Critical Failures: Corneille Observes His Spectators

chapter 11 Critical Failures: Corneille Observes His Spectators Joseph Harris 1 Introduction The playwright Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) is doubtless the most exten- sive self-commentator in seventeenth-century French theatre. In 1660, he published a three-volume edition of his complete works to date, with each volume prefaced by a lengthy discourse on dramatic theory and a short analy- sis (‘examen’) of each individual play.1 It is certainly tempting to regard the theories that emerge in these writings as effectively post hoc justifications for Corneille’s own dramatic decisions and innovations; indeed, one of Corneille’s foremost commentators, Georges Forestier, has bemoaned the critical refrain that ‘Corneille, the French author who expressed his aesthetic ideas at great- est length, should above all not be taken seriously as a critic or theoretician’.2 And while we should not overlook the strategic or self-justificatory impulses within Corneille’s theoretical writings, it is perhaps both more charitable 1 Le Théâtre de Pierre Corneille revu et corrigé par l’auteur (Rouen, Augustin Courbé: 1660), 3 vols. As the editor of Corneille’s Pléiade edition, Georges Couton, reminds us, modern editions of the work invariably take liberties with Corneille’s original ordering by publishing all three Discours alongside each other as parts of a single text. See Corneille Pierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. G. Couton, 3 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: 1980–1987) vol. 3, 1391. All editions published in Corneille’s lifetime spread the three Discours over each of the three volumes. The first discourse, “Discours de l’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique” (‘Discourse on the Usefulness and Parts of the Dramatic Poem’) prefaces the first volume, covering his plays (mostly comedies) from Mélite (1629) to L’Illusion comique (1635). The second, “Discours de la tragédie” (‘Discourse on Tragedy’), covers the period of his early tragic works, from Le Cid (1636) to Théodore (1644), and the third, “Discours des trois unites, d’action, de jour, et de lieu” (‘Discourse on the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place’), covers his most re- cent plays, from Rodogune (1644) to La Toison d’or (1660). The later 1682 edition contained a fourth volume of plays, with some prefatory material for each play but – despite Corneille’s apparent earlier intentions – no fourth discourse. The ‘examens’ themselves vary in length between about one and nine pages, running to an average of about three pages each in modern editions. Perhaps surprisingly, at least for a modern reader expecting each ‘examen’ to precede its respective play, Corneille bunches the ‘examens’ for each volume together after the opening ‘Discourse’. For more information, see Corneille, Writings on the Theatre, ed. H.T. Barnwell, Blackwell’s French Texts (Oxford: 1965) xxxiii. 2 Forestier G., Essai de génétique théâtrale: Corneille à l’œuvre (Paris: 1996) 23. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396593_013 Critical Failures: Corneille Observes His Spectators 317 and more constructive to consider his theories, as I shall do here, as part of a general process of experimentation, observation, and critical reflection on Corneille’s part.3 This is certainly, at least, how Corneille himself would have us read his dramatic theory. At the end of his first ‘Discourse’, Corneille is keen to remind us that he has one key advantage over all other theoreticians, whether con- temporaries like the abbé d’Aubignac or even canonical figures like Aristotle. According to Corneille, his three decades of playwriting experience have granted him an unrivalled level of dramatic expertise. While he does not ex- actly flout the precepts that Aristotle laid out for drama, he interprets them in his own way, being guided more by experience and reflection than by dry philological debate. ‘Le commentaire dont je m’y sers le plus’, he announces, ‘est l’expérience du théâtre et les réflexions sur ce que j’ai vu y plaire ou dé- plaire’ (‘The commentary I use most often is my experience of the theatre, and my reflections on what I have seen produce pleasure or displeasure there’).4 Corneille draws his corpus of modern examples almost exclusively from his own works – for fear, he claims, of offending contemporary playwrights or damning them with faint praise.5 He presents himself as plain-speaking and reliable in his self-commentaries, insisting that he will analyse his own works ‘sans ambition, et sans esprit de contestation’ (III, 141, ‘without ambition and without seeking to be combative’); elsewhere he comments: ‘je n’ai point ac- coutumé de dissimuler mes défauts’ (I, 840, ‘I am not accustomed to concealing my faults’). And, indeed, Corneille the theoretician is often refreshingly critical of Corneille the dramatist, especially where his earliest plays are concerned. In this contribution, however, I shall explore how Corneille’s self-criticism is often mediated through a third party: the audience. Audience response is fundamental to the cycle of experimentation, observation, and reflection that underlies Corneille’s dramatic method. By 1660, Corneille had encountered both stunning box-office successes like Le Cid (1636) and utter catastrophes 3 For more information on Corneille’s self-commentaries, see Gossip C.J., “Corneille as Self- Critic”, Seventeenth-Century French Studies 23 (2001) 101–110. Christopher J. Gossip addresses Corneille’s (self-)critical writings from a range of illuminating perspectives (compositional, textual, and theoretical), and explores some of the apparent inconsistencies between his different theoretical accounts of plays such as Le Cid and Horace. Gossip’s study, however, makes only glancing reference to the question of audience response, which I hope to demon- strate here is fundamental to Corneille’s own dramatic practice. 4 Corneille, Œuvres complètes III, 141. All quotations from Corneille will be from this edition, referenced with volume and page number. All translations are my own. 5 In fact, Corneille does make occasional brief references to works by authors who had re- cently died, such as Tristan l’Hermite (La Mariane, 1637) and Battista Filippo Ghirardelli (Constantino, 1653)..

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