The Life of Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille was born in 1606 in Rouen, France to a well-off, middle-class family. At the time, Rouen was the capital of theater publishing in France, and Corneille probably saw many traveling productions (such as, according to speculation, Shakespeare’s The Tempest) when they passed through Rouen. Corneille’s father and grandfather, however, were both lawyers, members of the rising French bourgeoisie, and a career in law seemed to be expected of the young Corneille. At the age of nine, he entered the Jesuit school of Rouen, where he received an education of Renaissance humanism, classics (especially Latin), rhetoric, and Catholic doctrine. Unlike his younger contemporary, the playwright Jean Racine, who was educated by the heretical Jansenists and was influenced by their emphasis on original sin and predestination, the Jesuits instilled in Corneille an optimistic belief in free will. This belief in a rational, capable man who is master of his fate would later influence the philosophy of Corneille’s heroic tragedies like Le Cid.
In 1624, Corneille passed his bar examinations, but he performed so poorly on his first case that he gave up the profession in favor of a magisterial position arranged by his parents. He began writing, and in 1629 showed his first play, Mélite, to a theater troupe that happened to be passing through Rouen. The company took it to Paris, where it became a minor success and launched Corneille’s literary career. The company became known as the Théâtre du Marais, and for the next few decades Corneille wrote his plays almost exclusively for this theater. Some of Corneille’s plays are believed to reflect the composition of the acting ensemble—for example, the unusually large number of female actors in the company resulted in more female roles in Corneille’s plays.
Corneille tried his hand at numerous genres, including heroic tragedy, a genre largely of his own invention. He called his L’Illusion Comique (1636) a “strange monster,” a hybrid work composed of comedy, tragedy, and pastoral. Corneille’s most successful work, Le Cid (1636), about a conflict between heroic love and heroic duty, was a runaway hit with Parisian audiences and a lightning rod for critics. Despite being denounced by the French Academy, the play was so popular that people began using the phrase “beau comme Le Cid” [beautiful like Le Cid]. As for Corneille, he was fiercely defensive of his work. Early in his career, he famously quit the “Five Authors,” a company of playwrights who wrote plays based on topics suggested by Cardinal Richelieu. Known for his vainglorious but independent spirit, he was kept out of the French Academy for years because of his refusal to move to Paris.
Corneille continued to write plays—mostly tragedies, but also some religious and machine, or spectacle, plays—until late in life, even as the theater became more enamored with his younger rival, Jean Racine. A complete revised edition of his works was published in 1684, the year he died. After his death, Racine spoke these words about his competitor:
“You know in what condition was the French stage when he began his work. Such disorder! Such irregularity! No taste, no knowledge of the real beauties of the theater… In this chaos, […Corneille] against the bad taste of the century,… inspired by an extraordinary genius,… put reason on stage, but a reason accompanied by all the pomp and all the ornaments of which our language is capable; happily uniting verisimilitude and the marvelous, he left far behind him all the rivals… who tried in vain, through their discourses and frivolous criticism, to lower a merit that they could not equal.”
