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The Stroke of Passion: Pascal and the Poets

Richard Scholar

in The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something

It is commonly said that elusive forces draw individual human beings into passionate relations with one another. This chapter identifies three tendencies towards the je-ne-sais-quoi in the realm of ... More

It is commonly said that elusive forces draw individual human beings into passionate relations with one another. This chapter identifies three tendencies towards the je-ne-sais-quoi in the realm of the passions, and argues that these three tendencies correspond loosely to the term's history. The first part deals with Descartes and other philosophers who attempt to draw the je-ne-sais-quoi into, or to exclude it from, a systematic theory. The second part of the chapter is devoted to those early modern writers (Corneille, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Molière, Racine, and others) who describe a strange sympathy that springs not from any rational choice but from an inexplicable mutual passion. This falls upon the subject at one stroke and, or so the poets say at the term's moment of lexical currency, as a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. The third part of the chapter looks at those writers (Regnard among others) who come to exploit the term as a fashionable instrument of persuasion.Less

Literary Explorations

Michael Moriarty

in Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II

Interest in problems of self-knowledge and self-deception is not confined to philosophers and theologians. It is exploited by dramatists for comic effect (Corneille and Molière). But confusion as to ... More

Interest in problems of self-knowledge and self-deception is not confined to philosophers and theologians. It is exploited by dramatists for comic effect (Corneille and Molière). But confusion as to one’s motives is also found in characters in tragedy (Corneille and Racine) and in serious fiction (Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves). Different forms of this confusion are analysed.Less

The French Augustinians

Christopher Brooke

in Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau

This chapter details the contemporary assault on Stoic moral psychology from the pens of the French Augustinians. The influence of the Stoic revival of the sixteenth century continued to be felt in a ... More

This chapter details the contemporary assault on Stoic moral psychology from the pens of the French Augustinians. The influence of the Stoic revival of the sixteenth century continued to be felt in a variety of spheres in seventeenth-century France, and gave rise to a variegated landscape which brought about several orientations toward the Stoics. The chapter considers one such orientation in particular — the nascent anti-Stoicism of the 1640s. This took on its distinctive form in the pages of Corneille Jansen's Augustinus (1640), but, as the chapter demonstrates, such an orientation was not by any means confined to narrow Jansenist circles.Less

Corneille's Andromeda: Painting, Medicine, and the Politics of Spectacle

Wes Williams

in Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic

This chapter initiates discussion of the conjoined processes of medicalization and theatricalization that monsters undergo in the seventeenth century. The changing reception of Heliodorus's ... More

This chapter initiates discussion of the conjoined processes of medicalization and theatricalization that monsters undergo in the seventeenth century. The changing reception of Heliodorus's Aethiopica (onstage, in painting, and in vernacular verse and prose translation) introduces its central themes. There follows detailed analysis of (hitherto largely unknown) accounts of conjoined twins born mid-century. The survival of sixteenth-century civil-war rhetoric in these ‘medical’ discussions suggests that politics underscores the history of medicine in matters monstrous. The final section is devoted to a close reading of Corneille's enormously successful ‘machine-play’, Andromède, performed at a time of renewed civil war (1650). It focuses on Corneille's revisiting of the themes of sedition, seduction, witness/autopsy, and the force of the imagination; its argument is that the playwright's resistance to spectacular politics is evident both in his recasting of Perseus's ‘rescue’ as mere show, and of the monster as the embodiment of Andromeda's true desire.Less

Imitations of Christ in 17th-century France: Some attendant difficulties: Lecture in Modern Languages read 22 May 2013 by

Richard Parish

in British Academy Lectures 2012-13: Published in the online Journal of the British Academy

The most important verse paraphrase of the Imitation of Christ in 17th-century France was written by the dramatist Pierre Corneille. In his paratexts he discusses the difficulties he has encountered ... More

The most important verse paraphrase of the Imitation of Christ in 17th-century France was written by the dramatist Pierre Corneille. In his paratexts he discusses the difficulties he has encountered in the project, which expands on the original by including engravings, many of which illustrate episodes from the lives of saints. One such is Theodora, who is the subject of his closely contemporary martyr tragedy, Théodore. But here too he encountered difficulties, in the context of bienséance, from objections expressed to the prostitution with which the eponym is threatened. In a different idiom, the Jesuit priest Jean-Joseph Surin, seeing his role as exorcist as another kind of imitation of Christ, records his ordeal in two autobiographical works, one of which moves progressively into stylistic incoherence. Finally, Bossuet engages in the polemic surrounding a further possible implication of the term, in the form of the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence.Less

Terror and Pity: The Springs of Tragedy

Ronald Schechter

in A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France

The positive emotional connotations of the word “terror” were enhanced by eighteenth-century theater criticism, which used the standard of terror when judging tragedies. Drawing (often loosely) on ... More

The positive emotional connotations of the word “terror” were enhanced by eighteenth-century theater criticism, which used the standard of terror when judging tragedies. Drawing (often loosely) on Aristotle, writers praised tragedies for instilling terror and pity in spectators and discounted tragedies that failed to stimulate these feelings. Often, however, and particularly in the later decades of the century, theater critics neglected to mention pity in their assessments of tragedy and focused exclusively on terror. There were ethical implications to such judgments, because critics believed that viewing a terror-inspiring tragedy was morally improving. As a term used to praise exemplary works of drama, “terror” had a dignified, elevating feel to it, and it was a compliment to call a playwright “terrible.” Among the playwrights to benefit from the reputation of having instilled terror were the Greek tragedians Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, the seventeenth-century dramatist Jean Racine, and the eighteenth-century playwright Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon.Less

Cartesian Plots, Dramatic Theory, and Emotional Wonder

R. Darren Gobert

in The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater

This chapter concerns playwriting and dramatic theory after Descartes. It demonstrates how the much-discussed problem of dramatic catharsis originates in an incommensurability produced by ... More

This chapter concerns playwriting and dramatic theory after Descartes. It demonstrates how the much-discussed problem of dramatic catharsis originates in an incommensurability produced by Cartesianism, since the universal experience of pity and fear theorized by Aristotle cannot be reconciled with an audience of individualized subjects. Pierre Corneille responded to this incommensurability in Nicomède, whose script is analyzed alongside two of its performances: at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1651, and at the Louvre in 1658. Corneille reconfigured tragedy in order to foreground wonder, the precise emotion that Descartes located at the center of his emotional physics and moral philosophy. These Cartesian innovations, theorized in Corneille's copious theoretical writings, were in turn mimicked in English theater and dramatic theory of the period, especially that of John Dryden, whose essays "Of Dramatick Poesy" and "Conquest of Granada" are discussed.Less

The Monetary Imaginary of Renaissance France

Jotham Parsons

in Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State

This chapter argues that French literature down to the 1630s frequently thematized the social danger of money, particularly with regards to social mobility. Writers from the age of Henri II through ... More

This chapter argues that French literature down to the 1630s frequently thematized the social danger of money, particularly with regards to social mobility. Writers from the age of Henri II through the first years of the seventeenth century stressed the role of money and precious metals as both expressions and synecdoches of royal or even divine majesty. But in the half century that followed the death of Henri IV, monetary themes became the province of comic and libertine writers such as Pierre Corneille, Tristan l'Hermite, and Charles Sorel, who flourished in the reign of Louis XIII (1610–1643), and their successors, such as Molière and Antoine Furetière, under Louis XIV.Less

Divas and Diplomacy in Seventeenth-Century France

John Watkins

in After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy

This chapter examines how war affected interdynastic marriage in seventeenth-century France. By late seventeenth century, the hope for European peace had lost its foundations in a shared ... More

This chapter examines how war affected interdynastic marriage in seventeenth-century France. By late seventeenth century, the hope for European peace had lost its foundations in a shared sacramentology and confidence in women's intercessions. When discrete national historiographies celebrating nation-states rather than dynasties appeared, their writers cast the women whose marriages bound Europe in a single family as tragic victims of their fathers' ambitions and husbands' infidelities. This chapter analyzes how French drama registered the personal and cultural impact of marriage diplomacy's declining prestige by focusing on Pierre Corneille's Horace and Tite et Bérénice, as well as Jean Racine's Andromaque and Bérénice. It also discusses two treaties, the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees and the 1670 Treaty of Dover.Less

From Emotion to Affect

Andrea Frisch

in Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion

Examines the consolidation in French tragedy of the early seventeenth century of what Thomas Pavel has described as an “art of distancing” (“art de l'éloignement”) characteristic of French ... More

Examines the consolidation in French tragedy of the early seventeenth century of what Thomas Pavel has described as an “art of distancing” (“art de l'éloignement”) characteristic of French neo-classicism. The conciliatory posture encouraged by the exhortation to extinguish memories of the wars provoked a reorientation of French emotions about the national past, away from a Renaissance Humanist tendency to exploit pathos in the service of political action, and towards a neoclassical aesthetics and an absolutist politics for which emotion frequently functioned as an alternative to political action. By seeking to unify the French around a set of shared emotions, the imperative to forget the violently divisive differences of the period of the Wars of Religion paved the way for the thoroughgoing forgetting of difference that grounded the ideology of absolutism.Less

The Drama of Time in Short Supply

in On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines

This chapter discusses concepts of the drama of time through the works of Aristotle, Pierre Corneille, Shakespeare, Lessing, and Proust.

Cartesian Générosité and Its Antecedents

Michael Moriarty

in The Measure of Greatness: Philosophers on Magnanimity

The chapter contains an exposition of Descartes’s ethics, the keystone of which is the concept of générosité. This incorporates both a cognitive state (the knowledge that nothing belongs to us but ... More

The chapter contains an exposition of Descartes’s ethics, the keystone of which is the concept of générosité. This incorporates both a cognitive state (the knowledge that nothing belongs to us but the use of our free will, and that nothing but the good or bad use of our free will is worthy of praise or blame) and a disposition of will, a determination always to act in accordance with our judgement of what is best. The concept is discussed in relation both to Aristotle’s conception of magnanimity and to the Stoic ethics of Epictetus, but also in relation to the use of the term in literary texts of the time, the plays of Pierre Corneille, and the stories of Jean-Pierre Camus.Less

Corneille: The Indulgent Spectator

Joseph Harris

in Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France

The writings of the dramatist Corneille inject a salutary dose of practical experience into a debate so far conducted largely between theoreticians. Steering away from illusionistic models, the more ... More

The writings of the dramatist Corneille inject a salutary dose of practical experience into a debate so far conducted largely between theoreticians. Steering away from illusionistic models, the more pragmatic Corneille holds that dramatists can win spectators’ belief by engaging their interest in the plot or its characters, distracting them from technical flaws and inconsistencies, and manipulating their (often patchy) grasp of history. Corneille is one of the first thinkers to consider the spectator’s emotional relationship to dramatic characters rather than to the whole dramatic fiction. Most famously, he is drawn to the ideal of a dramatic hero able—often through great virtue—to produce wonder in spectators alongside, or even instead of, Aristotle’s traditional pity and fear. Despite often being drafted in to justify Corneille’s own innovations, the spectator emerges in Corneille’s theories as a recognizably human, three-dimensional being: intelligent, equitable, imaginative, but also pleasure-seeking, complex, and fascinatingly unpredictable.Less

Counter-Reformation Tragedy: The Laurel and the Cypress

Blair Hoxby

in What Was Tragedy?: Theory and the Early Modern Canon

Twentieth-century critics claim that drama cannot be both Christian and tragic at once, and when they do make an exception it is for the Calvinist or Jansenist tragedy of damnation. As staunch ... More

Twentieth-century critics claim that drama cannot be both Christian and tragic at once, and when they do make an exception it is for the Calvinist or Jansenist tragedy of damnation. As staunch opponents of both of these strains of Augustinian piety, the Jesuits, who may have produced 100,000 tragedies before 1773, find no place in such accounts. Focusing on Bernardino Stefonio’s Crispus (1597), Calderón’s The Constant Prince (1629), and Corneille’s Polyeucte (1644), this chapter reconstructs the theory and dramaturgy of rounter-reformation martyr tragedies. It argues that Molinism supports a dramaturgy that frets over the competing claims of God’s providence and man’s free will while doing so in terms that are distinct from the implicitly Lutheran account of necessity and free will offered by German idealists such as Schelling and Hölderlin.Less

Achilles in French Tragedy (1563–1680)

Tiphaine Karsenti

in Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century

This chapter examines how French playwrights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appropriated the epic figure of Achilles. Inheriting both antique and medieval traditions, they made him into a ... More

This chapter examines how French playwrights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appropriated the epic figure of Achilles. Inheriting both antique and medieval traditions, they made him into a flexible tragic hero, alternately noble, brutal, and romantic. Following the evolution of taste and aesthetics, love and passions progressively took a major part in their treatment of the hero. But the uses of this epic figure also reflect the social, political, and ethical concerns of a France facing profound transformation. From the civil wars opposing Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century to the establishment of absolute monarchy under Louis XIV, the definition of the state, the relations between nobles and political power, the vision of man and history were profoundly shaken. The ambivalent characterizations of Achilles, virtuous yet excessive, supportive yet a threat to the king, authorized manifold dramatizations of these contemporary issues.Less

Conclusions: The Spectrum of Friendship

Cedric C. Brown

in Friendship and its Discourses in the Seventeenth Century

One conclusion is repeated: the spectrum of friendship is indivisible, instrumentality not occluding principled affection. On the question of why many of the champions of friendship in this book are ... More

One conclusion is repeated: the spectrum of friendship is indivisible, instrumentality not occluding principled affection. On the question of why many of the champions of friendship in this book are not socio-typical, the possible answer—friendship discourse could be to do with need—is related to the historical observation, that from the ancient world onwards writings about friendship often appeared in times of disintegration. Another general observation concerns the pervasive exclusivity of friendship criteria, despite the pressure of caritas. Foreign language competence is often used as a surrogate marker. Finally, the book demonstrates the indivisibility of the friendship spectrum by reconfiguring the case of the woman writer most associated with friendship, Katherine Philips. The changes of address at the Restoration did not radically rewrite earlier practice: some early poems also approached those in higher social positions. The Poliarchus letters, Corneille translations, and posthumous collections are considered.Less

Nourished on Blood

Helen Slaney

in The Senecan Aesthetic: A Performance History

French tragedy of the same period (sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) was likewise experiencing rapid change, transformed within a generation from an academic pastime into a fully-fledged ... More

French tragedy of the same period (sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) was likewise experiencing rapid change, transformed within a generation from an academic pastime into a fully-fledged profession. Initially performed within the collège (university) communities, Seneca entered the repertoire of touring companies and was translated for outdoor performance on temporary stages by playwrights such as Robert Garnier and Jean de La Taille. With the establishment of the first permanent venues in Paris, the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Théâtre du Marais, companies began to take advantage of the scenography and special effects now available to fuse Senecan tragedy with baroque spectacle. Whereas English playwrights tended to apply senecan features to different plots, Senecan plays in their entirety were performed much more frequently in France.Less

The Great Repression

Helen Slaney

in The Senecan Aesthetic: A Performance History

Following precepts derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, French neoclassical tragedy from the 1630s onwards was required to comply with the so-called Règles—the ‘Rules’—of dramatic composition. One of ... More

Following precepts derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, French neoclassical tragedy from the 1630s onwards was required to comply with the so-called Règles—the ‘Rules’—of dramatic composition. One of the most important of these was ‘unity of place’, which was not in fact prescribed by Aristotle but became essential in French theatre practice. Racine’s Phèdre is a brilliant example of how Senecan tragedy could be adapted to neoclassical regulation. Although claiming Euripides’ Hippolytus as its source, Phèdre actually has more structural and thematic similarities to the Senecan version. One such theme is the idea of repression and containment, expressed not only through the spoken text of Phèdre but also in its staging.Less