The manner in which it is given is worth more than the gift.
- Pierre Corneille, 1606-1684, French playwright
CORNEILLE'S WORKMANSHIP - from an article was originally published in A Short History of the Drama. Martha Fletcher Bellinger. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1927. pp. 170-2.
... French drama is indebted to Corneille not only for its first important tragedy, but also for its first important comedy, The Liar (Le Menteur). Although as a writer of comedy he exhibited undoubted genius, yet his greatest work, both in bulk and in quality, was in tragedy. He wrote thirty plays, choosing a great many historical subjects, several of which had often been used before, such as Sofonisba, Attila, Oedipus. He avowed his allegiance to the so-called classical rules, and for a part of the time he adhered to them. His theory was that the subject of a tragedy should be remote and improbable, with as many striking and extraordinary situations as were compatible with unity of action. His plays succeeded in spite of his theories. ...
PIERRE CORNEILLE - French Dramatist - Discover France
... Although Corneille is regarded as the founder of French tragedy, six of his first eight plays, beginning with Melite (c.1629), were comedies. In each, however, he was working toward the creation of the Cornelian hero. Pierre CorneilleIn La Place Royale (1633-34) his comedy does not exclude seriousness. The hero abandons his proposed wife because he feels that love is only a phase in life and does not justify sacrificing duty and freedom. ...
An interesting paragraph is in Not Molière! Ah, Nothing Is Sacred - Wehaitians.com:
... Experts in the period say that Mr. Labbé, for instance, does not take into account the significant constraints in 17th-century literary genres, which induced playwrights to use similar registers of vocabulary and greatly bridled lexical creativity. The stylistic codes at play are therefore far more powerful than the personality of any given writer. And the difference between Corneille and Molière is not so much a matter of lexicon as of syntax and rhythm, nuances that can escape statistical analysis entirely. In fact, Mr. Forestier said, dozens of other 17th-century plays are close in vocabulary to the ones by Molière and Corneille. Mr. Labbé, however, fails to draw any such comparisons, except with a single play by Racine, "Les Plaideurs," considered semantically atypical by specialists. ...
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