Corneille’s Discourse on Tragedy (1660)

Though the theoretical writings of great playwrights should be taken with a pinch of salt, Corneille’s Discourse is one of the best formulations of what classical tragedy is. It is an interesting polemic with Aristotle’s Poetics, touching on the most hotly debated issues, and often referring to his own dramatic practice (still partly as a justification of The Cid).

Corneille starts with the problem of the interrelatedness of pity, fear and catharsis:

“The pity for misfortune, when we see the fall of people similar to ourselves, brings to us fear of a similar one. The fear brings us to a desire of avoiding it, and this desire to purging, moderating, rectifying, and even eradicating in ourselves the passion which, before our eyes, plunges into misfortune the persons we pity; for this common but natural and indubitable reason, that to avoid the effect it is necessary to remove the cause.” Corneille, in effect, says that we pity ourselves when we pity the other (a highly psychological interpretation of Aristotle) and in a typical manner, he traces the idea back to the universal principle of cause-and-effect. Corneille insists that it is not the high rank of the characters in drama which starts this complex reaction (kings and princes are also men) but the significance, the weight of the calamities in which they get involved.

Next, Corneille considers a similarly difficult question, the problem of the ‘tragic flaw’

(hamartia). Corneille says he does not understand why Aristotle gives Oedipus and Thyestes as the examples of the tragic hero, who, in Corneille’s interpretation of Aristotle, “is nether entirely good, nor entirely bad and who, through a fault or human frailty, falls into misfortune, which he does not deserve”. Oedipus, Corneille claims, committed no crime, since he did not know the old man he killed was his father and he “only contests, the way as a man of gallant soul against an unknown who attacks him with superior force” (thus Oedipus becomes a 17^th century gentleman, a “Cid” of honourable deeds). Thyestes is guilty of incest before the play would start, so the play itself can hardly purge us from that feeling because the play is not about it, and in the tragedy proper he only believes his brother and it is unlikely that we should be purged of confidence and sincerity. Rather, contrary to Aristotle, Corneille argues with his The Cid, where the tragic conditions are met “with great success”: Rodrigue’s and Chiméne’s passion causes their misfortune but hey are unfortunate “only to the extent of their passion for each other”, and we all share the human weakness of love with them. “That this has wrung many tears from the spectators, there is no contesting”. This pity ought to give us fear of falling into a similar misfortune and thus purge us from the excess of love. Corneille recommends the spectator to look into him/herself and see if the play has been successful in purifying excessive passions. He also allows for the possibility that the whole mechanism of

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pity, fear and catharsis is just a good idea on Aristotle’s part and, in fact, no play has hitherto been written which could put this theory into actual practice. Yet martyrs are no subject-matter for tragedies for sure, since they suffer without fault.

The ideal tragic hero for Corneille is an honest man who, under ordinary circumstances, would “not go to the woods to steal” or would not murder anyone but, because of some high yet still natural passion (such as love) is forced to resort to deceit, theft or even murder in order not to lose this passion.

Then Corneille allows for an alternative interpretation of Aristotle, according to which Aristotle meant that pity cannot come without fear, while fear can be aroused without pity.

Thus it is either fear, or fear-and-pity which are to be purged. This, more liberal interpretation does not make, for Corneille, Oedipus a tragedy, either, and he refers to his own plays again to show that he complies even with the more rigid norms of Aristotle better than Aristotle’s own contemporaries. Aristotle becomes a “soothsayer” who had, in fact, Corneille’s plays in mind when he defined the ‘prefect tragedy’ and he does not refer to them only because he did not (could not) read them.

Corneille agrees with Aristotle that those tragedies are the most effective in which the characters involved in the calamities are close family members (“the proximity of blood and the intimacy of love or friendship between the persecutor and the persecuted, the hunting and the hunted”), though this is not to be found, e.g. in Sophocles’s Ajax or Philoctetes.

In a less exciting part, Corneille examines the various combinations Aristotle works out for tragic actions happening between close relatives; the four factors from which the possibilities are worked out are: (1) the one who wishes the death of the other recognises the victim (2) or not; (3) the murderer achieves his goal (4) or not. According to Aristotle, Corneille claims, the best is when the murderer does not recognise his victim in time to save him/her yet he does so later on and he achieves his goal. The worst is when he recognises, murders but achieves nothing.

Corneille, on the other hand argues that the most superior kind of tragedy is when the actual deed (murder) need not be actually done (a curious suggestion: tragedy without death), – although all the conditions for the deed are granted – and the goal is still achieved. This is Corneille’s doctrine of generosity (générosite). And what else would his example be than The Cid, where Chiméne does not ruin Rodrigue, though she could, and Rodrigue (through his generosity in spearing Don Sanches’s life) is still purged of his guilt (of having killed the Count, Chiméne’s father)?

The next question is to what extent the events put on the tragic stage should come from history (‘real life’) or from ‘fable’ (the writer’s imagination). Here Corneille first – quite rightly – points out that, in the first place, fable and history are so much mixed in classical antiquity that it is impossible to tell which tragic plot comes form which side. Here the safest is to say, he claims, that the event should by all means be probable “so that one can say that if this could have been done, it must have been done as the poet describes it”. Thus, for example the sudden intervention of the gods (the deus ex machina) is no longer credible on stage, so it should not be employed. Since Corneille does not use the category we today label as

‘mythology’, he has to qualify well-known Greek plots along the lines of history versus imagination. He notes that many of these stories are credible neither as history, nor as products of the imagination.

Practically the same applies to the question to what extent the writer is licensed to ‘re-write’ old stories, to what extent he is allowed to interfere with history. Here Corneille contrasts the Orestes-story (dramatised both by Sophocles and Euripides) with his own Oreste (1659): the playwright cannot e.g. say that Clytemnestra killed Orestes, since it happened the other way round; though the story is not ‘history proper’, it is so deeply rooted in common belief that it would create a scandal to interfere with it to such an extent. Yet the significance

of Clytamnestra’s death can be given a twist and thus be shown from a different light.

Corneille tells us that he had always disliked the idea that Orestes decides on the killing of his mother when she is begging him on her knees to spare her life, so Corneille made Orestes’s design to fall only on Aegisthus, Clytamnestra’s lover and made her death a kind of accident.

When Orestes wishes to kill Aegisthus, Clytamnestra throws herself between them and thus gets stabbed; this way, Corneille claims, a double effect of tragedy is achieved: Orestes remains innocent, – “leaving her [Clytamnestra] to God”, Corneille says – and Clytamnestra still gets punished but she dies heroically, ready to sacrifice herself for her lover.

In the last section, Corneille gives a highly original and interesting treatment of two highly difficult Aristotelian categories: probability and necessity. His conclusion, on the basis of the Poetics is that according to Aristotle, there are occasions when probability is to be preferred to necessity and others when necessity is to be preferred to probability. To clarify this, he introduces two “things” which are to be distinguished in the actions that make up tragedy: the first “consists of these actions in themselves, together with the inseparable circumstances of time and place; the other in the natural relationship which make the one give birth to the other” (this second is, in fact, the unity of action [plot]). In other words, Corneille is examining – in a totally un-Aristotelian way – the relationship between place, time and the plot and says that with respect to place and time, probability is to be preferred; with respect to the plot, necessity.

Here he contrasts tragedy with ‘romance’ (narrative poem or today’s ‘novel’). It is clear that for Corneille there are actions and events existing on a neutral, independent plane and it is only when they are put into either of these forms (‘genres’) that the question of probability and necessity arise. Romances, he says, have no constraints (!), they can jump back and forth in time and may use as large fields and as many scenes as they like, so the authors can easily arrive at probability. But the dramatist, burdened by the constraints of having to present his plot at roughly the same place and within twenty-four or thirty-six hours, has to be careful not to violate probability by forcing too many events into the frame with the prescribed boundaries. The best solution is if the playwright concentrates on the unity of action (which Corneille here calls liaison – ‘connection, continuity’): one action should be preceded by the other and at least one person of a scene should remain to be character in the next; this way the playwright can establish necessary connections between two probable actions.

Probability is defined by Corneille as: “a thing manifestly possible with propensity and it is neither manifestly true nor manifestly false”. This definition will yield four subcategories:

(1) general probability is which is possible for a king, a general, a lover – for a human being in a certain position

(2) particular probability is what is possible for an individual (Alexander, Ceasar, etc.). To violate this kind of probability is tantamount to falsifying history (e.g. to say that Ceasar and Antony remained friends after the battle of Actium)

(3) ordinary probability is which happens often, or at least as often as its opposite

(4) there is, finally, extraordinary probability, which is the most difficult to define. Corneille says that it happens less often than its opposite yet it is still feasible enough not to enter the realm of the miraculous. One of Aristotle’s examples for this, Corneille claims, is when a weaker man, with a just cause, defeats a man who is much stronger. The example Corneille gives is, not surprisingly, from The Cid: the scene where Rodrigue defeats Chiméne’s father.

Necessity is “the need of the poet to arrive at his goal or to make his actors get there”.

The goals of the actors are diverse: the things they must do in order to bring their ends about constitute necessity; this must be added, according to Corneille, to probability in the connection of the events.

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The ultimate goal is to please the spectator and thus the playwright can heighten the splendour of certain events and lessen the horror of disastrous ones. Here the violation of particular probability is permitted but not that of general probability. The author can also violate the order of historical events to make the events happen at the same place and time.

Corneille confesses that he has always regretted that the King, in The Cid, says that Rodrigue should wait one or two hours to fight Don Sances; thus he mistakenly called attention to the action taking place in 24 hours. This was unnecessary, since the best method is not to assign a fixed place and time for the action but to allow the audience’s imagination to put the action within 24 hours and within a certain location. Today we would say that Corneille allows for the possibility of a ‘stylised’ treatment of place and time, an almost ‘timeless’ and

‘locationless’ unfolding of the events which are only understood to take place within twenty-four hours and at the same place (Racine used this technique pretty often – he simply gives no specific indications of time and place).

The essay ends with a few notes on comedy, saying that comedy allows more licenses than tragedy.