The Illusion: Corneille to Kushner
by Larry Norman
“A strange monster,” “a bizarre and wild invention,” “a caprice.” These are the terms that Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) first used to describe his new play, the 1636 Theatre of Illusion (L’Illusion comique). Corneille chose his words carefully; he knew that his odd creation needed defending. The powerful and learned critics of the day — who were busy promoting the classical standards of logical clarity, elegant simplicity, and strict decorum — could find in the play much that was monstrously messy. Its shocking concoction of the farcical and the tragic, its freewheeling and disorienting shifts in place and time, its house-of-mirrors playfulness with illusion and reality, all combined to produce a work bound to confound the new enforcers of formal purity and reasoned order.
But the young Corneille was less concerned with the theory of neoclassical doctrine than with the reality of stage success. His Illusion was, he said, a “novelty” — and novelties sold tickets. There was, however, nothing particularly new nor novel in the individual elements of the play; the originality lay instead in the creative amalgamation of its wildly disparate parts. The aged magician with his supernatural showmanship (Alcandre) was a trademark of baroque theatre, best known today through Prospero in Shakespeare’s 1610 The Tempest (a play that the French Corneille likely did not know). The cowardly braggart (Matamore) was a comic staple since Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus, brilliantly resurrected in the Renaissance commedia dell’arte stock figure of the vain but craven “capitano.” The young hero (Clindor) as an adventurous jack-of-all-trades buffeted by fortune draws on 16th and 17th-century picaresque novels with their rapid succession of episodes. And the themes of theatrum mundi (life as a stage), of the interchangeability of dream and waking, and of the illusory nature of lofty ideals — whether heroic or romantic — constitute the very definition of baroque sensibility, from Midsummer’s Night Dream (c. 1594), to Don Quixote (1605-15) to Calderon’s aptly titled Life is a Dream (1635).
By boldly spanning such a broad gamut of dramatic forms and themes, Corneille produced a stunning statement on the power of the theatre as a reflection of life. Although drama had already become a well-established art in Italy, Spain and England, it was just rising to prominence in the late 1620’s when, at the age of only twenty-three, Corneille began his playwriting career in Paris. Raised in the provincial upper bourgeoisie and destined for a staid career in law, he abandoned secure respectability by casting his lot with a form of art still vying for cultural prestige. It is hard not to see something of Corneille in the role of Clindor. The rousing defense of theater that closes the original play cannot but echo the playwright’s own ambitious struggle for some form of recognition in the era’s strict social hierarchy — and perhaps also for some form of reconciliation with the conservative order represented by his father.
Corneille himself very soon gained that recognition, and more, by increasingly adopting the neoclassical model of tragedy promoted by the newly formed Académie Française and the authoritarian Cardinal Richelieu. The plays that succeeded The Illusion — Le Cid (1637), Horace (1640), and Cinna (1641), though hardly without controversy (Corneille knew a little scandal always attracts audiences!) — increasingly conformed to the neo-Aristotelian three unities, to the rules of propriety, and to a seamless clarity of plot and character. The path was paved for the great French playwrights of the next generation, Racine and Molière. Corneille rapidly became the most influential playwright of Europe. And the “strange monster” called The Illusion, predating Corneille’s somewhat pompous glory, was largely buried and forgotten for almost two centuries.
The resurrection of the play began, under the influence of later Romanticism, in the mid-nineteenth century. But it was with the return of highly self-conscious and reflexive theatricality in the early-twentieth century (think Pirandello and Brecht) that L’Illusion comique rose again from oblivion. The great directors of the last century working in France — Louis Jouvet (1936), Giorgio Strehler (1984), Jean-Marie Villégier (1997), to name but a few — produced landmark versions of the play, which has become a popular favorite in Corneille’s homeland. Yet it remained largely obscure outside the French-speaking world.
Kushner remedied that situation with his 1988 version. Far from a simple translation, it is, as the author acknowledges, “freely adapted” from its source. As the shortening of the title suggests, Kushner abridges somewhat Corneille’s lengthy apologetics for the art of theater. But while trimming some sections, Kushner expands on others, and notably on the theme of the romantic (or erotic) illusion. He does so, for example, by interjecting an entirely new scene, constituting the first of the “fantasias” presented in the grotto and featuring the young lovers Calisto and Melibia. The scene is loosely inspired by Fernando de Rojas’s masterpiece, La Celistina (1499-1526), in which the high-minded clichés of Renaissance courtly love confront the grittiness of daily life and lusts, to both comic and tragic effect. What emerges in Kushner’s reworked version is a reflection on the great psychological and moral obsessions of the baroque — the awe-inspiring ideals of human imagination and the inevitable disillusionments they engender, the grandeur of human passions and their concomitant deceptions and self-deceptions, the wonder of dreaming and the cognitive shock of waking — all revealed in their ever-startling freshness.
Larry Norman is Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures, Theatre & Performance Studies, and The College, as well as Deputy Provost for the Arts at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction.
