Opuscules Critiques (review)

In an age which saw the publication of many works of poetics, arguably the most influential contributor to poetic theory was Jean Chapelain, who published no such work. He exercised his influence orally, through the circulation of manuscripts, in prefaces, and in contributions to polemics. His main contribution as a poet in his own right was the publication late in his career of his epic poem La Pucelle, which served only to ruin his reputation, much derided as the work was by Boileau. And yet Chapelain, though not a dramatist, contributed hugely to the advent of the regular form of drama in France in the 1630s, most obviously in the form of his manuscript of 1630, the Lettre sur la règle des vingt-quatre heures, and the Sentiments de l’Académie française sur Le Cid of 1637, a work of diplomatic as well as theoretical skill. Alfred Hunter had collected Chapelain’s fragmentary writings on literary theory and published them (also with Droz) in 1936. This much-used volume has now been replaced by the work of Anne Duprat, who is to be congratulated on the considerable service to scholarship that she has performed. Duprat has removed the extracts from Chapelain’s correspondence which closed Hunter’s edition, on the grounds that the correspondence with Heinsius has recently been published (edited by B. Bray, Champion, 2005) and the rest of the correspondence is too important to be published in the form of extracts. By way of compensation, she adds two manuscripts, the Discours contre l’amour of 1635 and the Dialogue de la gloire (c. 1662). The most valuable part of the edition is her substantial and scholarly introduction (155 pages), contextualizing and analysing each of Chapelain’s texts in turn. She finds in him a ‘chercheur d’occasions’, and yet also detects a ‘très réelle cohérence’ among his disparate utterances (p. 12). This valuable edition is sure to serve the scholarly community as well, and as long, as Hunter’s own edition did. And yet those dix-septiémistes who, like me, are sceptical about the critical value of terms like baroque and classicism, will be repeatedly frustrated by the frequency with which they are called on, throughout the introduction, as if in some explanatory way. We are told that Chapelain is a ‘théoricien baroque’ (p. 58) and that ‘[sa] poétique [. . .] comporte [. . .] déjà en 1637 la doctrine “classique” du merveilleux qu’il étendra en 1657 et en 1673 au cas de la poésie narrative’ (p. 88). His complex approach to vraisemblance is ‘explained’ in terms of both the baroque and classical principles at work (p. 87). These are not straightforward, explanatory terms to my mind and I would have found the introduction even more compelling and illuminating without them.