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University Microfiims 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 A Xerox Education Company |! :! 73-15,322 I H/VrrON, Donald day, 1931- THE nnfLLic mmrïPE in the plaïs of pierre CORNEILLE (MELITE THROUGH POLÏBUCTE'). AN INSPIRATIONSTOB^ION. ------- The Itaiversity of Oklahoma, Ph.D., 1972 Language and Literature, modem University Microfilms. A Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan © 1973 Donald Clay Hatton ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFIIWED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. i THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE THE IDYLLIC ARCHETYPE IN THE PLAYS OF PIERRE CORNEILLE (MÉLITE THROUGH POLYEUCTE). AN INSPIRATIONAL OBSESSION. A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY DONALD CLAY HATTON Norman, Oklahoma 1972 THE IDYLLIC ARCHETYPE IN THE PLAYS OF PIERRE CORNEILLE (MfiLITE THROUGH POLYEUCTE). AN INSPIRATIONAL OBSESSION. A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES PLEASE NOTE; Some pages may have indistinct print. Filmed as received. University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the members of my reading committee. Professors James D. Fife, Jim P. Artman, and Seymour Feiler, and especially Professor Besse A. Clement, for their edito­ rial suggestions and indispensable help in fulfilling the administrative requirements connected with this dissertation, I should also like to thank my mother-in-law, Mrs. Hayward B, Smith, for providing me a perfect environment in which to write and study, and my wife, Kay, for assisting in the ardu­ ous final typing. For his encouragement, scholarly guidance, and generos­ ity I am greatly indebted to my dissertation director. Professor Willis H. Bowen, to whom this work is respectfully dedicated. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................. 1 I. MÉLITE............................................ 31 II. CLITANDRE........................................ 42 III. lA VEUVE..... ...................................... 57 IV. LA PLACE R O Y A L E .................................. 89 V. M Ê D É E ............................................ 104 VI. L« ILLUSION COMIQUE................................. 126 VII. IÆ ÇI D ............................................ 144 VIII. HORACE AND CINKA................................... 170 IX. POLYEUCTE........................................ I88 X. CONCLUSION........................................ 221 BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................. 231 INTRODUCTION A. Preliminary Remarks This dissertation is an outgrowth of my interest in three subjects: the plays of Pierre Corneille, Platonic love, and the psychology of artistic creativity. By Platonic love I mean a feeling which the lover has that he and the beloved possess, actually or potentially, a single soul. This kind of love is erotic in the broad sense, in that the lover yearns to become one with the beloved, spiritually or both spiritually and phy­ sically. Through union with her he hopes to reach a higher state of existence— perhaps even divinity. Of course Platonic feelings may be experienced by both members of the couple. The term may also denote a strong sympathetic attraction to another living being, accompanied by the impression of a continuing concurrence of wills. Thus a sailor may feel Pla­ tonic love for his ship, if he is inclined to regard "her" as a living being; and one could call the relationship between Antiochus and Seleucus in Rodogune Platonic, even though the two are not lovers but brothers. We will be concerned here only with intersexual love, however, in which context the term is no doubt most properly used to designate a sensation erotic in not only the broad but also the narrow sense. That is, to denote an impression of transcendent oneness (hroad sense of eroticism) occuring be­ tween a man and a woman who are attracted to each other by physical desire (narrow sense of eroticism). Most people now regard Platonic love as non-sexual (nar­ row sense), but in Renaissance Italy only a few theoreticians believed, with Ficino, that it should completely ignore man's animal nature. The majority— Bembo, Leone Ebreo, Equicola, Varchi— held that the union should be both spiritual and phy­ sical.^ When I first began to think about Corneille's theater, I was struck by the fact that, although he seemed to have a penchant for the latter viewpoint, his lovers often tended, for one alleged reason or another, to avoid the physical con­ summation of their will to unite. I saw what appeared to be strong elements of Platonic love in Corneille's theater, but could not determine their in­ spirational role. At times they almost seemed to be nothing more than ornaments in the work of a self-sufficient superman. Then, quite by chance, I made a discovery which led to two sig­ nificant conclusions: first, that what I supposed to be Platonic love, in Corneille, was in reality the ancestral form of all kinds of romantic love, and second, that this ancestral form profoundly influenced the poet's genius. 1 A.J. Smith, "The Metaphysic of Love," in A Mirror for Modern Scholars, Essays in Methods of Research in Literature ed. Lester A. Beaurline (Hew York: The Odyssey Press, Inc., 1966), pp. 140-155. While collecting examples of Platonic union in literature, I came across four fifteenth- and sixteenth-century illustra­ tions for the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, which is found in Ovid. At the time I vas especially curious about this story because of my increasing interest in the theme of union in death. Thanks, perhaps, to a recent reading of Ervin Panovsky's Studies in IconologyI soon realized, upon comparing the pictures to each other, an obvious fact vhich my hurried reading of the story had not revealed: namely, that its different phenomenolo­ gical elements— the tomb, the fountain, the lion— vere parts of a symbolic complex vhose meaning transcended that of the writ­ ten narrative. I set about the task of deciphering those symbols, using as principal tools the collected writings of C.J. Jung, J.E. Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbolsand what I knew of Corneille's psychological history. Long before I had fully understood the symbolic lesson of the story, it was clear that I had stumbled upon an archetype. By this term I mean a coherent pattern of beliefs and feelings so widely shared at a level beneath consciousness that there exists no ab­ stract vocabulary for representing it, and so 'sacred* that unexamined, irrational restraints inhibit any explicit analy­ sis. Such a complex finds a formula or pattern story, which 2 Ervin Panovsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, Harper Torchbooks, The Academic Library (Hew York: Harper and Row, 1962). 3 J.E, Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (Hew York: Philosophical Library, 1962). serves both to embody it, and, at first at least, to conceal its full implications. Later, the secret may be revealed, the archetype 'analyzed* or 'allegorically' interpreted ac­ cording to the language of the day.h What caused me to recognize the archetypal nature of the Pyramus story was the frequency with which its symbols recur in other stories dealing with the theme of union in death. I also noted that many of these stories, like the original myth, may be in­ terpreted either as rites de passage or as rites avortés, depending on whether one stresses the idea of union (as Vagner does in Tristan und Isolde) or the idea of death (as Shakespeare does in Romeo and Juliet). Ovid's history goes as follows. The lovers lived in Babylon, the "brick-walled city"5 pf Semiramis. Pyramus was very handsome, Thisbe the "loveliest of all those Eastern girls.They inhabited neighboring houses separated by a high garden wall and, apparently, encircled by another wall. At night, through a chink in the first wall, they held whispered conversations— for their parents had forbidden them to speak to each other. Eventually they decided to flee together from their homes and from the city. Each would steal U Leslie Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Ruck Honey!" in Five Approaches to Literary Criticism, an Arrangement of Con­ temporary Critical Essays, ed. Wilbur S. Scott (Hew York; Collier Books, 1962), p.

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