Comic Performance, Formal Experimentation
The four plays that Corneille the six years that followed L’Illusion Comique—the tragicomedy Le Cid (1637), the Roman political tragedies Horace (1640) and Cinna (1641), and the Christian martyrdom tragedy Polyeucte (1642)— are known collectively as the ‘tetralogy’ and hold a special place in the French theatrical canon, traditionally taught in schools and performed in theatres to the near exclusion of Corneille’s other plays. Since the revitalization of L’Illusion Comique in performance in the mid-twentieth century, however, increasing attention has been paid to Corneille’s early work, the large part of which are comedies. In these plays scholars have found patterns of comic structure and moments of theatrical experimentation that perhaps culminate in L’Illusion Comique, and which continue to inform Corneille’s later work.
Claire Carlin, in her 1998 study Pierre Corneille Revisited, takes as her starting point Northrop Frye’s thesis about comedy, which proposes that the comic story is one of renewal in which young lovers overcome obstacles and are accepted into society. Carlin argues for the importance of performance in this model, in that the ultimate success or failure of the comic heroes depends on their reception by the community, which serves as their audience. She writes that “Corneille’s comic protagonists are creators of illusions that can be labeled either positive or negative [by their audience] in terms of their social impact;” as such, a Cornelian hero must be “actor, director, and dramatist in a play of his or her invention,” performing his or her worth to society in a drive for recognition and integration. There are connections here with the use of performance and illusion in L’Illusion Comique both by the characters within the illusion scenes and by Alcandre in the broader framework of the play. Carlin charts the progression of this structure through Corneille’s early works, many of which involve deceptions and elaborate ruses that lead to punishment when their overall effect is destructive, but are tolerated or even celebrated when resulting in an appropriate marriage. In broad terms, role-playing done well is a virtue for Corneille. In L’Illusion Comique, Clindor is a consummate role-player who successfully performs a variety of identities: he works as a servant while making claims to nobility, yet actual comes from a bourgeois background; he acts as Matamore’s messenger to Isabelle while he woos her himself, yet claims actually to love Lise; and he fittingly becomes an actor, a professional player of roles whose talent is celebrated by society. Conversely, the inability to play a role convincingly— Matamore’s transparent pretensions to grandeur, for example—might be justly ridiculed. But the plays tend to avoid overt didacticism; rather, it falls to the audience in the theatre to pass judgment on the characters’ “performances.”
For Carlin, the question of role-playing will remain crucial for the rest of Corneille’s works. In the famous tragicomedy Le Cid, for example, the two young lovers Rodrigue and Chimène are forced by a family quarrel to defend their gloire, their reputation in society, against each other. Despite their intimate relationship, this must take place in the public sphere, with the characters performing their honor in disputes and duels for the watchful eyes of a judging king, court, and, by extension, audience.
The early plays are also fascinating for their innovations in form. Carlin notes that, while Corneille wrote the standard French alexandrines, there is a great variety of tone within his verse, especially in the comedies. Felicia Londré recounts other experimental features of Corneille’s early comedies. With Mélite (1629), his first play, Corneille attempts to write a comedy without resorting to stock characters modeled on commedia. In La Veuve (1632), characters “perform” asides, soliloquizing with the intention that they be overheard. La Galerie du Palais (1633) transposes a pair of lovers who would have been at home in a traditional pastoral comedy into an urban setting, creating a comment both on the inherited genre and the vicissitudes of romance in the city. Such formal experimentation seems to reach its pinnacle in L’Illusion Comique; Corneille famously calls the play a “strange monster” that contains a prologue, an incomplete and problematic comedy, and a tragedy, and yet manages on the whole to be a comedy. Corneille would continue to experiment in genre and form despite the increasing influence of neo-classicism; his oeuvre contains not only tragedies and comedies, but also several more works of hybrid genres: tragicomedies, spectacular ‘machine plays,’ and heroic comedies. Nowhere, though, is his elastic approach to genre and his willingness to defy convention as present as in L’Illusion Comique.
Image: Pepper’s Ghost Effect. Engraving (1878)
–Zachary Moull, Dramaturgy Assistant
