Hey there!
I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course
Theater, and today’s episode will take place
in one location, in one revolution of the
sun, and involve only one plot.
Because we’re in early modern France.
And if there’s one thing the French love,
it’s raw milk cheese, and rules.
[[YORICK DROPS IN WEARING A PROFOUNDLY AHISTORICAL
BERET]] OH, right, and fashion.
Good one, Cue Ball.
Today we’ll be looking at the French embrace
of neoclassicism, the playwrights who rocked
it, and Le Cid, the play that scandalized
France by following neoclassical rules in
weird, absurd and possibly immoral ways.
Allons-y!
INTRO
The Renaissance arrived pretty late in France.
After political upheaval and religious wars,
the country finally settled down in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
with the help of the boy kings Louis XIII
and Louis XIV alongside their ministers, Cardinal
Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin.
All were enthusiastic proponents of the theater.
Yay!
Still, French playwriting had a slow start.
Editions of Terence appeared late in the fifteenth
century, followed by translations of Greek
tragedies and Aristotle’s Poetics.
A few playwrights tried out some Latin dialogues,
and a couple of Seneca adaptations began to
circulate.
Turns out, authors and intellectuals needed
about a century to think about Classical Drama
before they began writing Neoclassical drama.
And the result of all that thinking?
That’s right: rules.
The French framework for neo-classical drama
first arose around 1550, when a group of seven
French authors called Le Pleiade set up some
rules for writing.
Many of their ideas were absorbed by the Academie
Francaise, founded in 1636, which created
more rules.
Following Le Cid—which we’ll talk about
in a moment—the Academy standardized their
system, and articulated five main rules for
plays, allegedly based on classical models.
Here are your neoclassical must-haves:
Number One: Verisimilitude.
This means that the action onstage must be
believable.
No gods cruising through to solve everything,
no ghosts, no monsters, or satyrs with enormous
phalli.
And Yorick, I hate to break this to you, but
no soliloquies.
Breaking the fourth wall and talking directly
to the audience?
That is UNBELIEVABLE.
So instead we start getting a lot of friends
and maids as sounding boards.
Plays are still in verse, though and still
depict some pretty outrageous situations.
But they don’t violate spectators’ sense
of what should happen.
Which brings us to NUMBER TWO, Decorum.
From Horace, the Academy takes the idea that
drama has to teach and please.
And not from Horace, that plays should uphold
and promulgate French morals.
Good people have to be rewarded.
Bad people have to be punished.
No defaming people a la Aristophanes.
And no violence.
It’s tacky.
NUMBER THREE: No mixing of dramatic styles.
Comedies are funny.
Tragedies are sad.
That’s that.
No fools for comic relief.
No somber moments in the middle of some celebration.
Shakespeare: I’m looking at you.
Serious plays have to be about serious people,
which basically means: the nobility.
And comedies about unserious middle class
and lower class people falling in love.
Just stay in your lanes, everybody.
NUMBER FOUR: Unities.
The French rulemakers decided that what was
good enough for Aristotle was good enough
for France.
So plays had to embrace the three unities:
Unity of time, unity of place, and unity of
action.
Plays had to take place in one revolution
of the sun.
In a single location.
And follow only one plot.
To be clear, though, Aristotle only makes
a big deal about unity of action.
He does say in the Poetics that when compared
to the epic, “tragedy tends to fall within
a single revolution of the sun or slightly
to exceed that,” but he’s just making
an observation.
And unity of place, he doesn’t mention that
one at all.
The French were out-Aristotling Aristotle!
But in a country that finally had a strong
centralized monarchy after a long stretch
of ugly religious wars, it isn’t hard to
imagine why unity was attractive.
And Number FIVE: Five acts.
Each drama had to follow a five-act structure.
Why?
Because that’s how Seneca did it.
And do you know better than Seneca?
Didn’t think so.
In the late 1500s and early 1600s, there were
some popular plays—early attempts at secular
tragedies and a lot of nymphy, shepherdessy
pastoral comedies—but no truly great works.
Maybe the mystery play and medieval farces
were still strong influences; maybe playwrights
didn’t have the hang of neoclassicism yet.
Maybe all those rules make playwriting a little
weird and unwieldy.
But by the middle of seventeenth century,
two men had done it: Jean Racine and Pierre
Corneille.
Also Molière, but we’re going to get to
him next time.
Let’s start with Racine, because he follows
the rules scrupulously and elegantly.
He was born in 1639, orphaned young, and educated
by Jansenists who taught him a lot of Greek
and Latin.
Like most classical French playwrights, Racine
wrote in a metrical line called an alexandrine,
a twelve-syllable line of iambic hexameter.
That’s a dodecasyllabic line if you’re
feeling fancy.
And I mean, this is French theater so you
probably are.
The line has a pause, called a caesura, right
in the middle.
So a perfect twelve-syllable line is composed
of linked six-syllable thoughts.
As lines of verse go, the alexandrine is just
two syllables longer than Shakespeare’s
iambic pentameter, but it’s a lot less hurtling.
It feels… stately.
But, a genius like Racine can harness that
stateliness and turn it into something awesome,
and pure and furious.
Racine’s diction is formal and his vocabulary
much narrower than Shakespeare’s, but this
gives his plays a feeling of concentration
and force.
Most of Racine’s plays are simple stories
focused on tormented women.
They include long, wrenching speeches where
women explain to their maids just how tortured
they are.
And not much else happens: they’re about
intensely observed feelings that overwhelm
the characters.
Racine’s characters feel compelled to act
on their feelings even when they know better.
They can’t escape their emotions or their
fates.
Other playwrights twist themselves into knots
trying to observe the unities, but Racine
makes it look easy.
He sets his plays right before an emotional
crisis and most of his conflicts are internal,
so upholding the unities of time, place and
action isn’t a struggle.
Voltaire called him “indisputably our best
tragic poet, the one who alone spoke to the
heart and to reason, who alone was truly sublime
without being overdone.”
Man these guys REALLY knew how to compliment
one another.
Racine’s most famous play is the five-act
tragedy Phèdre, from 1677, based on the Greek
myth of, well, Phaedra.
Phaedra is married to the great hero Theseus.
But while Theseus is away, she develops an
overpowering passion for her stepson, Hippolytus.
She would rather die than act on it, but when
she gets word that Theseus is dead, she confesses
her love.
Hippolytus is freaked out, because duh, but
also in love with another woman.
So he rejects her.
Phaedra wants to die.
She wants to die even more when it turns out
Theseus is alive and almost home.
Trying to save Phaedra’s life, her maid
makes up a story that Hippolytus tried to
rape Phaedra.
Theseus banishes Hippolytus and curses him.
He dies, offstage, with some help from a sea
monster.
Phaedra’s maid kills herself.
Phaedra confesses everything and then kills
herself.
Theseus adopts the woman that Hippolytus loved.
So maybe that seems like a lot–because it
is–but in Racine’s hands, the compressed
action works, and actually doesn’t seem
ridiculous.
The unities of time and place feel like natural
choices.
Racine has an incredible gift for entering
into extreme psychological states.
And Phaedra’s long speeches about her passion,
horror and self-disgust are breathtaking.
But when Phèdre first premiered, it wasn’t
a success.
Probably because audiences were so hyped up
about Racine’s rival Corneille.
Born in 1606, he trained as a lawyer before
moving on to playwriting.
Corneille had his first successes with comedies
before moving into tragedies.
While he was aware of the neoclassical rules,
Corneille never adhered to them as carefully,
or as elegantly, as Racine did.
And sometimes that got him into trouble.
Corneille’s most famous play is the 1636
tragicomedy Le Cid.
Remember how Racine is sublime but not overdone?
Well, Corneille has overdone on lock.
Le Cid is based on the youthful adventures
of a medieval Spanish military figure, and
hoooo boy did it cause some controversy.
Before it pops off, let’s take a look at
the action in the Thoughtbubble:
Chimene, a noblewoman in medieval Seville,
likes Rodrigue.
Rodrigue likes Chimene.
Unfortunately, their fathers quarrel: one
slaps the other, and Rodrigue is forced to
duel Chimene’s father.
Rodrigue kills him.
WHOOPS.
Chimene is understandably upset.
Oh, and also: the Moorish navy is about to
attack.
There’s a lot going on.
Crushed, Rodrigue goes to Chimene’s house
and tells Chimene’s maid, Elvire, that he
wants Chimene to kill him.
Elvire tells him to chill out, and he hides
while Chimene confesses that she both loves
and hates him.
Her plan: Kill him and then kill herself.
French neoclassical drama is real big on suicide.
Rodrigue reveals himself and is like, great
plan, here’s my sword.
But Chimene can’t do it, and Rodrigue has
to leave to go defeat the Moors.
Which he does.
Offstage.
Very quickly.
Even the Moors are impressed, naming him Le
Cid, or the Lord.
But Chimene’s like—hey, great, way to
save Spain, but hello?
We both still have to kill ourselves?
The other nobles are like, nuh-uh, and they
set up another duel—have they learned nothing!—and
force Chimene to agree to marry the winner.
Rodrigue tells her he’s not even going to
try to win.
But Chimene’s like, I know I keep saying
you have to die, but I really don’t want
to marry the other guy, so make it happen
my dude.
The other guy comes back all bloody, and Chimene
believes that Rodrigue is dead.
She tries to become a nun, but it turns out
that he’s alive!
And now she can marry the man who killed her
dad!
After he kills some more Moors.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
So all of that supposedly happens in twenty-four
hours!
That is one busy day.
Right away we can see how Corneille is different
from Racine.
Corneille focuses on men with free will; Racine
is interested in women doomed by fate.
Racine likes simple plots and complex characters,
and Corneille is the other way around.
Le Cid was an immediate success and an immediate
scandal, launching a thousand angry pamphlets—the
seventeenth-century equivalent of a tweetstorm.
“This play betrays the unities!!!!”, the
cranky pamphlets said.
The battle is too short, they griped.
There are multiple locations in Seville, they
groused.
It’s mostly about Rodrigue and Chimene,
but other action happens!
It ends happily!
A woman can’t marry the man who killed her
dad!
French intellectuals were in a pamphleteering
uproar.
So Cardinal Richelieu turned to the newly
created Academie Francaise and asked them
for a verdict.
The Academy said look, we know people really
like this play, but it violates pretty much
all of our rules.
It’s implausible, it’s immoral, it takes
a bunch of shortcuts with the unities.
But Corneille was like, also look: I’ve
created awesome, virtuous characters and I
made the audience feel pity and fear just
like Aristotle wanted, so back off, Academy.
Mic drop.
But then he stopped writing plays for four
years, and, when he returned, he followed
the rules pretty closely.
So I guess… mic pick back up.
Neoclassicism in France held sway for more
than a century, and its austere style helped
make France the dominant European cultural
center of the day.
Neoclassicism is persnickety, and it’s hard
to adhere to.
But when it’s done well, the plays are incredibly
forceful.
And if all you’re reading from this period
are the plays of Racine and Corneille, you’d
be forgiven for thinking the French Renaissance
had no sense of humor.
But, ah ha mon cher, you’d be mistaken as
well..
Next time: jokes, but French.
Until then… curtain.
