SOURCE: Barnwell, H. T. “‘They Have Their Exits and Their Entrances’: Stage and Speech in Corneille's Drama.” The Modern Language Review 81, no. 1 (January 1986): 51-63.

[In the following essay, Barnwell considers “some of the ways in which Corneille orders and constructs the successive episodes of his plays and some of the connexions between that arrangement and speech.”]

1984 saw the commemoration of the tercentenary of the death of Pierre Corneille.¹ Since a glance through the titles of papers presented at the international colloquium held at Rouen in October would hardly suggest to the uninitiated that we were remembering a great playwright, it is perhaps timely to take one small step on his behalf in the direction which René Bray took for Molière some thirty years ago.² While often acknowledging that Corneille was a talented dramatist, critics tend to denigrate his pursuit of the dramatic on the grounds that it somehow obscures what they think of as the really interesting aspects of his work: his supposed ideology, his psychological insight, his rhetorical or (in the narrow sense) ‘poetic’ power, or the way in which his plays reflect the social, moral, and political preoccupations of his contemporaries. But why did that reticent, tongue-tied man, with his lawyer's training and official function, turn to writing for the theatre? In order to propound some ethical or political theory? If so, his earliest plays were a very odd beginning,³ and the concept of a theatre of the imagination which emerges from L'Illusion comique a strange apologia.

I am simple-minded enough to assume—and the evidence of his own critical assessment of his work supports the assumption—that Corneille chose to write plays, not moral tracts or even novels, in order to interest and entertain his audiences, and that if those plays convey not a moral message but a vision of the moral universe, that vision is suggested through a particular dramatic form. It is the form that gives access to the vision. I take it for granted that no dramatist is great unless he is a complete master of his craft: what marks him out from the makers of well-made plays is his ability to suggest through it his perception, which may not even be conscious, of at least some abiding aspect of man's moral nature. Needing for present purposes strictly to circumscribe my subject, I shall confine myself to considering in a few examples some of the ways in which Corneille orders and constructs the successive episodes of his plays and some of the connexions between that arrangement and speech. I am aware that I am scratching the surface of a small area of a large, almost virgin field, though the substance of my remarks may seem all too obvious.

                                                                                All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays several parts,
His acts being seven ages …

(As You Like It, ii. 7)

In the present context, I take those lines to refer to the theatricalization of life on the stage. The parts the actors play involve exits and entrances and encounters with others. Entrance and exit also mean birth and death. In a sense, a dramatic character is born when he first appears on the stage, lives, while the play lasts, through a series of encounters theatrically manifested in his exits and entrances and expressed in speech, action, and gesture, and dies at his last exit.

Shakespeare's lines may be developed by reference to a passage in Oliver Taplin's book, Greek Drama in Action (London, 1978), where he is half-apologetic for the way in which he begins his study:

It may seem odd to start with the moments when people are on the verge of absence, but a second glance sees that entrances and exits mark key junctures in a play—the beginnings and ends of acts, the engagement and disengagement of characters, the changes in the combination of the participants which alter the whole tone and direction of the drama. The timing; manner and direction of these comings and goings are fully in the control of the playwright, and his disposition of them may well signpost the way to our understanding of what he is about.

(p. 31)

Another cue comes from Pierre Larthomas, whose book on Le Langage dramatique (Paris, 1972)⁴ is based on the idea that dramatic language is generically distinct not only from the language of everyday life but from that of every other literary form. Dramatic language must fulfil specific functions: it must present convincingly to the audience characters caught up in certain situations which bring them together in particular relationships and, for the characters themselves, it must attempt to persuade others to act in certain ways, through deliberation, argument, and decision, a problem largely neglected in rhetorical studies. The text is written to be spoken, in conditions where speech is a form of action, action which must interest and excite the audience, as well as persuading the interlocutor, and must command the audience's sympathy (or repulsion), commiseration, awe, fear, and the like. But Aristotle long ago pointed out⁵ that it is much more difficult to construct a play with the right ‘combination of incidents’, that is, in our terms, encounters effected by exits and entrances, than it is to write good verse or create satisfactory characters. Indeed, without the right ‘combination of incidents’, diction (or poetry in the ordinary sense) and characterization will achieve no dramatic effect, or emotional effect, in the theatre.

It is with the theatre and in the theatre that I begin my enquiry. While I do not wish merely to study technicalities, some aspects of theatrical conditions in the 1630s and 1640s, the years when Corneille was making his name as a dramatist, seem to me to be important, in ways not always recognized, for an understanding of the construction of his plays. It has been shown that during those years, in spite of the advent of the single set with its Serlian perspective, the multiple set with its compartments continued to be used, particularly at the Hôtel de Bourgogne.⁶ At the same time, the convention, or rule, of the liaison des scènes was gradually being adopted. In the preface to the first edition of La Suivante, published in 1637, the year of Le Cid, Corneille himself first mentions it, regarding it as ‘un embellissement et non pas un précepte’, as he continued to do, at any rate up to about 1648.⁷ The relationship between the single set and the liaison des scènes is clear enough. Before the first character appeared on the stage, the curtain went up and did not come down again until after the final exit: the set was exposed to view during the whole performance, including the intervals. An empty stage indicated the end of an act. Within each act, the individual scene was, as D'Aubignac put it, ‘cette partie d'un acte qui apporte quelque changement au théâtre par le changement des acteurs’, or, in Lamy's words: ‘Une scène commence lorsqu'un acteur entre sur le théâtre, ou qu'il se retire.’⁸ If the stage is not to be empty within an act, the action itself must be continuous through the successive linked encounters, each of which constitutes a scene. From this point of view a scene is not a more or less self-contained unit, but a phase in an uninterrupted development. Given the convention of the single set, D'Aubignac's detailed insistence on the liaison des scènes makes good enough sense, and Corneille does not deny it.

But the use of the multiple set is conducive to a different dramatic conception. Changes of place, and therefore a succession of scenes not linked by the continuing presence of one or more characters from one to the next, were common practice. In these conditions, the scene is less a phase in a continuous development than a distinct episode, one of a sequence in which incidents shown successively on the stage may not in fact be successive but simultaneous and occurring in different places. Such an arrangement depends for its cohesion less on a logical cause-and-effect development than on the presentation of interlocking aspects of a central theme.⁹ It favours the creation of the more or less autonomous spectacular or rhetorical set-piece, the scène à faire, which generates pathos and alternates with scenes of action arousing suspense, curiosity, and excitement. But so long as no hiatus occurs between one character's exit and another's emergence from one of the compartments, the performance is in practice continuous enough to avoid giving the impression that the act has come to an end, even though no connexion is perceptible between exit and entrance. This was the kind of drama being produced by Corneille's most successful contemporaries (notably Rotrou, Mairet, Scudéry, and Tristan l'Hermite) when he was composing his first ten or twelve plays.

The nature of Corneille's output during the most crucial years of his development as a dramatist shows that he must have been very well aware of the implications of the two conventions of staging. In some respects, the evolution from Médée in 1635 to Horace in 1640 can be directly related to their coexistence in the Paris theatre of that period. Médée (a tragedy), L'Illusion comique (a comedy), and Le Cid (a tragicomedy), all written for a multiple set, satisfied that craving for spectacle alluded to by Rayssiguier in 1632.¹⁰ Where spectacle was not actually staged, it was suggested in speeches of poetic evocation and description, often highly picturesque, of battles, duels, storms, and so on or, in pathetic fallacies, of a pastoral countryside. Such speeches, together with or resulting in lamentation or rejoicing, as the case may be, were the high points of many plays, and indeed, in tragedy, may often have constituted their real purpose, rhetorical rather than dramatic.

Médée, clearly that kind of play, resembles Hercule mourant (which had appeared a little earlier) both in subject-matter and Senecan sources and in dramatic conception: rhetorical set-pieces, monologues, altercations, imprecations, and laments, and scenes of visual spectacle, partly occasioned by the magical powers central to the theme of the plays. Many scenes are autonomous episodes, the liaison being frequently disregarded. The two inner plays of L'Illusion comique feature a sequence of episodes without logical connexion or liaison, alternating lamentation and action, the comic and the tragic. Le Cid likewise does not observe the unity of place or the liaison des scènes. A tragicomedy, though with a seriousness characteristic of tragedy,¹¹ it features spectacle and physical action. Clearly written for the single set, the scenes always linked, Horace on the other hand was the first tragedy to observe strict unity of place (Pratique, p. 111). Corneille's growing awareness of the rules and his readiness to write for the new stage contribute to the creation of this tragic masterpiece. The dynamism already evident in Médée (even Jason's final monologue is not purely passive lament, but a finally fruitless search for action, though it does turn out to be suicide) has, in Horace, found its proper vehicle, as I shall hope to show.

Once he has conceived of his subject and the general manner in which he intends to treat and order it, the playwright must decide how to make it begin. This certainly presented particular difficulties in the seventeenth-century theatre. The audience, as T. E. Lawrenson suggested,¹² without a ‘collective purpose such as the mystery play possessed’, constituted the first problem; it was also quite unlike the captive audiences of school or château for which so much earlier drama had been written. Then, of course, a number of spectators were on the stage itself.¹³

The problem was exacerbated by the undue depth of the stage: in order to be properly seen by candle-light and adequately heard, the actor must come right downstage before speaking. The texts of many plays by Corneille's predecessors and contemporaries, and indeed some of his own, testify to the difficulty;¹⁴ it clearly persists through the seventeenth century, as witness Palmis, in Suréna, breaking off her conversation with Eurydice on seeing Pacorus approach. ‘Le Prince vient, Madame …’, she says, but it is only six lines later that he has reached the front of the stage, Palmis finally leaves, and Eurydice can greet him (ll. 1155-60).

Echoes of all this can be heard in the passage where, in his third Discours (pp. 69-70), Corneille discusses the proper motivation of exits and entrances with particular reference to the opening scene of Cinna, Emilie's monologue:

L'auditeur attend l'acteur [at the beginning of the play, and after the curtain has gone up to reveal an empty stage]; et bien que le théâtre représente la chambre ou le cabinet de celui qui parle, il ne peut toutefois s'y montrer qu'il ne vienne de derrière la tapisserie [i.e., from backstage]. … Je n'ai vu personne se scandaliser de voir Emilie commencer Cinna sans dire pourquoi elle vient dans sa chambre [though the monologue suggests it is simply to seek solitude in order to come to terms with her overwrought emotions]. Elle est présumée y être avant que la pièce commence, et ce n'est que la nécessité de la représentation [the conditions of staging the play] qui la fait sortir de derrière le théâtre pour y venir.

All these practical difficulties made it necessary for the play to begin in such a way as to capture the audience's attention immediately. That depended on the actors' having a commanding presence and some arresting lines to speak. If the attention was to be held, the lines must be interesting, and begin at once to sow ‘les semences de tout ce qui doit arriver’, as Corneille expresses it (first Discours, p. 21), that is, to perform a strictly expository function, but also to establish some sympathy between the spectator and the character represented. The expository and emotional functions are, for Corneille, inseparable. As D'Aubignac saw (Pratique, pp. 279-81, 302), and as Larthomas points out (p. 58), purely informative exposition is dramatically inefficacious. Whenever possible, therefore, the expository scenes should directly involve, that is, bring onto the stage, one or more of the characters emotionally affected by the situation as it exists at the outset. Accordingly, in the 1660 revision of Le Cid, Corneille substituted for the original first scene, between Don Gomès and Elvire, a dialogue between Elvire and Chimène in which the heroine is in a state of great anxiety as to her father's choice of a husband for her. Part of that dialogue is a récit, as Elvire terms it (l. 23), performing the same function as the opening scene of 1637, and leaving the outcome of the council meeting uncertain and Chimène a prey to contrary emotions (l. 56).

Like Chimène, the Infante expresses highly-wrought emotions, but also determination to see the marriage through. Her exit makes no formal link with the encounter between the fathers which follows it, and whose movement (from controlled pride and anger, through stichomythic statement and retort, to the culmination of the ‘soufflet’, the mark of speech reduced to powerlessness) ends with the exit of Don Gomès. Don Diègue's monologue is, despite the opening line (‘O rage, ô désespoir! ô vieillesse ennemie!’), far from being a passive lament: the injured pride, the sense of frustration, lead to an active determination to persuade Rodrigue, his love for Chimène notwithstanding, to avenge him. Immediately on Rodrigue's entry, that determination is put into effect: ‘Meurs ou tue …’, ‘… va, cours et nous venge.’ The stances of Rodrigue's soliloquy, which follows, pass from despair and powerlessness (‘Et malheureux objet d'une injuste rigueur,¦Je demeure immobile …’) through inner conflict (‘Que je sens de rudes combats!’) to determination (‘Courons à la vengeance’), raising the dramatic tension which Corneille deemed appropriate to the end of an act. The rhythmic development of Scenes 4 and 6 is parallel, from dismay to action, and it forms part of a pattern of alternating encounter and solitude (encounter with self), leading from the pathos of new, unexpected situations, not to lamentation—that may be its starting-point—but to action, all expressed in an expressive variety of rhetorical forms. It is notable, too, that once the action proper begins, with the encounter between the fathers, it is continuous and unrelenting.

That is the characteristic which Corneille develops, but now consistently, in Horace, the whole play conforming—as only Polyeucte and Pompée will do up to 1660 (see third Discours, pp. 76-79)—to the strict unity of place, and performed on the single set. Commenting favourably on Corneille's practice from Horace onwards, D'Aubignac was to say that ‘… il faut que les incidents soient préparés par des adresses ingénieuses, et que cela paraisse selon les rencontres dans la suite de l'action …’ (Pratique, p. 125), encounters within the continuity of the action. As in the revised version of Le Cid—revised perhaps in the light of his experience in Horace—Corneille brings on first one of the two principal characters and her confidant. Why Sabine? As an invented character she needs to be immediately known within the web of relationships which makes the play. Unable to influence the course of the action, she is not merely its passive victim. At its emotional centre (‘ma douleur’, l. 1), she is immediately involved, not in pure lament, but in active conflict within herself—and with Julie, when Camille's situation is discussed, heralding the transition to Scene 2. The unity of place and the creation of a shared confidant enable Corneille to make a much tighter exit and entrance than in the revised version of Le Cid, and to maintain unbroken the impetus of the action already begun.

As in Le Cid, this second scene is parallel to the first but, thanks to the liaison, Sabine is seen to be integrated into the action in a way in which the Infante, in her scène détachée, is not. Following Sabine's inner conflict comes Camille's—the same sources, but different effect and expression. More impulsive, more impressionable, Camille launches into her long speech which is brought to an end only by the dramatic appearance of Curiace.

At this early stage in the play, a dramatic entrance—like that of Don Diègue and Don Gomès, but now formally integrated into what precedes it—changes and realigns the situation. The skilful and suspenseful handling of the dialogue is consistent not only with the passionate impatience of Camille, already established, but with the surprise occasioned by Curiace's entrance. The act still ends in uncertainty, Curiace, like Julie in Act iii, Scene 6, having impulsively left the place of decision—made his stage entry—before its outcome was known. But the action is already realigned: shifted from the public to the private sphere, from the general to the particular, it will be concentrated in the lives of two families linked by bonds of love and marriage, the conflict paradoxically assuming a more universal significance.

It is precisely into this new situation that Corneille introduces Horace, after the interval between the acts. Although the Roman choice has already been made, the dramatist does not dissipate all the suspense at once, but withholds the Alban choice until Flavian's appearance (ii, 2) interrupts the conversation between the two heroes. It is resumed on his departure, but the new realignment of the action is evident in their changed attitude to one another and in their tone. In the course of five scenes, then, two dramatic entrances have occurred, dramatic in themselves and in their immediate effects on the course of the action. They excite our interest in the characters' responses to them, expressed in both speech and action; they arouse curiosity.

In Le Cid, Corneille had actually staged the episode of the ‘soufflet’. He does not, in Horace, stage even the meeting of the two opposing army commanders or the choosing of either set of champions: all that, like the combat itself, is reported to characters on the stage. The real, dramatic conflict is placed in their emotions, their suffering, their grappling with a changing situation occasioned by their comings and goings, by their encounters. Exploiting the ‘limitations’ of the single set, Corneille dramatizes not public events themselves but the responses to them of a close-knit group of individuals, active responses expressed in speech.

Parallel techniques are evident in Cinna, which is opened by another invented character. In her pursuit of Auguste, the spring of the action, Emilie can and does shape its course. As Corneille says (first Discours, p. 23), her inner conflict, expressed in a passionate soliloquy, occasions her allusive exposition of the initial situation. But the monologue itself, far from being passive lamentation, is a dramatization of her emotions in the form of a one-sided dialogue in which she addresses in turn those feelings, Cinna, her fears, and her love. Expressed in the rhetoric of antithetical exclamations and questions, not in reasoned argument, the inner conflict issues into a decision to pursue her vengeance (l. 48).

The testing of the decision, resulting from Fulvie's entrance, emphasizes its urgency (repetition of the word ‘aujourd'hui’ (ll. 138-39)). Like the choice of champions and the battle in Horace, the decisive action will not wait. The urgency, an essential feature of the dynamism expressed both in speech and in the successive developments and realignments effected by entrances and exits, is accentuated first by Cinna's arrival with his long account of the preparations for the assassination on the morrow, and then by Evandre's irruption and dramatically brief message (l. 280), whose uncertain significance makes the direction of the realignment ambiguous. As Corneille was later to point out (first Discours, pp. 22-23), these first scenes establish no direct logical link between the conspiracy and the summons, but their sequence establishes a (false) connexion in the minds of characters and spectators alike.

In the four great plays—for similar features characterize Polyeucte—the integration of passion, action, and speech is inseparable from the inner conflicts. But the same skill in opening with an appropriate sequence of scenes is discernible in the plays from Pompée onwards, where such conflicts are less important or virtually non-existent.

That tragedy opens with a deliberation which results in action: Ptolomée's decision to have Pompée killed in the hope of appeasing César. Far from being passionate, this scene provides a living demonstration of the young King's weakness in the presence of his Machiavellian counsellors. On the exit of Septime and Achillas to put the decision into effect, he is left alone with Photin, who stiffens his wavering resolve. It is immediately attacked when Cléopâtre enters, and has again to be encouraged when she makes her haughty exit. The sequence of the four scenes, Ptolomée and Photin being present and together throughout, on their own in two of them, provides encounters which express already the King's dependence on his evil genius, and, in speech, the battle for his mind.

All these examples of Corneille's techniques in effecting the exposition stand in marked contrast to those of his contemporaries who were still wedded to the décor multiple, presumably by their conception of tragedy. In Tristan's Mariane, for example, the first scene features Hérode's soliloquy on his awakening from his terrible dream: it creates a sense of foreboding and evokes pathos which together characterize the entire first act. The action, however, is not set in motion, and indeed it is not until the first scene of Act ii, when Mariane recounts the background situation to Dina, that the exposition proper is effected: it is continued in the following scene and concludes only in Salomé's monologue at the end of it, the second part of which appears to be directly addressed to the audience. Not until after that can the action be said to commence. Tristan seems to deal with one aspect of his tragedy at a time, and perhaps the order adopted provides a clue to his priorities: an atmosphere of foreboding and pathos first, action itself last.

Whatever the actual form of the exposition in Corneille's plays, on the other hand, it is already action, present and urgent, expressed in and arising from encounters.¹⁵ The occasion for making the informative exposition is almost always an encounter, even if of a character with himself, in a crisis which calls for decisive action. The search for a decision necessitates the weighing of the conflicting elements of the situation—in speech. Speech, however, performs other dramatic functions. For present purposes, I shall limit myself to the two least obviously dramatic forms, the récit and the monologue, in their relation to entrances and exits.

First, a general remark about the récit. In Le Cid, Rodrigue's account of the battle with the Moors (iv, 3)—eighty-four lines with one short interruption—delivered in the palace to the King and three of his nobles, occurs in a scène détachée following the one between Chimène and the Infante which takes place in the heroine's residence. A morceau de bravoure of the type found in tragedies and some tragicomedies of the 1630s and 1640s, the speech comprises a highly-detailed, concrete, picturesque account of the battle, rhetorical in concept and, at times, lyrical in execution. Athough, since it is not interrupted after the first ten lines, it obviously interests the listeners, it does not actually perform any dramatic function, and it is cut short by the arrival of Chimène, and is never completed. This récit is spoken by one who not only has directly participated in the action he describes but also is the hero of the play. What interests the audience, other than a good tale well told, is the pride and excitement of the speaker—not suspense, since the actual news of the victory has already been broken. As both Corneille (Examen of Médée) and D'Aubignac (Pratique, iii, ii) agree, such long narratives require the listener on the stage to have sufficient interest and patience to hear them out. Now, after Le Cid (that is, after Corneille has begun to observe the unity of place, at least within each act,¹⁶ and the liaison des scènes) this kind of autonomous récit disappears from his work. In the Examen of Polyeucte (pp. 120-21), he is able to say: ‘Je n'ai point fait de narration de la mort de Polyeucte.’ It was preferable to have it alluded to, through her emotional reaction to it, by Pauline. In later plays, Sertorius, Sophonisbe, and Suréna, for example, the accounts of the deaths of the principal characters are laconic, to say the least, and in the second of these three tragedies, the battle lost by Syphax is not described at all. This is one of the many signs that Corneille moved gradually further away from the ‘discours pathétiques’ so much admired by D'Aubignac (Pratique, iv, vii) among others, and towards closer portrayal of the characters' hidden motives.

Usually, but not always, accounts of off-stage action are spoken by eye-witnesses to characters emotionally involved in its outcome. The récit acts upon them, and in so doing determines their own subsequent action. The spectator is also of course interested in the récit for its own sake—if nothing else, it satisfies his curiosity, not only about the actual events but also about the stage-listener's responses to them. Watching and hearing, he sees the off-stage action in his imagination, and the response to it before his eyes.

In the third and fourth acts of Horace, all this is very carefully contrived. The account of the combat is made to the three people directly concerned in its outcome: Sabine, Camille, and Le Vieil Horace. After Sabine's failure (ii, 6) to dissuade the men from fighting, and Le Vieil Horace has rescued them from her, his son asks him to keep the women indoors. There, with him, they wait, after the young men have gone out to the battlefield, and while the gods are consulted: there, Sabine and Camille engage in their rather bitter exchange; there, Le Vieil Horace breaks in on them with the news that the combat is indeed going forward. His long, stoically patriotic speech is suddenly interrupted by the return of Julie with the incomplete account of the fight. Thanks to the interruptions and then to the fury of Le Vieil Horace, it consists of a mere seven discontinuous lines. What Corneille gives in this scene is not the conventional detailed récit but the reactions of the listeners. The old man storms out, intending to punish his surviving son, and the two women follow, attempting to restrain him. Act iii ends on that uncertainty.

Le Vieil Horace returns at the beginning of Act iv, with Camille, who is still trying to reason with him when Valère bursts in with the completion of the story. With the certainty in his mind that his sons have been defeated, Le Vieil Horace keeps on breaking into the récit, if the interruptions allow it to be so called: twenty-nine lines are spoken before Valère can reveal the dramatic truth. For the old man, it is an occasion for rejoicing, in spite of the loss of two sons (l. 1141). Camille's reactions can all too easily be guessed at: she remains silent, even during her father's exhortation following the departure of Valère to inform the King of the old man's patriotic feelings.

Valère's interrupted récit is brief and active, verbs proliferating, picturesque details absent, a complete contrast, in style and function, to the epic récit in Le Cid. As for Julie's narrative, whose incompleteness heightens the drama, Corneille's own comments testify to his skill: in order to cause Le Vieil Horace to show his anger, on false evidence, with his surviving son, ‘il a été à propos … de se servir de l'impatience d'une femme qui suit brusquement sa première idée et présume le combat achevé, parce qu'elle a vu deux des Horaces par terre et le troisième en fuite’ (Examen of Horace, p. 113). Corneille turns the bienséances and exigencies of stage conditions to advantage: the playwright, he says, ‘doit choisir [les actions] qui lui sont les plus avantageuses à faire voir, soit par la beauté du spectacle, soit par l'éclat et la véhémence des passions qu'elles produisent …’ (third Discours, p. 64). It is that vehemence, expressed in speech situated in encounter and in response to speech narrating off-stage events, which is the subject of these scenes.

Not all Corneille's récits, however, are of this kind. Those in Pompée, for example, are quite different. The second of them comes at the beginning of Act iii, and very unusual it is. The speaker is Achorée, the listener Charmion, both minor characters and neither directly involved in the action. This account of Ptolomée's presentation of the head of the dead Pompée to César is made while Cléopâtre is in her own quarters awaiting, as she has put it (l. 640), his homage. Charmion listens attentively, not because of any personal concern but because she will need to recount to her mistress what Achorée has said. This is, like the earlier récit in Act ii, Scene 2, a stately speech, though enlivened by Achorée's reactions to the shameful scene he has just witnessed. Few picturesque details are provided: Achorée concentrates on the demeanour of Ptolomée and, in particular, that of César—and this is the preparation for their interview in the following scene, when they make their entry together, with their followers. Achorée's récit foreshadows the dialogue which, in the very centre of the play, dramatically reveals the contrast in the moral statures of the two men, the heart of the action.

With regard to monologue, I have referred to the first scene of Cinna and to Corneille's comments on it. Although always passionate, monologues do not always express inner conflict: the four given to Cléopâtre in Rodogune consist of her reflections on action already taken and expression of determination for future action; in particular they are the means of conveying to the audience her true intentions behind the deceptions she is practising on others. In one sense, they eliminate suspense and surprise, but in another they enhance them, because, in Sophoclean manner, we are invited to watch the trap being set, and await in suspense the response of the victim. Cléopâtre's three monologues in Acts iv and V follow each other closely. Like the first, in Act ii, their theme is hatred. Here, as the crisis heightens and is precipitated by her actions against her sons and Rodogune, hatred and fury are intensified, first by the scene of apparent reconciliation with Antiochus, then by the open defiance of Séleucus. Between these scenes comes another, in which Laonice, believing the reconciliation to be genuine, expresses relief, and a second, when she has gone out to summon Séleucus, in which Cléopâtre, alone, rages against her other son (l. 1388), showing that the apparent agreement is a trap. After Séleucus has left her, she is again alone and, certain now that neither son will avenge her on Rodogune, she despairs and vows to kill all three (ll. 1480, 1491, 1495-96). On that threatening note, Act IV ends. Cléopâtre reappears, alone, to open Act v, gloating over the death of her first victim, Séleucus, and plotting that of the others. When Laonice appears to announce the completion of the wedding preparations, she dissimulates again (ll. 1537-38), the better to commit the foul deeds which, however, dramatically recoil upon her in the closing scenes. These monologues are functional, so placed as to disclose the speaker's true intentions and to prepare the action to follow, and they arise out of action in encounters which have immediately preceded them. Unlike most conventional monologues of their period, they are not passive lamentations over a situation but active responses to it and realignments of it, as the exits and entrances surrounding them clearly show. They are anything other than ‘discours pathétiques’.

Some monologues in Corneille's plays are such speeches, but even they—Camille's and Auguste's, for example—reveal other qualities and functions. I have commented upon the sequence of scenes leading up to Valère's récit and Camille's silence under her father's exhortation. When he goes out to convey news of the combat to Sabine, Camille is left alone and, no longer surrounded by a family whose fierce patriotism she does not share, she bursts into passionate speech, first reversing the intention of her father's orders—she will face her brother with her anger and grief—then uttering a ‘discours pathétique’ in which she reviews all the changes and chances of that fatal day—part lament, part protest—and finally confirming her first resolve, to challenge Horace (ll. 1243, 1247). The central ‘discours pathétique’ is active: it reinforces her decision, brings her emotion to fever-pitch just at the moment when the warrior returns home, also highly-wrought with the elation of victory and the satisfaction of his ‘gloire’, bringing into the house his trophies, to him its visible symbols, to Camille the relics of her lover and his brothers (see the irony of ‘… songe à mes trophées’ (l. 1276)). Horace's entry brings the battle into the family. His insensitive boasts and commands, a more brutal repetition of the orders he had given Camille before the combat (compare ll. 526, 1298), propel the altercation to its fatal climax in Camille's rhetorical condemnation of all that Horace has fought for (l. 1301) and in the murder which inevitably follows it, and vindicates his wife's and his victim's taunts of inhumanity and barbarity (ll. 657, 1278). Set in the dramatic development, the monologue is seen to be the consequence of action (the father's exhortation, Horace's victory and return), action (as decision) in itself, and the cause of action (the murder and all that ensues). Camille uses its pathos to fan the flames of her passionate determination, not in a conventional ‘discours pathétique’ but in an active engagement characteristic of those ‘grands sujets’, as Corneille calls them, which ‘opposent l'impétuosité [des passions] aux lois du devoir et aux tendresses du sang’ (first Discours, p. 2). Not only does the monologue, in its consequences, realign the action and bring about the moral downfall of the hero: it enables us to judge his motive as self-realization rather than public duty—‘Ma sœur, voici le bras qui venge nos deux frères ¦ … voici le bras ¦ Qui seul fait aujourd'hui le sort de deux Etats ¦ … ces témoins de ma gloire ¦ … l'heure de ma victoire’ (ll. 1251-56), and that he is being tried in Act v as much for his ‘gloire’ as for the actual murder.

Like Camille's monologue and the scene which follows it, Auguste's soliloquy in Cinna is related to an earlier episode, the big deliberation scene at the beginning of Act ii. The introduction to the soliloquy is as dramatic as that to the earlier scene: Euphorbe's betrayal of Cinna, which brings about the emperor's realization of his solitude (‘Quoi, mes plus chers amis! quoi, Cinna! quoi, Maxime!’ (l. 1081)) only a few hours after his confidential discussion with his advisers (l. 1085). Like Camille, he is in every sense left alone, to deliberate, with a new urgency, on the same problem as before, but in more personal terms. The rhetoric of argument and counter-argument expresses his anxious, regretful, retrospective view of his career. The emotional charge makes the speech, like Camille's monologue, a ‘discours pathétique’, but the speaker is actively seeking a solution to his problem. Livie's entrance, the arrangement of presences and absences having allowed Euphorbe to acquaint her with the situation, comes at the point where Auguste's search reaches its most poignant formulation (l. 1192). The importance of the dialogue which follows lies not in the solution which it might seem to offer but in the emperor's rejection of the arguments of political expediency in the name of others of the same order. The encounter ends with suspense and uncertainty, and it is not until Auguste has confronted each of the conspirators in turn in the last act that he comes to the realization that the way forward lies not in political mastery and power but in the moral authority of self-mastery. It is a curious paradox of the play that only when, one by one, the conspirators have been gathered round him again after their desertion and absence does the inspired solution come to Auguste.

Such a solution is denied to Suréna, the hero of Corneille's last play, in which self-interrogation which brings no answer gives way to interrogation which meets with stubborn resistance. That last play is built entirely around a succession of interrogations which tighten the web of tyranny, political and emotional—the first indeed used for the benefit of the second—around the hero and Eurydice. Orode and Pacorus in turn question them and their confidant, Suréna's sister, Palmis, in an endeavour to wrest from them the secret of their love. The number of encounters—eighteen scenes in all—is remarkably small; of the five main characters, never more than three appear together at one time, and in thirteen of the scenes, only two do so. The victims of the interrogations are picked off one by one, first by Pacorus, present throughout Act ii (Suréna, Eurydice, Palmis), then by Orode in Act iii (Suréna, Palmis), again by Pacorus in Act iv (Eurydice, Suréna), and finally by Orode in Act v (Eurydice). In the remaining scenes, the lovers confide in each other, resisting the advice of Palmis to acquiesce in the marriage demanded by the King. But Eurydice will not release Suréna, while he is both too loyal to defy the King openly and too devoted to his lady to contemplate marriage with anyone else. Locked into their love and their loyalty, the lovers are also locked into the inescapable spiral of the successive interrogations; but the interrogators, too, are prisoners: Orode of his fear of a rebellion led by Suréna, Pacorus of his jealousy of an unnamed rival. All are virtually imprisoned within the palace which no one enters from the outside world and from which no one departs, except ultimately Suréna, to his death, Eurydice having relented too late. In the same way, the lovers, when interrogated, are imprisoned in what has been called a double rhetoric:¹⁷ explicit, to try to persuade the adversary; implicit, to dissimulate their real passions. The close-knit web of relationships, the cycle of interrogations, the necessity actively to dissimulate without actually lying, the power of the passions, the imprisoning palace, all combine to make this play, Suréna, or The Impossible Exit, a tragedy which, superficially, seems devoid of action, but one in which the last act still contains a greater number of scenes than the preceding four,¹⁸ and in which soliloquy is rendered impossible.

Corneille's dramatic handling of récit and monologue and even of their absence complements his ideas about the maintenance of suspense and momentum right through the play, and particularly about withholding the dénouement until the last possible moment (first Discours, p. 26) and the precipitation of the action in the last act (third Discours, pp. 73-74). The removal of the short closing lament, spoken by Julie, at the end of the original version of Horace suggests that, having broken loose from the conventions of rhetorical tragedy, Corneille realized that the speech was inappropriate to his form of dynamic drama. Even in places where one might expect lamentation—Cornélie's apostrophe to the urn containing her husband's ashes, so different from that of Alcmène in Rotrou's Hercule mourant, or the death of Sophonisbe or of Suréna—it does not occur. Instead of slowing the action down towards the end, Corneille speeds it up. I do not believe that his sole reason is the one that he gives, the impatience of the audience (first Discours, p. 26). A clue to something more fundamental lies in the remark that ‘le combat des passions contre la nature, ou du devoir contre l'amour, occupe la meilleure partie du poème …’ (second Discours, p. 41; compare p. 46). The emotion springs from those struggles. Once they were over and the consequences of decision worked out, Corneille had no interest in looking back, any more than his characters have. Suspense is aroused not only for its own sake but also in order to put them in situations in which they attract pity (second Discours, p. 46) and what he calls admiration (Examen of Nicomède, p. 152), situations represented in the encounters which provide the movement of the play.

It is also that dynamism which is revealed in the absence of lamentations. And even if we analyse the speeches of the Infante in Le Cid, a character unable to influence the course of the action, it is striking that they contain little actual self-pity. In Act i, Scene 3, for example, in a speech of thirty-nine lines, fifty-seven verbs occur, forty-six of them finite, but only eighteen adjectives. References to the past are expressed in the preterite tense: they denote things completed—there is no going back on them with regret; the speaker looks forward. The Infante is an extreme case, and serves to demonstrate that even before Corneille had come to adopt strict unity of place within the acts or the liaison des scènes his conception of drama was an essentially dynamic one. That conception was also already discernible in the energy and animated rhetoric displayed in Médée, and it found its proper vehicle in Horace, when the dramatist followed the new staging convention. Speech, occasioned by encounter, dynamically expresses dynamic action: ‘Les actions sont l'âme de la tragédie’, writes Corneille, ‘où l'on ne doit parler qu'en agissant et pour agir’ (first Discours, p. 19; compare Examen of Le Cid, p. 104, and Pratique, pp. 282-83). If speech is inseparable from action, so is pathos. The continuity of the action places the characters in perpetually changing crisis as they encounter one another, and the pathos, far from being expressed, as it were autonomously, in lamentation, lies in the inescapable need to act in ways which involve suffering, not in the inability to do so or in retrospective regret.

I conclude with a reflection prompted by a remark made by Ronald Peacock in his Presidential Address to the Modern Humanities Research Association in 1983:¹⁹

In itself drama is very closely allied to the moral texture of life. As one kind of mimesis it is made up of those sequences of confrontation in which conflicts, actions, decisions, and events are generated. The interest of these for serious drama is not simply their external physicality but their derivation from moral relationships.

The relentless forward thrust of the action from exposition to dénouement, the unbroken sequence of encounters in which passionately-held ethical values are brought into conflict, the dynamic nature of the language in which they are expressed, suggest in Corneille's plays a particular moral vision, the vision of a life which demands decision and action at every turn and unregretful acceptance of their consequences. If the phrase ‘Cornelian heroism’, so freely used, has a meaning, it seems to me to lie there, and it finds appropriate dramatic expression thanks to the playwright's discovery of a new dramatic form which exploited the possibilities of the apparently—but only apparently—restrictive décor unique.²⁰

Notes

1. This article is a modified version of a paper read at the twenty-fifth annual conference of the Society for French Studies, held at Oxford in March 1984.

2. In Molière, homme de théâtre (Paris, 1954).

3. See, in this connexion, G. J. Mallinson's recent book, with its significant subtitle, The Comedies of Corneille: Experiments in the Comic (Manchester, 1984).

4. See, in particular, pp. 7-12, 25, 185-86.

5. Poetics, vi; see also ix: ‘The poet must be more the poet of his stories or plots than of his verses.’

6. See, for example, W.-M. Deierkauf-Holsboer, Histoire de la mise en scène française à Paris de 1600 à 1673 (Paris, 1960), p. 54; G. Védier, Origine et évolution de la dramaturgie néo-classique. L'influence des arts plastiques en Italie et en France: le rideau, la mise en scène et les trois unités (Paris, 1955), passim.

7. See, for example, the preface Au Lecteur of Corneille's Œuvres (Seconde partie) published in 1648, in my edition of his Writings on the Theatre (Oxford, 1965), p. 194, to which all page numbers hereafter refer. The passage from the preface to La Suivante is on page 179.

8. Abbé d'Aubignac, La Pratique du théâtre, edited by P. Martino (Algiers, 1927), p. 90 (hereafter Pratique); B. Lamy, Nouvelles réflexions sur l'art poétique (Paris, 1668), p. 160. See also J. Chapelain, Discours de la poésie représentative, in Opuscules critiques, edited by A. C. Hunter (Paris, 1936), p. 128.

9. See J. Morel, Jean Rotrou, dramaturge de l'ambiguïté (Paris, 1968), iii, i, passim.

10. Aminte, Au Lecteur, quoted in J. Scherer, La Dramaturgie classique en France (Paris, [1950]), p. 160.

11. R. C. Knight has studied the tragicomic origins of Corneille's concept of tragedy in ‘Horace, première tragédie classique’, in Mélanges d'histoire littéraire (xvi^e-xviii^e siècle) offerts à Raymond Lebègue (Paris, 1969), pp. 195-200, an article to which the present one is complementary.

12. The French Stage in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester, 1957), p. 165.

13. See, among others, Chappuzeau, Le Théâtre françois (Lyons, 1674), p. 153. See also Mondory (quoted by Deierkauf-Holsboer, pp. 142-44), Abbé de Pure (quoted by P. Mélèse, Le Théâtre et le public sous Louis XIV (Paris, 1934), pp. 211-12, n. 4), Tallement des Réaux, Historiettes (Monmerqué et Paris edition. 1854-60), 9 vols, vii, 177.

14. Scherer cites this and others (p. 270) drawn from the early part of the seventeenth century.

15. Corneille produces no stereotyped pattern for the first act of his plays. The first scene of Sertorius is in some respects not unlike that of Pompée, but Perpenna has only one counsellor. The much-criticized first act of Rodogune, with its exposition in a dialogue between minor characters interrupted by the entrances of Antiochus and Séleucus and then resumed, is perhaps one of the least successful. It forms a marked contrast with Nicomède, which opens, unusually, for Corneille, with a dialogue between hero and heroine.

16. With the exception of Cinna (on which see Lawrenson's comments regarding staging arrangements, pp. 99-100), Corneille never, after Le Cid, effects a change of setting (or breaks the liaison des scènes) within any act of a play. This is true even of the machine-plays, Andromède and La Toison d'or, which are in some ways the successors of the spectacular vein of L'Illusion comique and Médée with the characteristics I have described.

17. See J. Morel, ‘Rhétorique et tragédie aux dix-septième siècle’, XVII^e siècle, 80-81 (1968), 94-95, 103-05).

18. On the construction of the play, see Bernard Croquette's interesting analysis in ‘Structure de Suréna’, RSH [Revue des Sciences Humaines], 38 (1973), 633-43.

19. ‘Drama and the Moral Connexion’, MLR [Modern Language Review], 78 (1963), xxiii-xxxii.

20. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that Corneille's superiority over his contemporaries is due solely to his adoption of the décor unique and the concomitant ‘rules’, or that he was a better dramatist than, say, Shakespeare, whose practice was conditioned by stage conventions not dissimilar in their effects to those of the décor multiple. Neither do I imply that Corneille's plays are more dramatic than those of these other playwrights, but simply that they are more consistently dynamic, and that the dynamism expresses a particular view both of heroic action and its consequences and of the circumstances in which it must be taken.