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 seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine.
Pierre Corneille (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ kɔʁnɛj]; 6 June 1606 – 1 October 1684) was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three good seventeenth-century French dramatists, along when Molière and Racine.
As a young man, he earned the vital patrionate of Cardinal Richelieu, who was irritating to announce classical tragedy along formal lines, but later quarrelled bearing in mind him, especially on height of 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.
Corneille was born in Rouen, Normandy, France, to Marthe Le Pesant and Pierre Corneille, a distinguished lawyer. His younger brother, Thomas Corneille, also became a noted playwright. He was total a rigorous Jesuit education at the Collège de Bourbon (Lycée Pierre-Corneille since 1873), where acting upon the stage was allocation of the training. At 18 he began to breakdown law, but his practical legal endeavours were largely unsuccessful. Corneille’s dad secured two magisterial posts for him later than the Rouen department of Forests and Rivers. During his time in imitation of the department, he wrote his first play. It is run of the mill exactly with he wrote it, but the play, the comedy Mélite, surfaced subsequently Corneille brought it to a help of traveling actors in 1629. The actors qualified of the pretense and made it ration of their repertoire. The decree was a deed in Paris, and Corneille began writing plays upon a regular basis. He moved to Paris in the similar year and soon became one of the leading playwrights of the French stage. His into the future comedies, starting with Mélite, depart from the French silliness tradition by reflecting the elevated language and manners of trendy Parisian society. Corneille describes his variety of comedy as “une peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”). His first authentic tragedy is Médée, produced in 1635.
The year 1634 brought more attention to Corneille. He was agreed to write verses for Cardinal Richelieu’s visit to Rouen. The Cardinal took broadcast of Corneille and prearranged him to be among Les Cinq Auteurs (“The Five Poets”; also translated as “the bureau of the five authors”). The others were Guillaume Colletet, Boisrobert, Jean Rotrou, and Claude de L’Estoile.
The five were chosen to pull off Richelieu’s vision of a new nice of stand-in that emphasized virtue. Richelieu would present ideas, which the writers would appearance in dramatic form. However, the Cardinal’s demands were too restrictive for Corneille, who attempted to innovate outdoor the boundaries defined by Richelieu. This led to contention amongst playwright and employer. After his initial union ended, Corneille left Les Cinq Auteurs and returned to Rouen.
In the years directly taking into consideration this crack with Richelieu, Corneille produced what is considered his finest play. Le Cid (al sayyid in Arabic; roughly translated as “The Lord”) is based on the play Mocedades del Cid (1621) by Guillem de Castro. Both plays were based upon the legend of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (nicknamed “El Cid Campeador”), a military figure in Medieval Spain.
The original 1637 edition of the statute was subtitled a tragicomedy, acknowledging that it with intent defies the classical tragedy/comedy distinction. Even though Le Cid was an gigantic popular success, it was the subject of a cross argument greater than the norms of dramatic practice, known as the “Querelle du Cid” or “The Quarrel of Le Cid”. Cardinal Richelieu’s Académie française acknowledged the play’s success, but distinct that it was defective, in part because it did not worship the classical unities of time, place, and action (Unity of Time stipulated that all the function in a bill must accept place within a 24-hour time-frame; Unity of Place, that there must be and no-one else one quality for the action; and Unity of Action, that the scheme must be centred on a single dogfight or problem). The newly formed Académie was a body that asserted divulge control greater than cultural activity. Although it usually dealt similar to efforts to standardize the French language, Richelieu himself ordered an analysis of Le Cid.
Accusations of immorality were leveled at the work the form of a well-known pamphlet campaign. These attacks were founded upon the classical theory that the theatre was a site of moral instruction. The Académie’s recommendations more or less the fake are articulated in Jean Chapelain’s Sentiments de l’Académie française sur la tragi-comédie du Cid (1638). Even the prominent writer Georges de Scudéry roughly criticized the play a part his Observations sur le Cid (1637). The depth of this “war of pamphlets” was heightened highly by Corneille’s boastful poem Excuse À Ariste, in which he rambled and boasted about his talents and claimed that no additional author could be a rival. These poems and pamphlets were made public, one after the other, as once “esteemed” playwrights traded slanderous blows. At one point, Corneille took several shots at criticizing author Jean Mairet’s relatives and lineage. Scudéry, a near friend of Mairet at the time, did not stoop to Corneille’s level of “distastefulness”, but on the other hand continued to pillory Le Cid and its violations. Scudéry even acknowledged of Le Cid that, “almost everything of the beauty which the performance contains is plagiarized.”
This “war of pamphlets” eventually influenced Richelieu to call upon the Académie française to analyze the play. In their pure conclusions, the Academy ruled that even though Corneille had attempted to remain faithful to the deal of time, Le Cid broke too many of the unities to be a valued piece of work.
The controversy, coupled subsequently the Academy’s ruling proved too much for Corneille, who established to reward to Rouen. When one of his plays was reviewed unfavorably, Corneille was known to desist from public life. He remained publicly Quiet for some time; privately, however, he was said to be “troubled and obsessed by the issues, making numerous revisions to the play.”
After a hiatus from the theater, Corneille returned in 1640. The Querelle du Cid caused Corneille to pay closer attention to classical dramatic rules. This was evident in his next-door plays, which were classical tragedies, Horace (1640, dedicated to Richelieu), Cinna (1643), and Polyeucte (1643). These three plays and Le Cid are collectively known as Corneille’s “Classical Tetralogy”. Corneille furthermore responded to the criticisms of the Académie by making complex revisions to Le Cid to make it closer to the conventions of classical tragedy. The 1648, 1660, and 1682 editions were no longer subtitled “tragicomedy”, but “tragedy”.
Corneille’s popularity grew and by the mid 1640s, the first addition of his plays was published. Corneille married Marie de Lampérière in 1641. They had seven children together. In the mid to late 1640s, Corneille produced mostly tragedies, La Mort de Pompée (The Death of Pompey, performed 1644), Rodogune (performed 1645), Théodore (performed 1646), and Héraclius (performed 1647). He in addition to wrote one comedy in this period, Le Menteur (The Liar, 1644).
In 1652, the play Pertharite met next poor essential reviews and a disheartened Corneille granted to quit the theatre. He began to focus on an influential verse translation of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, which he completed in 1656. After an malingering of approximately eight years, Corneille was persuaded to reward to performing arts in 1659. He wrote the play Oedipe, which was favored by Louis XIV. In the neighboring year, Corneille published Trois discours sur le poème dramatique (Three Discourses on Dramatic Poetry), which were, in part, defenses of his style. These writings can be seen as Corneille’s recognition to the Querelle du Cid. He simultaneously maintained the importance of classical dramatic rules and justified his own transgressions of those rules in Le Cid. Corneille argued the Aristotelian dramatic guidelines were not designed to be subject to a strict literal reading. Instead, he suggested that they were entrйe to interpretation. Although the relevance of classical rules was maintained, Corneille suggested that the rules should not be therefore tyrannical that they stifle innovation.
Even though Corneille was prolific after his reward to the stage, writing one fake a year for the 14 years after 1659, his superior plays did not have the thesame success as those of his earlier career. Other writers were dawn to gain popularity. In 1670 Corneille and Jean Racine, one of his dramatic rivals, were challenged to write plays upon the thesame incident. Each playwright was unaware that the challenge had furthermore been issued to the other. When both plays were completed, it was generally customary that Corneille’s Tite et Bérénice (1671) was inferior to Racine’s play (Bérénice). Molière was in addition to prominent at the epoch and Corneille even composed the comedy Psyché (1671) in collaboration in imitation of him (and Philippe Quinault). Most of the plays that Corneille wrote after his return to stand-in were tragedies. They included La Toison d’or (The Golden Fleece, 1660), Sertorius (1662), Othon (1664), Agésilas (1666), and Attila (1667).
He wrote his last piece Suréna in 1674; it was a resolved failure. After this, he retired from substitute for the truth time and died at his home in Paris in 1684. His grave in the Église Saint-Roch went without a monument until 1821.