Fate has dealt unkindly with the great seventeenth-century French dramatist, Pierre Corneille, even in his native land. 'As a result of an over-simple and restrictive tradition,' writes Raymond Picard in his admirable analysis of the writer [Two Centuries of French Literature,] 'it has long been contended that, of all Corneille's plays, only a handful of tragedies such as Le Cid, Horace, Cinna, or Pompée (1637-43) deserve to survive. By disregarding all the rest, critics have had no trouble in reducing Corneille's genius to a few dramatic devices, some psychological stances and a certain lofty tone, and thus, by an obvious over-simplification, they have frozen the founder of the classical theatre in a pose of exaggerated sublimity.' But in fact 'his thirty-two plays show a prodigious range of talent. Far from having worked to a formula, Corneille again and again struck out in original directions, renewing his strength and genius over forty long years of writing. His work pulsates with an extraordinary creative vitality. A tragedy follows a comedy or a tragicomedy; a tragedy-ballet comes after a heroic comedy; and within the same genre there are profound differences between the plays.'

His first plays are poles apart from the stereotype of the bombastic tragedies he is represented as having written. 'With such works as Mélite, La Galerie du Palais and La Place Royale (1629-34), he created an original type of five-act comedy in verse.' They are remarkable for 'the naturalness, the freshness and the grace of the young people [portrayed], the badinage and the wit, the truth to life of the attitudes, the penetrating observation of the manners of the age—all in a simple colloquial style'. As Corneille himself pointed out (in 1634), 'My vein … often combines the lofty buskin with the comic sock, and … pleases the audience by striking contrasting notes.'

'But, at about the same time as Corneille wrote these three "contemporary" comedies, he produced in Clitandre an Elizabethan play in which fantasy runs wild. The stage changes from a wood to a prison, and then to a cave. Before the spectator's eyes, Pymantes tries to rape Dorisa who in her turn puts out one of his eyes. Frenzied, utterly impossible actions are enacted in an entirely fanciful world.' The Theatrical Illusion (L'Illusion Comique), dated 1636, also takes place in this world of fantasy, as readers will see from the Preface and translation of the play in the present volume; the irrepressible Corneille even parodies the martial sentiments of The Cid before that play was written.

What is more, though he 'appealed much more to the mind than to the eye in four or five of the finest tragedies of the seventeenth century, … he continued to delight and astonish visually … "My main aim," he wrote of the musical play of Andromède, "has been to satisfy the visual sense by the gorgeousness and the variety of the scenery and not to appeal to the intellect by cogent arguments or to touch the heart by delicate representations of the passions." '

The second obstacle to Corneille's demummification is the old but tenacious fallacy that his plays represent a school-book conflict, especially in The Cid, between 'love which is alleged to be a passion replete with weaknesses and honour which dictates duty. The carefully pondered love, which one feels for and claims from someone whom one deems worthy of it, is also a duty. Rodrigo goes so far as to affirm in a lyrical meditation at the end of the first act

Duty's not only to my mistress. It
Is also to my father.

Moreover, the two types of duty do not really conflict. If he does not avenge the insult done to his father, Rodrigo will draw down on himself the contempt of Ximena and will thereby forfeit her love for that love implies esteem and even admiration. Paradoxically it is his love for her, as well as his honour, that forces him to kill his sweetheart's father and thus to raise an obstacle between the two lovers which might to some appear insurmountable. As soon as Rodrigo has transcended the basic option between cowardice which would have involved the loss of everything—honour and love—and heroism, which is his vocation, he has no alternative but to fulfil his destiny as a hero. In this as in other tragedies, what is cornélien is the intolerable and sometimes agonizing situation in which the character is trapped and from which he can free himself only by shouldering his responsibility as a hero.

'Now, as it happens, Corneille's characters are nothing if not heroes. Rodrigo, Horace, Augustus and Nicomedes are of more than human stature. Endowed with extraordinary moral strength, they possess to the utmost degree the virtue of générosité (nobility of soul); they are ready to devote all their inner resources to the task of incarnating their sublime image of themselves. Will-power, self-control, courage and judgement, all these enhance man's powers and his greatness. In the humanist world in which they live, it would seem that nothing—misfortune, suffering or catastrophe—can undermine their overweening integrity. Fortified by their energy and stoicism, they have nothing to fear at the hands of Destiny. They will parry its blows, or bear them uncomplainingly. Fate may dog their steps. For them, it is nothing but a congeries of external accidents and mishaps, and it is powerless to force an entry into their hearts and alter their resolve. Man is entirely free and fully responsible. He has no grounds for dreading the gods. When treating the most sombre theme in Greek tragedy, Corneille in his Oedipe (1659) radically transforms the spirit of the legend and does not shrink from writing

The heavens, fair in reward and punishment,
To give to deeds their penalty or meed
Must offer us their aid, then let us act.

This concept of free will is clearly borrowed from the Jesuits and the humanist tradition. The tragic element in Corneille, then, is not to be sought in the pathetic helplessness of the characters but in the harrowing circumstances in which a wicked fate has placed them. What we have, in a way, is a tragedy of circumstances, over which the hero must rise superior, relying on his own forces.

'But he does so only after exacting and grievous efforts. Corneille's characters are no cardboard supermen. For them, heroism is not a second nature to which they need merely abandon themselves. They are not sublime automata. They know what suffering is, and they sometimes vent their feelings in lyrical stanzas and in monologues. They are tugged this way and that. They are rent by inner conflicts, and they admit as much. Ximena confesses that Rodrigo "tears [her] heart to pieces"; but she adds, it is "without dividing [her] soul" (III, 3); Pauline also, in Polyeucte, recognizes that her duty "tears her soul" although it "does not alter its resolve" (II, 2). There is no doubt that we must jettison the half-baked concept of the swashbuckling Cornelian hero, always sure of himself and unhesitatingly sublime, whose greatness is manifested primarily in a swaggering boastfulness. Even Augustus (in Cinna) complains of having "a wavering heart" (IV, 3). It is only at the end of the play when he proves victorious over himself that he exclaims (and this is more wishful thinking than actual fact):

I'm master of myself as of the world.
(V, 3)

There is a quivering sensitivity at loggerheads with itself, a three-dimensional reality, in these characters who are too readily described as being all of a piece. Heroism is not something already conferred on them. It is conquered stage by stage as the action unfolds. The hero takes shape before the spectator's eyes. People are not born heroes, they become heroes. Corneille's Theatre is, in the literal sense of the phrase, "a school of moral greatness".

'This greatness is not always synonymous with goodness and virtue. A great crime is also a great deed. Moral power and energy are important in their own right and not only because of the enterprises on which they are brought to bear. Thus, Cleopatra's crimes in Rodogune (1644) "are accompanied by a moral greatness which has something so grandiose about it," notes Corneille, "that, at the same time as we detest her actions, we admire the source from which they spring" (First Discourse). What one has to do is to arouse in the spectators' hearts a feeling of astonishment, indeed a transport, whether of horror or admiration, at the deeds of which man is capable at the summit of his powers. Now in Corneille the hero arrives at this paroxysm only when the society in which he lives and his place in it are challenged, when his gloire—that is, his dignity, his reputation, his honour—are at stake, as well as the safety of the state. Political interests are regarded as providing the hero with the best opportunity and means for their fulfilment. Hence their important role in this theatre. Love, as against this, remains in the background, for tragedy "calls for some great issue of state … and seeks to arouse fears for setbacks which are more serious than the loss of one's mistress". In Sertorius (1662), one character asks

When plans of such importance are conceived,
Can one put in the balance thoughts of love?
(I,3)

And in the same play, another character gives the following advice:

Let us, my lord, let's leave for petty souls
This lowly give and take of amorous sighs.
(I,3)

Love, which is convincingly portrayed in many guises in such a host of characters, may prove their downfall. It cannot shape their destiny.'

It could be added … that the particular type of heroism analysed by Picard is not to be found in the early works. It is only in The Place Royale (1634) that we find the first traces of the conviction which was to pervade all his later plays—that the hero must retain his inner, moral independence, especially in love. The dominant note until then is 'a joyous lust for life, a certain cruelty, a pronounced taste for women in their simplest and most sensual aspects, a love for sword play and adventure'. There is no trace, for example, of his subsequent ideals in The Theatrical Illusion, which has the same freshness and fantasy as some of Shakespeare's comedies. In the same way, Corneille was uninhibited by the famous three unities which demanded that the central subject be closely knit, the scene unchanging, and the action confined to the space of twenty-four hours.

In The Cid, on the contrary, the new heroic ideal is the driving force in the minds and acts of the main characters, as Picard has so lucidly shown. But in that play there is such a powerful charge of youthful passion and excitement and such a balance between richness of episode and tautness of construction that the work is free from pompousness, unreal heroism or contrivance.

However, The Cid, though universally popular and the first masterpiece of the classical French stage, came under heavy fire from the playwright's rivals and was later submitted (in 1637) by Cardinal Richelieu to the newly founded French Academy (the literary establishment of the day) which was to act as an arbiter between the opposing factions. The Academy, though it tried hard to be fair, was in the main composed of 'the learned' who, while able to see the formal weaknesses of the work, were blind to its elemental greatness. Their findings praised Corneille warmly, but agreed with the critics that he had not observed the rules. Corneille was deeply hurt by the verdict, and his friend, Chapelain, found him two years later still obsessed by this issue and working out arguments to refute the Academy's strictures. Even in 1660, he was still trying in his critical writings to win a retrospective battle on this debate.

And hence, when he emerged from a three-year silence and produced Horatius and Cinna (in 1640), his craftsmanship, his choice of subject and his views had suffered a sea-change. True, he was always to maintain that he accepted the rules only to the extent that they suited him (but, as a modern writer has put it neatly, only once he had established what the rules were), but all his life, as far as he possibly could, he tried to stick to them, and often with the most disturbing results. For his innate tendency was to cram his five acts with the most varied action, whereas the three unities are suited to the spare psychological tragedy where external action is reduced to the absolute minimum (as in Racine's works).

The same switch in emphasis is reflected in his subjects. Whereas both The Cid and The Theatrical Illusion are Spanish by inspiration and source, Horatius and Cinna (for the first time in Corneille's theatre) take place in ancient Rome. Of course, the change was not an absolute one, for Corneille by no means abandoned Spain as a quarry for dramatic themes. But that he veered in a different direction is clear.

And lastly, there is a difference in the political values underlying his work. In The Cid, even if we make the fullest allowances for the fact that the action takes place at the height of the Middle Ages in Spain when kings were by no means absolute, there is a distinct contrast between the image of the monarch in, say, The Cid and in Cinna. In the former play, the king is still very much primus inter pares. He is dependent on, and is defied by, his general (the Count) to a far greater degree than any other prince in Corneille's theatre, and certainly than Augustus. What is more, the spotlight in The Cid is focused on a mere knight—and a twenty-year-old stripling at that. On the other hand, the men who challenge the limitless power of Caesar (Cinna, Maximus and the rest) would be ignominiously swept into the discard of history were they not rescued by the equally limitless nobility of soul of the emperor. Here again, of course, it is not a question of a complete volte-face. Corneille retains his belief in the superiority of the concept of the king as a Christian knight, firm but merciful, as against that of the centralized monarchy and its Machiavellian ethos which was being sponsored by Richelieu. And the heroism which, from The Cid on, is a constant of his work is not only based on grandeur of soul, but is placed at the service of the romanesque ideal of honour.

'Romanesque', as the form of the word indicates, stands for the type of literature and ethos derived from the medieval romance, and hence impregnated with its spirit. The romanesque thus meant the far-fetched, the unusual, the adventurous, the ideal, often with a touch of the supernatural. The typical subjects were the exploits of knights errant—single combats and abductions. The guiding principle was that of honour and a romantic devotion to the beloved, and the ending was always a happy one. Much of the material for romanesque novels or plays was taken from Spain. (There was, it has been noted, a large Spanish colony in Corneille's native Rouen.) In this largely feudal world, nobility of soul and nobility of rank are broadly identical. If abstraction is made of this equation, however, the romanesque ethos of the early seventeenth century is disconcertingly similar to that of the cinema. There are also close analogies with the works of Shakespeare, and it is perhaps in this perspective that Corneille can best be appreciated by an Anglo-Saxon public. In fact, in the rare cases where the language barrier has been surmounted, the reaction of English and American readers is usually one of incredulous delight at finding a French classical dramatist in whose plays events actually happen and which do not consist simply of endless discussions.

Of Corneille the man, only the briefest account is called for. He was born of sound bourgeois stock in 1606 in the Norman town of Rouen, and, after studies with the Jesuits (who at the time had most of pre-University education in their hands), he entered the legal profession and practised till 1662 when he moved to Paris with his brother and fellow writer, Thomas. He was a model father to his seven children, though perhaps somewhat over-keen in soliciting pensions and favours, for example by obsequious dedications. He was also the first dramatist to treat his works as an important source of income, which shocked many of his contemporaries. He was awkward in speech and manner, but was always attracted, though within respectable limits, by women. He was justifiably proud of his works and fiercely aggressive in defending them against criticism. As Adam puts it, he had an unfortunate way of proving that he was right. He resented competition and used the 'Norman clan' (his brother and Donneau de Visé, who controlled much of the press at the time) to suppress his competitors such as the up-and-coming Racine, who referred to him waspishly as 'an ill-intentioned old playwright'. Corneille had small cause for such defensiveness, for he was the uncontested master of the dramatic scene. In 1663, a collected edition of his plays was published in two folio volumes—an honour usually reserved for the classics such as Virgil. He lived modestly, but there is no truth in the assertion that he died in poverty (1684, at the age of 78).

There is no obvious link between Corneille's life and theatre, unless we regard the latter as an escape from his relatively modest social position in an aristocratic world. He was a typical representative of his age in his attitudes, but he was highly untypical in his literary craftsmanship. To his inventive and inexhaustible dramatic genius must be added an infinite capacity for going over his works again and again, usually, but not always, with felicitous results, which, however, improved the clarity and impact of the lines rather than the music. If he lacks the harmony of Racine, he has a power and sonority which often, in the original, remind the listener of the finer flights of Elizabethan tragedy.