4 - Cinna: empty mirrors

Summary

‘Ah! souffrez que tout mort/Je vive encore en vous.’

Perhaps no other of Corneille's major tragedies was greeted with such unanimous praise as Cinna. In his famous letter to Corneille, Guez de Balzac expressed what was surely the general admiration of his contemporaries: ‘Votre Cinna guérit les malades, il fait que les paralytiques battent des mains, il rend la parole à un muet … La belle chose.’ Corneille, in his ‘Examen’ of the play, accepts this praise and admits that Cinna is the most universally admired of his works: ‘Ce poème a tant d'illustres suffrages qui lui donnent le premier rang parmi les miens’ (p. 152). He offers, as a possible reason for the play's popularity, a technical explanation. Cinna is successful principally because the laws of verisimilitude are made to function so well that form and content are intimately fused, creating a gleaming, shining mirage of theatrical splendor:

Cette approbation si forte et si générate vient sans doute de ce que le vraisemblable s'y trouve si heureusement conservé aux endroits où la verité lui manque qu'il n'a jamais besoin de recourir au necessaire. Rien n'y contredit l'histoire bien que beaucoup de choses y soient ajoutées: rien n'y est violenté par les incommodités de la représentation, ni par l'unité du jour, ni par celle de lieu.

(‘Examen’, p. 150)

The play's perfection mirrors, as it manifests, Classicism's precepts. Paradoxically, it is because of its shining surface that Cinna has, of all Corneille's plays, been used as a mirror reflecting its own contradictory readings.