État Présent: Thomas Corneille (1625–1709): Beyond the Triumvirate

In 1761, Voltaire wrote of Thomas Corneille: ‘si vous exceptez Racine, auquel il ne faut comparer personne, il était le seul de son temps qui fût digne d’être le premier au-dessous de son frère’.¹ With characteristic wit and acuity, Voltaire neatly sets up the stakes of the debate by putting his finger right on the challenges that still accompany any attempt at evaluating the work of our playwright, even 300 years after his death. Of course, the comparisons with Pierre Corneille, nineteen years Thomas’s senior, are in many ways legitimate; their contemporaries were quick to compare the two men, and Thomas himself openly acknowledged his debt to his older brother in matters theatrical. Furthermore, Thomas married the sister of Pierre’s wife, and the couples shared a house for many years; they moved from Rouen to Paris together in 1662 and when, in 1684, Pierre died, Thomas was unanimously elected to take his seat at the Académie Française.

Thomas is also widely remembered by means of another great playwright: in 1677, he devised a more anodyne verse version of Molière’s controversial Dom Juan (1665), using Molière’s original title, Le Festin de pierre.² Contrary to what is often stated, this is not simply a verse adaptation; rather it is a rewrite that has much to teach us about what Thomas (who was a good judge of such matters) considered to have been the objectionable aspects of Molière’s play and the means of rendering them acceptable.³ Whether or not Thomas had his rewrite performed under Molière’s name out of modesty or false modesty, the fact remains that this was the form in which the play (ostensibly Molière’s) was known until the prose version was resurrected in the nineteenth century.⁴ In this instance, the comparison with a more famous colleague is not only unavoidable but essential.

Often, however, such comparisons are fraught with potential pitfalls. How and where exactly is one to create a space for dramatists such as Thomas Corneille (or Jean Rotrou, born in 1609, whose anniversary also falls this year) in a discipline that is so thoroughly dominated by the towering presence of the dramaturgical Holy Trinity of Pierre Corneille (the Father), Racine (the Son) and Molière (the Holy Spirit)? Thomas needs to be evaluated on his own terms, and yet he is so much a part of the theatrical fabric that produced the canonical three that to examine him out of context is, paradoxically, to diminish his importance. Thomas Corneille’s plays are often described as being more or less ‘Cornelian’ or ‘Racinian’, and, to the extent that Racine and Pierre Corneille are more familiar to students and scholars alike, this can be a useful way into the topic. Yet these terms can also be misleading, for it is clear that dramatic influence between Thomas Corneille and Pierre Corneille, and between Thomas Corneille and Racine was a two-way street. More often than not, the greatness of Pierre Corneille and Racine is the yardstick by which Thomas Corneille is measured, but it may be more illuminating to use Thomas Corneille as the yardstick by which to measure the greatness of Pierre Corneille and Racine. Whatever the case, even the most committed scholars of Thomas Corneille stop short of arguing that he is their equal, still less their superior. Rather, he is the best of the rest. How, then, is one to give Thomas due credit for his considerable merits as a playwright without overstating the case? And how is one to avoid damning with faint praise? There is no easy solution to this conundrum and scholars must negotiate it as best they can.

The charge most frequently levelled against Thomas is that he was a follower of fashion, and that he adapted his work to the changing tastes of his audience too easily. Yet this might also be considered a great quality: certainly, if one is to attempt to understand the climate of seventeenth-century French theatre through the work of a...