Thomas Corneille (1625–1709): Beyond the Triumvirate
University of St Andrews
In 1761, Voltaire wrote of Thomas Corneille: ‘si vous exceptez Racine, auquel il ne faut comparer personne, il était le seul de son temps qui fût digne d’être le premier au-dessous de son frère'.1 With characteristic wit and acuity, Voltaire neatly sets up the stakes of the debate by putting his finger right on the challenges that still accompany any attempt at evaluating the work of our playwright, even 300 years after his death. Of course, the comparisons with Pierre Corneille, nineteen years Thomas's senior, are in many ways legitimate; their contemporaries were quick to compare the two men, and Thomas himself openly acknowledged his debt to his older brother in matters theatrical. Furthermore, Thomas married the sister of Pierre's wife, and the couples shared a house for many years; they moved from Rouen to Paris together in 1662 and when, in 1684, Pierre died, Thomas was unanimously elected to take his seat at the Académie Française.
Thomas is also widely remembered by means of another great playwright: in 1677, he devised a more anodyne verse version of Molière's controversial Dom Juan (1665), using Molière's original title, Le Festin de pierre.2 Contrary to what is often stated, this is not simply a verse adaptation; rather it is a rewrite that has much to teach us about what Thomas (who was a good judge of such matters) considered to have been the objectionable aspects of Molière's play and the means of rendering them acceptable.3 Whether or not Thomas had his rewrite performed under Molière's name out of modesty or false modesty, the fact remains that this was the form in which the play (ostensibly Molière's) was known until the prose version was resurrected in the nineteenth century.4 In this instance, the comparison with a more famous colleague is not only unavoidable but essential.
Often, however, such comparisons are fraught with potential pitfalls. How and where exactly is one to create a space for dramatists such as Thomas Corneille (or Jean Rotrou, born in 1609, whose anniversary also falls this year) in a discipline that is so thoroughly dominated by the towering presence of the dramaturgical Holy Trinity of Pierre Corneille (the Father), Racine (the Son) and Molière (the Holy Spirit)? Thomas needs to be evaluated on his own terms, and yet he is so much a part of the theatrical fabric that produced the canonical three that to examine him out of context is, paradoxically, to diminish his importance. Thomas Corneille's plays are often described as being more or less ‘Cornelian’ or ‘Racinian’, and, to the extent that Racine and Pierre Corneille are more familiar to students and scholars alike, this can be a useful way into the topic. Yet these terms can also be misleading, for it is clear that dramatic influence between Thomas Corneille and Pierre Corneille, and between Thomas Corneille and Racine was a two-way street. More often than not, the greatness of Pierre Corneille and Racine is the yardstick by which Thomas Corneille is measured, but it may be more illuminating to use Thomas Corneille as the yardstick by which to measure the greatness of Pierre Corneille and Racine. Whatever the case, even the most committed scholars of Thomas Corneille stop short of arguing that he is their equal, still less their superior. Rather, he is the best of the rest. How, then, is one to give Thomas due credit for his considerable merits as a playwright without overstating the case? And how is one to avoid damning with faint praise? There is no easy solution to this conundrum and scholars must negotiate it as best they can.
The charge most frequently levelled against Thomas is that he was a follower of fashion, and that he adapted his work to the changing tastes of his audience too easily. Yet this might also be considered a great quality: certainly, if one is to attempt to understand the climate of seventeenth-century French theatre through the work of a single playwright, Thomas Corneille would be the one to choose. His output and flexibility are truly remarkable: Thomas wrote more than forty dramatic works over a span of more than forty years;5 his corpus includes all the major dramatic genres (and most of the subgenres) of the century, ranging from Spanish comedies to comedies on contemporary events in France (in verse and prose),6 to romanesque tragicomedies and tragedies,7 to machine plays8 and operas. His work was performed, at different times, by all the major theatre companies in Paris: the Marais, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the Palais Royal and, after Molière's death, the Guénégaud and the Comédie Française. They were also performed at court.
Furthermore, Thomas Corneille was the sole author of what is widely accepted as having been the greatest box office hit of the century: the tragedy-with-a-happy-end, Timocrate (1656), which enjoyed an extraordinary initial run of nearly eighty performances. Timocrate achieved the rare distinction of being performed by both of the principal Parisian theatre companies, if not simultaneously, then in close succession;9 it dominated the 1656–1657 theatre season (the young Louis XIV and his court even went to the Marais to see it).10 The machine play, Circé (1675), by Thomas (with help from Jean Donneau de Visé and music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier), was another outstanding success. And Thomas was the principal author, also with Donneau de Visé, of another of the century's greatest hits: La Devineresse (1679), a succès de scandale during the Affair of the Poisons on which it was based.11 By any standards, then, Thomas Corneille was a remarkable and important playwright.
One reason why Thomas has proven somewhat elusive as a playwright is perhaps that so many of his works, particularly the later ones, were written collaboratively. His best-known association was with Donneau de Visé in the 1670s and 1680s, during which time the pair shamelessly promoted their work in the Mercure galant newspaper of which they were co-editors.12 Together, they produced a number of plays (several of them with incidental music by Charpentier) of different theatrical genres and of wildly diverging popularity.13 Thomas also collaborated with Montfleury on Le Comédien poète (1673), and with Jean-Baptiste Lully on the operas Psyché (1678)14 and Bellérophon (1679). In 1693, after Lully's death, Thomas Corneille ended a six-year theatrical silence by writing the libretto for Charpentier's full-scale opera Médée, based loosely on Pierre Corneille's 1635 play. Indeed one of the most important factors in the revival of Thomas Corneille today (and of other neglected playwrights of the seventeenth century who also wrote libretti) is a renewed interest in French baroque opera. Of particular note was a spectacular, full-scale production of Psyché in summer 2007 under the auspices of the Boston Early Music Festival of which a CD box set was released by CPO in 2008.15
To date, only two monographs have been published on the work of Thomas Corneille and there is certainly scope for another.16 A particular strength of the first, by Gustave Reynier,17 is the attention he gives to the machine plays and the operas. Reynier dedicates a full chapter to these works and recognizes them to be Thomas's most original (as well as his most overlooked) contribution to the seventeenth-century stage. He understands that these works are not primarily literary, but theatrical and spectacular. He also understands, as many literary scholars do not, the importance of music in an opera, and the relationship of a libretto to that music.
Yet Reynier's patent disdain for Thomas Corneille the writer of tragedies (at least the so-called ‘pre-Racinian’ ones) is troublesome. Reynier makes no effort to conceal his personal distaste for the romanesque — a view that many of us no doubt share, but about which we would do well to be a little more historically and culturally sensitive. His account of these plays is nothing short of sarcastic and judgmental. At the heart of Reynier's study sits a familiar dilemma: what are we to make of an author who was undeniably popular in his day, yet whose work (much of it, anyhow) is not to our more modern taste? Are we to assume that our taste is better than that of a seventeenth-century theatre audience? Does the advantage of time and distance render our judgement more valid or is it simply anachronistic? Reynier offers two possible answers to this question, one more palatable than the other: first, he suggests that Thomas was popular ‘parce qu'il satisfait les médiocres et que les médiocres sont toujours le nombre et la force’ (p. 324). The other more fruitful answer he proposes is that the plays are not to be read, but to be seen in performance. If the dictum of Alexandre Dumas (fils) that ‘le spectateur ne fait que le succès, c'est le lecteur qui fait la renommée’18 was true in the past, Thomas's renommée is now increasing thanks to a greater emphasis on theatre-in-performance in current criticism.
The second monograph, by David A. Collins, responds to, and often takes issue with, Reynier's reading of the plays.19 He provides a measured, if rather uninspiring, evaluation of his chosen plays and of Thomas Corneille's place in the hierarchy and chronology of seventeenth-century French theatre, asserting the extent and importance of his contribution, while never overstating the case. Collins's big mistake is to call the machine plays and operas ‘peripheral’ (p. 13). Both Collins and Reynier are heavy on plot summary, which is useful for familiarizing an uninformed readership, but which, thankfully, subsequent scholarship has been able to incorporate and go beyond.
Returning to the question of situating Thomas Corneille's work in context, Richard E. Goodkin published three articles in 1998, each comparing a tragedy by Thomas with one by a more famous contemporary.20 Rather than being embarrassed by the interesting dynamics that inevitably surface when comparing the work of the Corneille brothers, Goodkin eagerly embraces them by taking up the question of sibling rivalry within their plays. He clearly enjoys analysing first Pierre Corneille's Rodogune (1644) alongside Thomas Corneille's Persée et Démétrius (1662) and then Pierre Corneille's Nicomède (1650) alongside Thomas Corneille's La Mort d'Annibal (1669). Both sets of plays are examined in the context of waning feudalism and rising capitalism and the corresponding shift away from prioritizing primogeniture in favour of establishing a level playing field on which siblings could compete for, say, power and love. In both pairs of plays, Goodkin demonstrates how Thomas adopts a more radical position with regard to the younger sibling, something that is particularly apparent in the second pairing because the historical source material is essentially the same.
But it is Goodkin's examination of Thomas Corneille's Ariane (1672) alongside Racine's Phèdre (1677) that is in many ways the most illuminating, because the plays share source material and because they were performed only 5 years apart before the same Parisian public with the celebrated actress, La Champmeslé, playing the female lead in both.21 There is a very real sense, then, in which Phèdre can be read as a theatrical sequel to Ariane. At the same time, it is also important to remember that Ariane is itself widely considered to be Thomas's most ‘Racinian’ play; June Moravcevich argues that Ariane was influenced specifically by Racine's Andromaque and Bérénice.22 With this in mind, as Goodkin points out, the single mention that Racine's heroine makes of her older sister, Ariane, in I. 3, assumes a far greater significance than we usually ascribe to it. Furthermore, the question of female rivalry in the new character of Aricie recalls the earlier rivalry between Phèdre and Ariane, which in turn further intensifies the themes of intergenerational conflict and confusion, so central to Racine's masterpiece. If it is a bit of a stretch to suggest that (Racine's) Phèdre is the story of (Thomas's) Ariane's revenge, the juxtaposition of the two plays undoubtedly enhances our understanding of one of the most canonical plays in the history of French theatre.23 In a refreshing variation on this theme, Jan Clarke has argued that Thomas's opera Circé (which, like Phèdre, includes a reference to ‘implacable Vénus’) exerted at least as great an influence on Racine's Phèdre as Ariane.24 Adopting a different tactic, Helen L. Harrison offers an interesting reading of Ariane in and of itself, and in the broader context of the trajectory of the seventeenth-century onstage hero, arguing that the play ‘uses the problem of gratitude to undermine the heroic ethos’.25
The most substantial contribution to the Thomas Corneille corpus to have been published in the last decade is the third volume of Jan Clarke's magnum opus on the Guénégaud Theatre.26 Clarke's book is an account of Thomas's contribution to the machine play at a time when spectacle in the theatre was simultaneously popular with the theatre-going public and under threat from a series of draconian measures taken by Lully, who was attempting to establish for himself and his operas a monopoly on stage music. During the Guénégaud theatre's relatively short existence (1673–1680), it enjoyed an extraordinarily close partnership with Thomas who, along with Donneau de Visé, seems to have been charged with ensuring the new theatre's very viability.27 And sure enough, Circé was its first big hit and one that duly established the company as a theatrical force to be reckoned with. In an attempt to build on their success, Thomas and Donneau de Visé went on to write three further machine plays for the Guénégaud: L'Inconnu (1675), Le Triomphe des dames (1677) and La Devineresse (1679), as well as a fourth, La Pierre philosophale (1681), for the newly founded Comédie Française. It is on the material circumstances of the creation of these works that Clarke focuses her detailed attentions, demonstrating how Thomas Corneille can be credited with having taken the machine play in a new direction away from traditional mythological subjects (Circé) and towards a romanticized contemporary reality (L'Inconnu) and then a more cynical contemporary reality (La Devineresse). Clarke's study also illuminates the apparent ease with which Thomas changed allegiance, as he did when the Guénégaud was floundering, first by giving his Comte d'Essex to the troupe at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1678, and then by collaborating with the über-enemy, Lully, on Psyché and Bellérophon.
No complete edition of Thomas Corneille's dramatic works has ever been produced. However, Christopher Gossip is currently overseeing such an edition to appear in a Bibliothèque du théâtre français published by the Éditions Classiques Garnier both in hard copy and online. The project is still in its early stages, but it is expected that the plays, which are being edited by an array of distinguished scholars, will appear in chronological order (by date of first performance) in several volumes between 2011 and 2013.28 There is no doubt that this will provide a significant and long overdue service to the study of seventeenth-century French theatre. In the meantime, we look forward to a tercentenary conference that is to be held in Rouen in late 2009, organized by the Mouvement Corneille and the Université de Rouen. This too promises a welcome boost to the study of this important playwright, although there is an inescapable irony in the fact that the Mouvement Corneille is dedicated to the study of Pierre Corneille. It would seem that Voltaire's piquant observation with which we began is as apposite now as ever.29
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Footnotes |
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1 Voltaire, Commentaires sur Corneille, in
uvres complètes de Voltaire, LIII-LV, ed. by David Williams (Banbury, Voltaire Foundation, 1973–1975), LV, p. 979. 
2 He is also understood to be the Monsieur de L'Isle to whom Molière mockingly refers in L'Ecole des femmes I. 1.
3 For a helpful overview and analysis of these changes see, among others, Giorgio Sale, ‘Le Festin de pierre de Thomas Corneille: un exemple des procédés de réécriture’, in Don Giovanni a più voci, ed. by Anna Maria Finoli (Bologna, Cisalpino, 1996), pp. 177–93.
4 For a fascinating analysis of the shifting fate of Molière's play, see Joan DeJean, ‘The Work of Forgetting: Commerce, Sexuality, Censorship, and Molière's Le Festin de Pierre’, Critical Inquiry, 29.1 (2002), 53–80.
5 Although published some 35 years ago, Christopher Gossip's two articles dealing with some of the thornier aspects of chronology remain essential points of reference. See ‘Vers une chronologie des pièces de Thomas Corneille: I. Des premières comédies à la veille des tragédies romaines’ and ‘II. Les tragédies romaines et les pièces de fin de carrière’, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 74.4 (1974), 665–78 and 74.6 (1974), 1038–58.
6 Christopher Gossip provides a useful overview of Thomas's contribution to seventeenth-century comedy in ‘Thomas Corneille and the Comic Tradition’, in Essays on French Comic Drama from the 1640s to the 1780s, ed. by Derek Connon and George Evans (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 29–41.
7 For an introduction to the tragedies in comparison with those of Pierre Corneille, see Marcel Oddon, ‘Les Tragédies de Thomas Corneille: structures de l'univers des personnages’, Revue de la Société d'Histoire du Théâtre, 37.3 (1985), 199–213.
8 Machine plays are spectacular works involving more or less elaborate stage machinery and frequent changes of décor. Traditionally, they drew on mythological subjects featuring flying chariots, gods descending from the heavens and so on.
9 See Christopher Gossip, ‘"Tenir l'affiche" dans les théâtres parisiens du XVIIe siècle’, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 107.1 (2007), 19–33 (p. 30) for further discussion of this matter.
10 For a balanced and thoughtful analysis of the play (in which several earlier accounts of it are rightly taken to task), see Christopher Gossip, ‘Timocrate Reconsidered’, Studi Francesi, 50 (1973), 222–37. See also H. Gaston Hall, ‘Verisimilitude and Aesthetic Coherence in Thomas Corneille's Timocrate’, in Form and Meaning: Aesthetic Coherence in Seventeenth-Century French Drama, ed. by William D. Howarth and others (Amersham, Avebury, 1982), pp. 92–98.
11 Several articles have appeared recently on the play, including Martial Poirson, ‘Les Classiques ont-ils cru à leurs machines? La force du surnaturel dans La Devineresse ou Les Faux enchantements (1679)’, Revue d'histoire du théâtre, 223 (2004), 181–94; Jan Clarke, ‘La Devineresse and L'Affaire des poisons’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 28 (2006), 221–34; and Julia Prest, ‘Silencing the Supernatural: La Devineresse and the Affair of the Poisons’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 43.4 (2007), 397–409.
12 Donneau de Visé was founding editor of the Mercure galant in 1672; after a hiatus between 1675 and 1676, the newspaper began to appear again in 1677, and appeared regularly from 1678. Thomas became Donneau de Visé's informal associate there in 1677 and his official partner in 1681.
13 The extent of Donneau de Visé's contribution to these plays is a matter of some debate. Jan Clarke points out that Donneau de Visé makes no claim to have made any contribution to Le Triomphe des dames, which was the least successful of the three Guénégaud machine plays, while he may have exaggerated his contribution to the highly successful La Devineresse. See J. Clarke, The Guénégaud Theatre in Paris (1673–1680), III: The Demise of the Machine Play (Lewiston—Queenston—Lampeter, Edwin Mellen Press, 2007), pp. 47–8. Neither does he claim to have had a hand in the unsuccessful La Pierre philosophale, although Clarke conjectures that this too was a collaborative effort (ibid., p. 371n).
14 This 1678 operatic version of Psyché drew heavily on a 1671 version of the work, also with music by Lully, and original text by Molière, Pierre Corneille and Philippe Quinault.
15 On a similar note, Erato produced a CD box set of Charpentier's Médée in 1995. There also exists a 1985 recording of Médée by Harmonia Mundi.
16 A third, Gilbert Sautebin's Thomas Corneille, grammairien (repr. Geneva, Slatkine, 1968) falls beyond the scope of Thomas's career as a dramatist, with which we are concerned here.
17 G. Reynier, Thomas Corneille: sa vie et son théâtre (Paris, Hachette, 1892; repr. Geneva, Slatkine, 1970).
18 Reynier, Thomas Corneille, p. 329.
19 D. A. Collins, Thomas Corneille: Protean Dramatist (The Hague, Mouton, 1966).
20 R. E. Goodkin, ‘Born to Rebel Revisited: Pierre Corneille's Rodogune and Thomas Corneille's Persée et Démétrius’, in La Rochefoucauld, ‘Mithridate’, Frères et Sœurs, Les Muses sœurs, ed. by Claire Carlin (Tübingen, Narr, 1998), pp. 241–55; id., ‘Nicomède 1 and 2: The Fraternal Heritage of Pierre and Thomas Corneille’, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 25.48 (1998), 255–65; id., ‘Thomas Corneille's Ariane and Racine's Phèdre: The Older Sister Strikes Back’, L'Esprit créateur, 38.2 (1998), 60–71.
21 Madeleine Bertaud has written an article comparing Ariane with Hardy's much earlier tragicomedy, Ariane ravie: ‘Deux Ariane au XVIIe siècle: Alexandre Hardy et Thomas Corneille’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 19 (1997), 135–48.
22 See J. Moravcevich, ‘Thomas Corneille's Ariane and its Racinian models’, Romance Notes, 15.3 (1974), 465–76.
23 Oscar Mandel considers Ariane to be Thomas's masterpiece, and his only tragedy that can be favourably compared with those of Pierre Corneille and Racine. See his article ‘Éloge de l’Ariane de Thomas Corneille', Revue d'histoire du théâtre, 219 (2003), 261–80.
24 See J. Clarke, ‘Thomas Corneille's Circé: A precursor of Racine's Phèdre?’, The Modern Language Review, 90.2 (1995), 325–32. Clarke concludes that the influence was of a general, inspirational nature rather than of a specific, plot-based variety.
25 H. L. Harrison, ‘A Tragedy of Gratitude: Thomas Corneille's Ariane and the Demolition of the Hero’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 34.2 (1997), 183–95 (p. 183).
26 See n. 13 above for full bibliographical details.
27 Thomas's Le Comédien poète, written in collaboration with Montfleury, was the first original work to be performed at the Guénégaud (November 1673). The next new work performed there was written by Thomas alone: the tragedy La Mort d'Achille (December 1673).
28 These editors are William Brooks, Jan Clarke, Jane Conroy, Christophe Couderc, Catherine Dumas, Perry Gethner, Christopher Gossip, Gaël Le Chevalier, Emmanuel Minel, Liliane Picciola, Paul Scott and Montserrat Serrano Mañes.
29 I would like to extend my thanks to Christopher Gossip for his very helpful comments on this piece.
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