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Pierre Corneille's L'illusion Comique: The Play as Magic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert J. Nelson
Robert J. Nelson*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
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Extract

“Voici,” wrote Corneille in his dedication of L'Illusion comique 1636) to the unidentified M. F. D. R., “un étrange monstre que je vous dédie. Le premier acte n'est qu'un prologue, les trois suivants font une comédie imparfaite, le dernier est une tragédie: et tout cela, cousu ensemble, fait une comédie.” Most critics of the play have not looked beyond the first part of this indulgent characterization by its author: with varying degrees of indulgence on their own part, they have regarded L'Illusion comique primarily as “un étrange monstre.” It has been dismissed as a youthful whim; taxed with superficiality and inconsistency; seen primarily as an étude dramatique; believed interesting only as a document of theatrical life in the period, a backstage curio; viewed as a dramatization of Corneille's relations with the actor Mondory. Whatever the critical point of view (biographical, esthetic, historical or moral), the views of the play have all been partial. Yet many of these views are right, but right only when taken altogether: this early play is an élude dramatique; a document of the stage controversy of the period; a backstage drama; a dramatization of Corneille's relations with actors; a whim. It is, in short, a play about the theater.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 5 , December 1956 , pp. 1127 - 1140
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 Pierre Corneille, Œuvres, ed. Ch. Marty-Laveaux (Paris, 1862), n, 430. For those unfamiliar with this undeservedly neglected play, the following résumé may prove helpful: Dorante brings Pridamant to the grotto of Alcandre, a magician, hoping to learn something about Clindor, the son whom Pridamant admits having unjustly banished. Alcandre evokes for the father the image of his son in the service of the braggart captain, Matamore, whom Clindor is deceiving by pursuing one Isabelle, his master's mistress. Adraste, a rival for Isabelle's affections, intrigues with Lyse, servant of Isabelle who has been spurned by Clindor, to unmask the secret affair between Isabelle and Clindor. In an exciting confrontation scene, Matamore, typically, runs off, while Clindor slays Adraste. Géronte, father of Isabelle and partisan of Adraste, has Clindor arrested. With Clindor imprisoned, Lyse has a change of heart and intrigues with the jailer to have Clindor freed. The scheme succeeding, Clindor, Isabelle, Lyse and the jailer flee. These adventures have carried us to the end of Act iv and as Act v begins we see Isabelle and Lyse apparently lamenting a new infidelity by Clindor. Though he succeeds in absolving himself before Isabelle for his attachment to one Rosine, Clindor is slain by Eraste, servant of Rosine's husband. The adven tures of Clindor, begun in Act ii and followed with attention by Pridamant and Alcandre off-stage, have apparently come to a sad end. But only apparently, for Alcandre comforts the disconsolate father with the revelation that the last few scenes were but those of a play, that Clindor still lives, a member of an esteemed and lucrative profession. L'Illusion comique ends with the famous “éloge du théâtre.” (In the first version of the play, the play-within-a-play of Act v ended differently: having persuaded Isabelle of his fidelity, Clindor attempts to dissuade Rosine from her passion for him. While doing so he is slain by Eraste. Rosine, not Isabelle, dies of remorse. Eraste then leads Isabelle off to be comforted by Florilame, Rosine's husband and Clindor's benefactor, who has long been secretly in love with her.) The dates 1639–57 refer to the first edition of L'Illusion comique. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are based on Corneille's corrections after 1657. After 1660, the title was shortened to L'Illusion (Marty-Laveaux, ii, 460).

2 See, e.g., Voltaire, Commentaires sur Corneille in Œuvres, ed. Louis Moland (Paris, 1877–85), xxxl-xxxil, in which the play is completely ignored; Emile Faguet, Dix-septième Siècle (Paris, 1894), p. 145; Jules Lemaître in L. Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française (Paris, 1880), iv, 269–270; Raoul Morçay in Histoire de la littérature française, ed. J. Calvet (Paris, 1931–38), iii, 336.

3 (Manchester Univ. Press, 1944), p. xxi.

4 La Littérature de l'âge baroque en France (Paris, 1953), pp. 204–205. For further favorable comment on the play, see, too, Auguste Dorchain, Pierre Corneille (Paris, 1918), pp. 157–166, and Léon Lemonnier, Corneille (Paris, 1945), pp. 73–80.

5 Page 91, note to line 133.

6 Théâtre de Corneille (Paris, Ed. de la Pléiade, 1950), I, 1313, n. 6.

7 History: Part Two, i, 109.

8 We speak of the play being “about to begin” at the moment of the “coup de baguette” only figuratively, of course. Actually, the play about Clindor as the sieur de la Montagne in the service of Matamore does not begin until some further discussion about Clindor's new station has ensued between Pridamant and the magician.

9 Journal de l'empire, le 24 avril 1811. Quoted in J. de la Fontaine, Œuvres, ed. Henri Régnier (Paris, 1891), vil, 277, n. 1.

10 Page 92, note to line 181.

11 Tragédie cornélienne, tragédie racinienne, Illinois Studies in Lang, and Lit. xxxii, iv (Urbana, 1948), Ch. ii.

12 Professor John C. Lapp has suggested privately to the author that the preceding analysis of Pridamant's role holds up only for the first viewing of L'Illusion comique. In later viewings the spectator's identification with Pridamant is less complete, for dramatic curiosity is replaced by a kind of dramatic irony in which the spectator senses his superiority to Pridamant. Lapp suggests that perhaps both relationships obtain at once, this double perspectivism being characteristic of Corneille.

13 This staging is discussed in Marks, pp. xxxiv-xxxvii. Georges Ascoli had already suggested that Corneille was parodying English tragedies in the play-scene of Act v (La Grande Bretagne devant l'opinion française au XVIIe siècle, Paris, 1930, n, 154). Lancaster considers the hypothesis interesting but ultimately discounts it since we know so little of the English influences on Corneille (History: Part Two, i, 108).

14 “Corneille et Pirandello,” Cahiers du Sud, xxxi (1950), 109–114.

15 “Sono, tutti i sei, alio stesso punto di realizzazione artistica, et tutti i sei, sullo stesso piano di realtà, che è il fantastico délia commedia” (Luigi Pirandello, Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, 7 ed. riveduta e corretta con l'aggiunta d'une prefazione, Milano, 1930, P- 12).

16 The Idea of a Theater (Princeton, 1949), p. 188.

17 Cited by Branislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, ed Robert Redfield (Boston, 1948), p. 53.

18 For the extensive semantic field in which this notion occurs in the 17th century in France, see the unpubl. master's essay (Columbia, 1950) by Jules Brody, “L'Art de plaire in Seventeenth-Century France.”

19 Le Sentiment de l'amour dans l'œuvre de Pierre Corneille (Paris, 1948), passim.

20 See Ernst Friedrich, “Die Magie im französischen Theater des XVI und XVII Jahr-hunderts” in Mûnchener Beiträge zur Romanischen uni Englischen Philologie, No. 41 (Leipzig, 1908). Friedrich does not include L'Illusion in his long list of plays dealing with magic, no doubt considering the scenes between Alcandre and Pridamant external to the “principal action.”

21 “Rotrou et Corneille,” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire, 50e année (1950), 385–394. We might point out here that in Corneille's L'Illusion, as later in Rotrou's Le Véritable Saint Genest (1646), the play-within-a-play provides an excellent technical resolution of the double plot-scheme. The inner play is not merely a mechanical parallel]or hollow echo of the main action. A crucial moment of that action, it is a structural metaphor.

22 In Search of Theater (New York, 1953), p. 386.