La Comédie des Tuileries et l’Aveugle de Smyrne. Ecrites en collaboration par F. de Boisrobert, G. Colletet, P. Corneille, Cl. De l’Estoile, J. Rotrou, sous la direction de Richelieu avec la participation de J. Chapelain (review)

This edition brings together for the first time two plays, commissioned by Richelieu and written in collaboration by five popular authors of the time, most noticeably Rotrou and Corneille. While the editor himself admits that they may be of limited interest in terms of their dramatic quality, the contextualisation and analysis he provides in his introduction, as well as his notes and appended documents, are well worthy of attention. The first part deals with the texts of the plays themselves, the attribution of the acts to each of the credited authors and the role of Richelieu in the conception of the works. The sections that take a close look at the genesis of this collaborative work and the tensions that underline it, especially ‘l’équipe de direction’ and ‘Richelieu auteur’, shed some light on Richelieu’s stronghold on the arts and on each author’s own perception of drama. The second part deals with the most famous of the five authors, Corneille, his theories regarding the purpose and value of his art and with his dissensions with Chapelain’s vision in particular. It starts with a brief reminder and contextualization of the significance of this period (1634–7) in Corneille’s artistic life and on the development of his skills as a writer and, most importantly, of his own theories on the theatre. It then goes back at length on the difficulties inherent to producing a collective work such as La Comédie des Tuileries. While some of those are clearly practical (coherence of plot and style), it is clear that Corneille and Chapelain’s radically different visions of the purpose of drama (in particular regarding the balance between the ‘pleasure’ to be derived from comedy and its moral purpose) and of the relationship between playwright and audience also caused some friction. Chapelain’s theories are exposed at some length and go some way to explaining Corneille’s ultimate ‘escape’ from Richelieu’s project. Nonetheless, Lasserre also points out the ‘positive’ effects of this experience on Corneille: namely in forcing him to articulate his own theories and in providing him with some material for later works. The book offers two further ‘annexes’ before we finally get to the plays: one on ‘Les textes témoins’, which will be of interest only to researchers working very closely on those two texts, the other, an interesting but speculative analysis of the relationship between Rotrou and Corneille, which takes a highly critical look at Henri Chardon’s theories on the matter. For the few who study them, this is a welcome new edition of plays that are fairly rarely talked about. For the others, the extra material offered by Lasserre will still make it very interesting reading.