Five Classic French Plays

By Dover Publications

Dramas that both entertain and quicken the spirit, these classics are a blend of poetic beauty, intrigue, and rhetoric that have enthralled generations of theatergoers in France and around the world. Each of the authors is a playwright of international repute, whose works nevertheless embody a rigorously French style and tone.
From the pathos of Racine to the comic exuberance of Moliére, the landmark dramas span two centuries of French literary history and represent five different genres: the tragicomedy of Corneille's The Cid (1636)/ Racine's tragic Phaedra (1677); the high comedy of Moliére's The Intellectual Ladies (1672); Marivaux's romantic comedy, The Game of Love and Chance (1730); and the conspiratorial comedy of Beaumarchais' The Barber of Seville (1775).
Vivid translations by noted scholar Wallace Fowlie are remarkable for their faithfulness to the original text. In addition, Mr. Fowlie precedes each text with a brief historical-critical introduction that defines the importance of the play in the history of the French theater, the literary position of the playwright, and the general meaning of the play. Any student or lover of theater will welcome this treasury of masterpieces from the Golden Age of French drama, newly available in an attractive Dover edition at a reasonable price.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: May 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9780486167879

Book preview

Contents

FRENCH CLASSICISM by John Gassner

Foreword by Wallace Fowlie

THE CID by Pierre Corneille

PHAEDRA by Jean Racine

THE INTELLECTUAL LADIES by Molière

THE GAME OF LOVE AND CHANCE by Pierre Marivaux

THE BARBER OF SEVILLE by Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais

Selected Bibliography

French Classicism

BY

JOHN GASSNER

Shakespeare had been dead twenty years when the French theater acquired its first masterpiece, Corneille’s Le Cid, in 1636 or early in January 1637, as recent scholarship would have it Although medieval drama had ended in France by 1548, when the performance of the Mysteries and Miracles, the customary biblical and saint plays, was prohibited by law, the French theater arrived at greatness after, not during, the Renaissance. But once launched on its distinguished career, it produced a succession of masterworks for nearly sixty years, almost twice the life-span of the Elizabethan dramatic period. Moreover, France continued to produce noteworthy plays, though only in the field of comedy, for nearly another century. The last comic masterpieces, Beaumarchais’ Le Barbier de Séville and Le Manage de Figaro, appeared in 1775 and 1784, one year before the American and five years before the French Revolution, respectively. When this first great period of the French theater, the classic and the pseudo-classic, started, the monarchy was well on its way toward achieving supremacy as the palladium of law, order, and reason. When the period ended with the social dynamite of The Marriage of Figaro, which it took less wit to write than to get past the censorship, the monarchy of the Bourbons, the ancien régime, was bankrupt and ready for demolition.

I

It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance of the classic French drama in the history of the European theater; one way to estimate its importance is to note the many efforts that were made to assimilate French classicism in other lands or to reject its influence not only in foreign lands, but in France itself. It took one artistic revolution, in the last third of the eighteenth century, to overcome this influence in Germany; and it took another, in the first third of the nineteenth, to overcome it in France.

As for the masterpieces of French classicism themselves, it is fortunately not at all a question of their having been banished from the stage. In the case of the chief tragic poets, Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) and Jean Racine (1639–1699), their influence may have vanished, but the life in their masterpieces has remained remarkably undiminished. The best of their plays, especially those in the present collection, continue to absorb and excite the French public. In the case of the comedies, there is even less reason to suspect a decline of interest. The theatrical genius of Molière is a preservative against time’s erosion of all but his least characteristic writings. The liveliness of Marivaux’ graceful encounters with the affections and the affectations is as apparent today in good Comédie Française productions as it must have been in the eighteenth century. And it would be difficult to convince a civilized reader that Beaumarchais’ satiric humor can ever suffer eclipse with and even without benefit of Mozart’s and Rossini’s music.*

Only in English have the masterpieces of Louis XIV’s reign and of the eighteenth century encountered difficulties. These have been mainly problems of translation, aggravated in the case of the tragedies by their formal discursiveness. The comedies have had only moderate and widely spaced success on the English-speaking stage, while no successes at all outside the academic world have been registered in the case of the tragedies. It would seem that this discouraging situation is at last being modified. A distinguished version of The Misanthrope by the poet Richard Wilbur was recently staged in New York, though only on a small off-Broadway stage and with modest success. A production of Tartuffe in 1950, at the Lyric Hammersmith in London, fared well, as did a Theatre Guild production in the 1930’s of The School for Husbands in an adaptation by the poet Arthur Guiterman and the producer Lawrence Langner. More recently, Jacques Barzun’s version of Beaumarchais’ comic masterpiece under the title of Figaro’s Marriage has earned praise for conveying the vivacity of the original. But a great deal more effort will have to be made before the work of Corneille and Racine becomes sufficiently accessible to the American public, and one such effort is the publication of the present collection of translations plainly designed to make access to both the comedies and tragedies easier.

II

It may be best to approach the plays without assuming any obligation to understand neo-classical theory, which Corneille himself did not particularly fathom when he gave the French theater its first masterpiece. It would only impede the general reader if instead of reading for interest and pleasure, he were made to feel that he had to first acquaint himself with the principles of seventeenth century criticism and participate in literary battles fought long ago. Is the reader stirred by the youthful drama of love and honor contained in The Cid? Does the glorious paradox of high tragedy impinge on him as he reads the Phèdre? Is he paradoxically troubled and uplifted by this drama of inexorable passion and fatality? Do the comedies of Molière, Marivaux, and Beaumarchais entertain him, and at the same time quicken his spirit, as do the distinguished high comedies written in our own language?

Only one question may be considered at once, if only to dispose of it. Are there any impediments to immediate appreciation in the plays themselves exclusive of the problems of translation? In the case of the comedies, there are none. Molière and Beaumarchais communicate with us directly, and so can Marivaux unless we are indifferent to well-spoken sensibility and are constrained to frown rather than laugh at the heroes and heroines of a mannered aristocracy. Impediments do, however, challenge the English reader when he turns to classic French drama. In the tragedies and tragi-comedies of Corneille and Racine there is often considerable formalism in the dialogue, and it is made especially apparent by the strict syllabic versification of the rhymed hexameter couplets. The more or less elegant characters, moreover, observe the formalities of refined society, and they often discourse at great length and with much precision in the midst of grave situations and fateful crises. All this makes the characters too self-conscious for honest feeling, we think, when we bring to the play habits of reading and playgoing formed in an age of casual realistic writing. But it is well to remember that the formal manners of an age or a people are an essential part of reality, and its formalities and social restraints are likely to be an expression of emotion as well as a defense against it. The writers of French tragedy, moreover, deal with uncommon rather than common characters. The protagonists have a position to maintain and perhaps a mask to wear that may have become indistinguishable from the face and that they would gladly tear off if only they could. The result is genuine dramatic tension, and their very punctilio and worrying about propriety may be an aspect of their tragic condition.

As for the unities of time, place, and action in the plays, they are not as conducive to artificiality as has sometimes been imagined. The rules of the unities may have been launched with pedantry and maintained with censoriousness—not unchallenged, be it said, in their own time. But whatever restraints they may have imposed on the romantic expansiveness of later generations, the unities did make for concentration. A crisis of principle in Corneille or an emotional crisis in Racine receives its full measure of dramatic realization. It is noteworthy that when Ibsen developed social drama and Strindberg psychological tragedy they went out of their way to attain a similar concentration of experience and argument. Neoclassical rules were not held in reverence by Ibsen and Strindberg, and there were no pressures on the twin-founders of the modern drama to observe them, yet they returned to the unities. The former’s Ghosts and the latter’s Miss Julie would have outraged arbiters of taste in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who laid great stress on propriety, but the plays would have seemed as classical in structure as any reasonable critic could have desired. Compared with them, in fact, The Cid, with its welter of action in a single day that makes it surely one of the busiest since time began, would seem romantic rather than classical.

From this observation, moreover, it is but a step to the conclusion that there was more freedom in French classicism than is often realized. Undoubtedly its theoretical requirements were unsuited to the romantic and realistic genius of English and American literature. Undoubtedly, too, neoclassical theory served as a straitjacket for Corneille’s dramatic talent in a number of plays; but he managed to evade the rules in The Cid and to adapt them to his needs in certain other plays and in his critical writing. It is also to be noted that The Cid, with its eventfulness, retained its popularity despite the criticism of the official literary circle. Like any other public, the French public was never successfully weaned from its partiality for the exciting action which was abundantly available to it in the comedies and spectacles of the period. It is doubtful that any genuine dramatist actually lost his appetite for excitement while retaining possession of his talent for the theater. Even Racine, who worked so well within the rules, managed to whip up a good deal of excitement. His last tragedy, Athalie, was written for performance by the pupils of a religious boarding school, the Maison de St.-Cyr, maintained by Louis XIV’s pious mistress, Madame de Maintenon. Yet it is as vigorous a work as any tragedian has created without losing himself in melodrama or overextending himself in a spectacular chronicle.

Excitement did not vanish from good French tragedies written during the vogue of classical or quasi-classical prescriptions. If the excitement is not always easy to locate, the reason is that it became internal. It shifted from the surface of plot to the inner person who usually had to struggle with principle in Corneille’s work or with passion in Racine’s; Corneille produced moral and Racine psychological drama. The external formalism of the plays needs no apology whenever it is associated with poetic and dramatic values. But the formalism can be seriously misleading if it causes us to ignore the essential enrichment and, I venture to say, modernization of the drama by interior conflict.

That prince of modern sophisticates, the late Jean Giraudoux, was surely mistaking the shadow for the substance when he declared in the 1920’s that There is not a sentiment in Racine that is not a literary sentiment. A great deal of evidence has been accumulated in Racine scholarship since then to contradict him. The very assumption that classic art is impersonal and that the classical writer never put himself into his work is questionable. It is questionable even when the author conceals himself behind the mask of comedy, as did Molière. Molière the man appears in Alceste, the comic hero of The Misanthrope, with considerable transparency, and Molière’s comedies of jealousy contain a substantial ingredient of personal discomfiture. How much of Racine himself appears not only in the heroes of his tragedies but in his heroines is a pertinent question. Racine, it can be surmised if not indeed shown,* plunged into the very recesses of felt passion. But there is hardly any need for biographical investigation to reject the view that Racine was merely a gifted artificer. His plays are all the evidence one needs to realize he was concerned with the complexities of the inner self not only as an instinctive psychologist but as a moralist for whom the sinfulness of human nature was a personal experience as well as an article of faith.

It has been aptly said indeed that this member of a strict religious sect (which he abandoned for a while but to which he returned after severe disappointments in the courtly world) was inclined to portray fair women full of Attic grace but lacking the grace of God. His heroine Phaedra is obviously one of these. Like other great tragedians, Racine was concerned with the state of man’s soul. Corneille was also concerned with it, but noted mostly the soul’s capacity for stoic endurance, high resolve, and noble decision. It is no wonder that he proposed to add admiration to the elements of pity and fear Aristotle considered essential to our experience of tragedy. But Racine noted tragic flaws in his characters that are flaws in human nature itself.

Much more can be said about an existentialist vein in Corneille’s work and about a tragedy of reason or of rationality meeting its opposite in Racine’s. Nevertheless, we must not overlook the poetic beauty and theatrical effectiveness, including the effective intrigue and rhetoric, of the plays we admire for their depth. Even the gratifications offered by the great tragic poets are first and last dramatic and esthetic. And it is not exclusively the tragic or near-tragic drama that speaks for the theatrical period that starts in the reign of Louis XIII and ends in that of Louis XVI. The period teemed with comedies not only by the playwrights represented in the present volume but by other observant and deft humorists, such as the less well known Regnard, Le Sage, and Destouches. Molière’s encounters with folly and pretense, here represented by Les Femmes savantes, combine satiric correction with comic delight, Marivaux’ comedy of sentiment glitters, and Beaumarchais’ comedy of intrigue and mischief abounds in tart entertainment. Professor Fowlie’s volume of French plays introduces us to a total theater of pleasure as well as pain, and of bright surfaces as well as sombre depths.

* Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro, and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.

* As in recent books by René Jasinski and Charles Mauron, Vers la vrai Racine and L’Inconscient sans l’oeuvre et la vie de Racine, respectively.

Foreword

The five French plays from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries chosen for this collection are the works of five playwrights who have an international reputation in the history of the theater, and who at the same time are representative of a rigorously French style and tone. The selections are key texts from the viewpoint of French literary history and examples of plays which have been successful with several generations of theatergoers in France.

Each language has its own particular quality and power, and each national theater has its own conventions. A translation, no matter how many liberties are taken, cannot possibly recapture poetic style or very specific theatrical and linguistic traits. The principle followed in preparing these translations has been faithfulness to the original text rather than adaptation. Only in the case of the Molière play have a few passages been slightly shortened in order to provide a more suitable acting version of the text.

The five plays represent five genres, or five types of play: a tragicomedy in Le Cid, a tragedy in Phèdre, a high comedy in Les Femmes savantes, a comedy of love in Le Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard, and a comedy of intrigue in Le Barbier de Séville. Each text is preceded by a brief historical-critical introduction which attempts to describe the importance of the play in the history of the French theater, the literary position of the playwright, and the general meaning of the play.

The conventions of tragic style and poetry are such that tragedy loses more in translation than comedy. It may well be that Corneille and Racine cannot be put into another language and provide anything comparable to the theatrical experience of performances in French. Comedy has more recognizable conventions and more universal traditions, and therefore seems to suffer less in translation than tragedy.

The Cid

(LE CID)

1636

A TRAGICOMEDY IN FIVE ACTS

BY

PIERRE CORNEILLE

translated by WALLACE FOWLIE

Pierre Corneille

(1606–1684)

In recent years there has been a renewed critical interest in the tragedies of Corneille, an appreciative re-evaluation of his dramatic art. And yet the general theatergoing public has never given his plays the support and the enthusiasm they have given to Racine and Molière. The strong moralizing accent of his work accounts to some degree for his position among the classical playwrights. His poetry is vigorous but tends toward the bombastic. His language seems today somewhat archaic and oratorical, but he was a master of the alexandrine verse. His poetic style has clarity and precision and a firm sense of rhythm. The poetry of his best tragedies, Le Cid, Horace, Cinna, Polyeucte, is a poetry of action, an intellectual language projecting the feelings and dilemmas of the characters.

Corneille’s biography is sober and uneventful. He was a Norman, born in Rouen, in 1606. There he was educated by the Jesuits, who gave him a solid training in Latin and the humanities and who introduced him to the theater in school productions. He was a sincerely pious man throughout his life and devoted to his large family. His last years were disturbed by disappointment at the public’s waning interest in his work, and by jealousy over the fame of his younger rival Racine.

The principle of the Cornelian form of tragedy is truth, resemblance to life, or, as it is sometimes called, verisimilitude. Although the three unities of Greek tragedy were not fully established in France when Corneille wrote Le Cid in 1636, he did subscribe to them. However, the unities of time, place, and action were not always easy for him to observe. Only in the work of Racine do they seem to be the natural laws of tragedy, observed in order to reach in the art a maximum verisimilitude.

The theater of Corneille ignores the trappings of melodrama which were used in the plays of his predecessors. He does have complications, but they are of a moral order. The moral problem in his play may be extraordinary, but it is always human and believable. He follows the precept of Aristotle in electing almost always an historical subject, and therefore one which, in large part, is true to fact. Le Cid, for example, had an immediate poetic source, but it had also a basis in history.

The type of human nature which Corneille depicts is highly intelligent and willful. Repeatedly he uses as protagonists clear-thinking, passionate individuals who are almost fanatical in their exaltation. His theory of love is close to that of Descartes. Love, to Corneille, is the desire for the good, and it is based upon knowledge of the good. One falls in love because of the perfection that is visible in the beloved. This formula applies to the love of Chimene and Rodrigue. Even in persecuting Rodrigue, Chimene believes she has the right and the duty to love him.

If esteem is the determining factor in love, as it seems to be in Corneille, then the lover acts, not because of love, but because of honor and duty, because of his gloire. The lovers are more worthy of love after making an effort of will which may threaten the very existence of love. Thus Rodrigue, in killing the father of Chimene, and Chimene, in demanding the death of Rodrigue, are examples of the supreme triumph of will. Cornelian heroism is always the exaltation of will which is looked upon as a free faculty of man. The very structure of the tragedy is based upon this freedom and power of will. The hero and the heroine, Rodrigue and Chimene, are equal in their strength of will. Their opposition to one another is evenly balanced, as if the play were a carefully calculated mathematical, as well as a moral, problem.

Every aspect of the play’s structure reiterates this psychology of will. It is in the form of the Cornelian dialogue, both the long eloquent speeches or tirades which are convincingly reasoned arguments, and the brief elliptical answers where arguments and ideas are reduced to maxims, and where the language is harsh and tense.

The immediate source of Le Cid was a long Spanish drama of 1618: Las Mocedades del Cid, by Guillén de Castro. One of the principal episodes of this Spanish work was converted into the French tragi-comédie. In extracting Le Cid from Las Mocedades del Cid, Corneille was guided by the laws of classical tragedy, the three unities, and by his desire to reduce the extravagances, the coarseness, and the surprising changes of fortune which characterized the tragi-comédie of his day. In this type of play, a series of events which threaten to become tragic are resolved in a happy ending. To Corneille, the event itself is not as interesting as the sentiment arising from it. Hence, the violent events—the death of the Count, the battle with the Moors, and the duel between Rodrigue and Don Sanche—do not take place on stage. The real action of Le Cid is the struggle between love and filial piety.

The formula which Corneille worked out fixed the basic form of French tragedy. Le Cid is a character study, a demonstration in which human beings are engaged in spiritual or psychological conflict. The interest in the play is not in the historical background, the melodramatic events of Spanish history, but in the psychological truths and stresses which arise from the play’s action.

Despite the popular success of Le Cid in 1636 and 1637, there was considerable critical objection to the play. Cardinal Richelieu forced the newly organized Académie Française (1637) to Pass judgment on it. Their report, Les Sentiments sur Le Cid, was a work of critical narrowness and prejudice, but in no way did it discourage the public from enjoying the play. Le Cid has remained steadfastly in the classical repertory as one of the most stirring plays on the theme of youthful passion and honor. Charles Péguy once called it the poem on honor: Honor loved with love, and love honored with honor.

The Cid

CHARACTERS

DON FERDINAND, King of Castille

THE INFANTA, his daughter

DON DIEGUE, father of Don Rodrigue

COUNT GOMES, father of Chimene

DON RODRIGUE, in love with Chimene

DON SANCHE, in love with Chimene

DON ARIAS, noble

DON ALONSO, noble

CHIMENE

LEONOR, confidante of the Infanta

ELVIRE, confidante of Chimene

A PAGE

Scene: Seville. The King’s palace,

Chimene’s house, a street in Seville.

ACT I

SCENE 1. Chimene and Elvire.

CHIMENE. Are you telling me the truth, Elvire?

Have you kept back any of my father’s words?

ELVIRE. I am still under the spell of those words.

He respects Rodrigue as much as you love him,

and if I am not mistaken in my reading of his heart,

he will command you to accept Rodrigue’s love.

CHIMENE. Please tell me once again

what makes you feel he approves of my choice.

Tell me once more what hope I may cherish.

You cannot repeat such joyous news too often.

Keep promising, to the passion of our love,

the sweet privilege of its being revealed.

What did he say about the intrigue

in which Don Sanche and Don Rodrigue have involved you?

Did you not show too clearly the choice I have made

between my two suitors?

ELVIRE. No, I described your heart as indifferent,

neither raising nor quelling the hope of either one,

looking upon them neither severely nor with favor,

and waiting your father’s order to choose a husband.

He loved your respect. His words and countenance

gave instant testimony to it

And since you want me to repeat the story,

this is what he said, in haste, about you and about them:

"She is dutiful. Both men are worthy of her.

Both come from a noble lineage that is strong and sure,

both young, but with eyes that reveal

the dazzling virtue of their brave ancestors.

Every expression on Rodrigue’s face

displays the true image of a courageous man.

His family is so endowed with warriors

that they seem to have been born with laurel leaves.

The valor of his father, who was without peer in his day,

was looked upon as miraculous.

His prowess is now engraved in the creases of his brow,

marking for us the sign of his past deeds.

What the father accomplished I look for in the son,

and if my daughter loves him, she pleases me thereby."

He was late for the council when I saw him

and had to cut short his speech,

but in those few words I can tell

he is not hesitating between your two suitors.

The King has to choose a tutor for his son,

and your father is the obvious choice for this honor.

There is no doubt, for his exceptional valor

allows no rival to be feared.

His lofty exploits have no parallel,

and for so well-deserved a hope