Corneille and Racine

Another attempt to bring back the ancient form had been going on for some time across the English Channel, in France. The French Classical tragedy, whose monuments are Pierre Corneille’s Cid (1637) and Jean Racine’s Bérénice (1670) and Phèdre (1677), made no attempt to be popular in the way of the Elizabethan theatre. The plays were written by and for intellectual aristocrats, who came together in an elite theatre, patronized by royalty and nobility. Gone were the bustle and pageantry of the Elizabethan tragedies, with their admixtures of whatever modes and moods the dramatists thought would work. The French playwrights submitted themselves to the severe discipline they derived from the Greek models and especially the “rules,” as they interpreted them, laid down by Aristotle. The unities of place, time, and action were strictly observed.

One theme, the conflict between Passion and Reason, was uppermost. The path of Reason was the path of Duty and Obligation (noblesse oblige), and that path had been clearly plotted by moralists and philosophers, both ancient and modern. In this sense there was nothing exploratory in the French tragedy; existing moral and spiritual norms were insisted upon. The norms are never criticized or tested as Aeschylus challenged the Olympians or as Marlowe presented, with startling sympathy, the Renaissance overreacher. Corneille’s Cid shows Duty triumphant over Passion, and, as a reward, hero and heroine are happily united.

By the time of Phèdre, Corneille’s proud affirmation of the power of the will and the reason over passion had given way to what Racine called “stately sorrow,” with which he asks the audience to contemplate Phèdre’s heroic, but losing, moral struggle. Her passion for her stepson, Hippolyte, bears her down relentlessly. Her fine principles and heroic will are of no avail. Both she and Hippolyte are destroyed. The action is limited to one terrible day; there is no change of scene; there is neither comic digression nor relief—the focus on the process by which a great nature goes down is sharp and intense. Such is the power of Racine’s poetry (it is untranslatable), his conception of character, and his penetrating analysis of it, that it suggests the presence of Sophoclean “heroic humanism.” In this sense it could be said that Racine tested the norms, that he uncovered a cruel injustice in the nature of a code that could destroy such a person as Phèdre. Once again, here is a world of tragic ambiguity, in which no precept or prescription can answer complicated human questions.

The English “heroic play”

This ambiguity was all but eliminated in the “heroic play” that vied with the comedy of the Restoration stage in England in the latter part of the 17th century. After the vicissitudes of the Civil War, the age was hungry for heroism. An English philosopher of the time, Thomas Hobbes, defined the purpose of the type: “The work of an heroic poem is to raise admiration, principally for three virtues, valour, beauty, and love.” Moral concern, beginning with Aeschylus, has always been central in tragedy, but in the works of the great tragedians this concern was exploratory and inductive. The moral concern of the heroic play is the reverse. It is deductive and dogmatic. The first rule, writes Dryden (following the contemporary French critic, René Le Bossu) in his preface to his Troilus and Cressida (1679), is “to make the moral of the work; that is, to lay down to yourself what that precept of morality shall be, which you would insinuate into the people.” In All for Love the moral is all too clear: Antony must choose between the path of honour and his illicit passion for Cleopatra. He chooses Cleopatra, and they are both destroyed. Only Dryden’s poetry, with its air of emotional argumentation, manages to convey human complexities in spite of his moral bias and saves the play from artificiality—makes it, in fact, the finest near-tragic production of its age.

The eclipse of tragedy

Although the annals of the drama from Dryden onward are filled with plays called tragedies by their authors, the form as it has been defined here went into an eclipse during the late 17th, the 18th, and the early 19th centuries. Reasons that have been suggested for the decline include the politics of the Restoration in England; the rise of science and, with it, the optimism of the Enlightenment throughout Europe; the developing middle-class economy; the trend toward reassuring Deism in theology; and, in literature, the rise of the novel and the vogue of satire. The genius of the age was discursive and rationalistic. In France and later in England, belief in Evil was reduced to the perception of evils, which were looked upon as institutional and therefore remediable. The nature of man was no longer the problem; rather, it was the better organization and management of men. The old haunting fear and mystery, the sense of ambiguity at the centre of human nature and of dark forces working against humankind in the universe, were replaced by a new and confident dogma.

Tragedy never lost its high prestige in the minds of the leading spirits. Theorizing upon it were men of letters as diverse as Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and German philosophers from Gotthold Lessing in the 18th century to Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th.

Revivals of Shakespeare’s tragedies were often bowdlerized or altered, as in the happy ending for Lear in a production of 1681. Those who felt themselves called upon to write tragedies produced little but weak imitations. Shelley tried it once, in The Cenci (1819), but, as his wife wrote, “the bent of his mind went the other way”—which way may be seen in his Prometheus Unbound (1820), in which Zeus is overthrown and a golden age, ruled by the power of love, is born. Goethe had the sense to stay away from tragedy: “The mere attempt to write tragedy,” he said, “might be my undoing.” He concluded his two-part Faust (1808, 1832) in the spirit of the 19th-century optimistic humanitarianism. It was not until the latter part of the 19th century, with the plays of a Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, a Russian, Anton Chekhov, a Swede, August Strindberg, and, later, an American, Eugene O’Neill, that something of the original vision returned to inspire the tragic theatre.