630 and the classical “spirit” was born, through the early works of Corneille especially, around this date, too.

Although secular theatre was very much alive in Paris since 1548, the first permanent professional company of clowns and tragedians called “the King’s Players” were only established, in the Hôtel de Bourgogne, in 1629, soon to be followed by a second permanent group, led by the actor Montdory, in the enclosed tennis court of the Marais district in 1634.

These theatres were rather shabby: the Hôtel de Bourgogne was about 30 metres long and 16 metres wide; there was nothing in it but a gallery around three sides, a pit with no chairs and a stage of about 12 metres in depth. The visibility was very poor for most of the audience and it became customary to buy seats on the stage, which was very expensive. Yet, despite such discomforts, the theatre became an established institution: Cardinal Richelieu, who wrote plays himself, became the patron of the Marais theatre; he granted permission to – and kept an eye on – a number of playwrights, he organised police protection and made it respectable to attend the theatre. Previously, the audience was chiefly male and violent, consisting mostly of students, artisans and riotous soldiers; now in the lodges and galleries, the ‘polite society’, bourgeois and noble, male and female, made its appearance, ready for the analysis of delicately shaded feelings, for psychological realism and depth instead of the fantasies of the romance-tradition The new society was schooled on Italian and Spanish literature and especially on the emerging French lyrical and dramatic pastoral tradition (the Italian Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarini, the French Honoré d’Urfé and Racan). And from 1628 to 1631, Paris was witnessing to a kind of “theatre warfare” and a clearly identifiable doctrinal quarrel about the aim and form of drama, especially of tragedy.

The so-called irregular plays were still very much in fashion, with a great number of characters, lots of complications, noisy, bloody, glorious and often coarse adventures and lowly comic elements. The theatre-warfare, in effect, was triggered by François Ogier’s Preface to the play Tyr et Sidon by Jean de Schélandre, in which Ogier argued for the freedom of mixed genres (tragic substance with comic details) and in the name of the relativity of customs he rejected the authority of unities and rules in general. However, in 1630, the classical ‘avant-garde’ made its appearance, too: Jean Chapelain wrote his “letter” on the 24-hour rule and in his “Discourse on Representative Poetry” he claimed that the rules were dictated not by the authority of Aristotle but by general good sense and the common practice of the great classical playwrights. Interestingly, both Ogier and Chapelain appealed to verisimilitude, to ‘faithfulness to life’. More and more plays were produced adhering to the unities of action, time (24 or 36 hours), and place (the action must unfold within the boundaries of one forest or one city but several ‘rooms’ were permitted, these rooms built side by side on the stage, most of them covered by curtains, which opened and closed as the action

required). Interestingly again, behind the rigid rules there was the effort to increase dramatic credibility, by giving the action a fixed locality similar to the spectator’s, and a time as close as possible to the audience’s actual lived time (cf. Shakespeare’s The Tempest). Playwrights tried to reduce bloody and violent actions on the stage and comic elements slowly disappeared from tragedies altogether. The most popular plays were Sophonisbe (1634) by Jean Mairet and Mariane (1636) by François Tristan L’Hermite, the former considered to be the first “real”

classical French tragedy, in which a psychological crisis amidst political interests brings the protagonists to their deaths within a few hours, thus the three unities are masterfully used. But in 1634/35 season also witnessed to Pierre Corneille’s first tragedy, Médée (earlier he wrote mostly comedies). The elements of the classicist dramatic universe are the following:

– ancient subject-matters

– a predilection for maxims and moral aphorisms (similar to Seneca’s, very often used by Corneille)

– indulgence in sensual, almost lunatic passions (madness), communicated by (long) laments, but, interestingly, considering this self-abandoned state as a necessary evil and finding virtue in the recognition of this necessity

– use of premonitory dreams, or even magic

– erudite philosophical debates on e.g. the relationship between epicurianism and stoicism – the effects of violence and surprise are brought together in one great psychological crisis