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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

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

Surface Selves: Médée, 1634

Juliette Cherbuliez

in In the Wake of Medea: Neoclassical Theater and the Arts of Destruction

Chapter 1 serves as the cornerstone of this book, against which all the other chapters can be read. It explores a singular play, Pierre Corneille’s 1634 Médée. Often read as generic precursor or ... More

Chapter 1 serves as the cornerstone of this book, against which all the other chapters can be read. It explores a singular play, Pierre Corneille’s 1634 Médée. Often read as generic precursor or holdover, as failed experiment or primitive attempt, Médée is utterly unique for its era in its subject matter and politics. This chapter shows how its Médée is framed not by excess, passion, or inconstancy, but by moderation, knowledge, and attachment, in both positive and negative forms. Médée’s own “self” is a surface self, existing in counter-distinction to the complex self-possessed individual grounded in an interior, the hallmark of the eighteenth century. The contrast between the Medean surface self and the Medean art of destruction as one of cleaving to and cleaving from compels a meditation on how the self emerges in relation to others and what is sacrificed when we see the self as autonomous. Analogously, instead of seeing Médée as Corneille’s first tragedy, and so a primitive or premature form of what will come after it, this reading positions it at the undisclosed heart of the tragic project, as it reverberates in both its past and its future.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

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 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

Flying toward Futurity: Spectacularity and Suspension

Juliette Cherbuliez

in In the Wake of Medea: Neoclassical Theater and the Arts of Destruction

Corneille’s 1660 prequel to 1634’s Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or is usually dismissed as political propaganda. Instead, this chapter considers the play’s technological innovations as part of ... More

Corneille’s 1660 prequel to 1634’s Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or is usually dismissed as political propaganda. Instead, this chapter considers the play’s technological innovations as part of its aesthetic and political work. An on-stage Medean presence pits two forms of temporality against each other, each performed by a different stage technology. The chapter explores technological innovations in set design and special effects, which offer contrasting experiences of time: rapid transformation versus narrative suspense. The chapter shows how the play changes the rules of dramatic narrative by challenging audience expectations of what will happen. This play offers, contra such conceptual historians as Reinhart Koselleck, an early example of the collision between pre-modern forms of history and more progressivist senses of temporality. This collision is shown to invoke the metaphor of suspension only to replace it with that of suspense, thus effecting a replacement that positions the threat of violence close at hand.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 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

Judging Well

Emma Gilby

in Descartes's Fictions: Reading Philosophy with Poetics

When Marin Mersenne reflects upon the 1637 Discours de la méthode, he is anxious about what Descartes teaches us on the subject of flexibility and changing our minds. His worry is that Descartes ... More

When Marin Mersenne reflects upon the 1637 Discours de la méthode, he is anxious about what Descartes teaches us on the subject of flexibility and changing our minds. His worry is that Descartes might be arrogantly suggesting that the human will can tend to the good without the assistance of divine grace. Descartes’s response revolves around the example of Medea, a touchstone for poetic theory in general and the subject of Corneille’s 1635 reworking of Seneca. Subsequent critical comparisons of Corneille and Descartes are re-evaluated in this context, and against the background of the explosion of poetic debate in the quarrel surrounding Corneille’s 1637 Le Cid. This quarrel places the major players in earlier debates about tragicomedy on a very public stage.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.