Pierre Corneille

Introduction

Serge Doubrovsky's classic 1963 study, Corneille et la dialectique du héros, starts with a question that has remained all too familiar for Corneille scholars of different generations: 'Bien des livres et des articles ont été consacrés à Corneille: que dire de lui de neuf et de vrai?'.¹ And yet it is a question that Corneille's critics and commentators have managed to answer, negotiate, or elude in a range of different and often creative ways. This état présent aims to provide a selective overview of Corneille criticism roughly from 1984 (the tercentenary of his death) to the present day.²

Fortunately for those seeking, like Doubrovsky, to find something both 'new' and 'true' to say, Corneille's corpus is dogged by so many stereotypes — stereotypes often extrapolated from a small handful of plays and reinforced by the vagaries of academic publishing and the often reductive nature of university teaching — that there is a lot to react against. Indeed, far from being just a tragedian with a taste for the heroic, Corneille was an extraordinarily inventive and innovative playwright who tried his hand at a range of genres, from tragicomedies to machineplays, from tragédie-ballets to comédies héroïques. In addition to being a playwright, Corneille was also a dramatic theorist, a poet, and a gifted translator, although these elements of his work are even now only gradually being recognized in their own right. Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons why so many of Corneille's plays have traditionally been overlooked has been Corneille's resistance to generic expectations. Whereas his contemporaries Racine and Molière can be 'cherrypicked', albeit sometimes quite brutally, and made to fit into schemas of 'classical' tragedy or comedy that have been developed in large part from their own practice, Corneille's works remain stubbornly resistant to easy categorization.

Corneille scholarship has traditionally been dominated by the so-called 'tetralogy' of Le Cid, Horace, Cinna, and Polyeucte, a quartet sometimes accompanied by Rodogune and Nicomède, thus making up Harold Bloom's sextet of Corneille's canonical works, or by one or both of his most famous comedies, L'Illusión comique and Le Menteur.³ Unsurprisingly, the 'big four' plays, and this small handful of others, are routinely republished, and student guides to them are common.⁴ Yet even book-length critical studies of Corneille — and indeed some of the very best ones — also gravitate heavily around these particular plays, sometimes to the total or near-total exclusion of others. Whereas few commentators are as bold as Han Verhoeff in explicitly focusing on a corpus of supposedly 'great' plays from the vast mass of Corneille's writings,⁵ several explicitly limit their corpus to a particular time period that, more often than not, overlaps largely with the famous works, from the mid-1630s until the death of Louis XIII.⁶

Yet this focus on the early tragic plays (and in the case of Le Cid originally tragicomic, although this point is often overlooked) can not only distract attention from Corneille's other works but also give a skewed impression of what we expect to find across his corpus as a whole. Some critics have insisted on perceiving an underlying unity beneath Corneille's apparently very different works; in 1977, for instance, Marie-Odile Sweetser insisted that 'l'unité de l'œuvre [cornélienne] est organique, diffuse à travers tout le théâtre, par-delà les différences de genres'.⁷ The primary risk of such approaches, as Mary Jo Muratore has suggested, is that they perpetuate clichés rather than challenge them: 'yearning for esthetic coherence', she claims, 'readers anxious to locate […] familiar Cornelian qualities are willing to mold the text around the periphery of received opinion'.⁸

Over the last few decades, however, there have been some very fruitful attempts to move beyond the Corneille of cliché; several scholars have explicitly taken up the challenge of Corneille's overlooked and less critically successful plays. But even here, the gravitational pull of the tetralogy is so strong that writers are often tempted implicitly to dismiss these other plays...