Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ kɔʁnɛj]; 6 June 1606 – 1 October 1684) was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great 17th-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine.
"Corneille" redirects here. For other people with the name, see Corneille (name). For two schools in France, see Lycée Corneille.
Pierre Corneille
As a young man, he earned the valuable patronage of Cardinal Richelieu, who was trying to promote classical tragedy along formal lines, but later quarrelled with him, especially over his best-known play, Le Cid, about a medieval Spanish warrior, which was denounced by the newly formed Académie française for breaching the unities. He continued to write well-received tragedies for nearly forty years.
Legacy[edit]
The dramatist, author and philosopher Voltaire created, with the support of the Académie française, a twelve-volume annotated set of Corneille's dramatic works, the Commentaires sur Corneille.[3][4] It was Voltaire's largest ever work of literary criticism.[5] Voltaire's proposal to the Académie described Corneille as doing for the French language what Homer had done for Greek: showing the world that it could be a medium for great art.[3] Voltaire was driven to defend classic French literature in the face of increasingly popular foreign influences such as William Shakespeare. This is reflected in the first edition of the Commentaires, published in 1764, which focused on Corneille's better works and had relatively muted criticisms. By the second edition, published ten years later, Voltaire had come to a more negative assessment of Corneille and a stronger view on the need for objective criticism. He added five hundred critical notes, covering more works and taking a more negative tone.[6]
Critics' opinions of Corneille were already highly polarised. Voltaire's intervention polarised the debate further and some critics saw his criticisms as pedantic and driven by envy.[5][7] In the 19th century, the tide of opinion turned against Voltaire. Napoleon expressed a preference for Corneille over Voltaire, reviving the former's reputation as a dramatist while diminishing the latter's.[7]
In Episode 31 of the 1989 video lecture series, “The Western Tradition”, UCLA Professor Eugen Weber offers further commentary on Mssr. Corneille's work:
"But remember that Corneille’s plays were directed to an aristocracy that couldn’t be touched by sermons, by moralizing, by sentimentalism. So he touched them by showing the greatness of self-discipline and self-denial, of not doing what you want, but what you should do. And note that Corneille didn’t say, as a Christian would, that doing your duty makes you good, he said that doing your duty makes you great. When Corneille presented the struggle between passion and duty, it wasn’t a new invention. What was new in Corneille was that he showed one legitimate passion opposed to another passion that was equally legitimate. It was important to elevate the debate from a contest between right and wrong to a contest between two rights. Because a gentleman who got into a fight could not admit that he was wrong, but if you started by stipulating that his motives were honorable, he would at least stop to consider your argument, which is what Corneille achieved by raising the debate to a higher plane. And the seventeenth-century people who loved his adventure stories felt vaguely that they were getting in them something they hadn’t quite known before. And they were right. They hadn’t known it before for the simple reason that it had gone out with the Greeks. Roman thought was too legalistic, Christian thought was too simplistic to tolerate the idea that there could be two rights, that there could be two sides to a conflict. This is a very sophisticated view, and it is only fit for very sophisticated minds. And the tiny minority of the seventeenth-century society that read Corneille, that saw Corneille’s plays, was hardly very sophisticated, but it was beginning to try at least."
