Jean Rotrou
Encyclopedia
Jean Rotrou was a French
poet
and tragedian
.
Rotrou was born at Dreux
in Normandy
. He studied at Dreux and at Paris, and, though three years younger than Pierre Corneille
, began writing before him. In 1632 he became playwright
to the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. (This hall is the setting for the first act of Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac, and Rotrou's name is mentioned - as is Corneille's) With few exceptions, the only events recorded of Rotrou's life are the successive appearances of his plays and his enrolment in 1635 in the band of five poets who had the duty of turning Richelieu's dramatic ideas into shape.
Rotrou's own first piece, L'Hypocondriaque (first produced in 1631), dedicated to the Comte de Soissons
, seigneur of Dreux, appeared when he was only eighteen. In the same year he published a collection of Œuvres poetiques, including elegies, epistles and religious verse. His second piece, La Bague de l'oubli (1635), an adaptation in part from the Sortija del Olvido of Félix Lope de Vega, was much more characteristic. It is the first of several plays in which Rotrou endeavoured to naturalize in France the romantic comedy which had flourished in Spain
and England
instead of the classical tragedy of Seneca
and the classical comedy
of Terence
.
Corneille had leanings in the same direction. Rotrou's brilliant but hasty and unequal work showed the marks of a stronger adhesion to the Spanish model. In 1634, when he printed Cleagénor et Doristée (acted 1630), he said he was already the author of thirty plays; but this probably includes adaptations. Diane (acted 1630; pr. 1633), Les Occasions perdues (acted 1631; printed 1635), which won for him the favour of Richelieu, and L'Heureuse Constance (acted 1631; pr. 1635), which was praised by Anne of Austria
, succeeded each other rapidly, and were all in the Spanish manner.
In 1631 Rotrou imitated Plautus
in Les Mentyhmes, and in 1634 Seneca in his Hercube mourant. Comedies and tragi-comedies followed. Documents exist showing the sale of four pieces to Antoine de Sommarille for 750 binres tournois in 1636, and in the next year he sold ten to the same bookseller. He spent much time at Le Mans
with his patron, de Belin, who was one of the opponents of Corneille in the quarrel over Le Cid
. It has been generally assumed, partly because of a forged letter long accepted as Corneille's, that Rotrou was his generous defender in this matter. He appears to have been no more than neutral, but is credited with an attempt at reconciliation between the parties in a pamphlet printed in 1637, L'Inconnu et veritable amy de messieurs de Scudéry et Corneille.
De Belin died in 1637, and in 1639 Rotrou bought the post of lieutenant particulier au baüliage at Dreux. In the next year he married Marguerite Camus, and settled down as a model magistrate and père de famille. Among his pieces written before his marriage were a translation of the Amphitryon
of Plautus
, under the title of Les Deux Sosies (1636), Antigone (1638), and Laure Persecutie (acted 1637; pr. 1639), in the opposite style to these classical pieces.
In 1646 Rotrou produced the first of his four masterpieces, Le Veritable Saint Genest (acted 1646; pr. 1648), a story of Christian martyrdom containing some amusing byplay, one noble speech and a good deal of dignified action. Rotrou uses with considerable success the device of a play within a play to assert a Christian perspective on the theatrum mundi theme. The Roman actor Genest becomes a real convert while playing the part of a Christian martyr. Incidentally (Act i. Sc. v.) Rotrou pays a noble tribute to the genius of Corneille. Don Bertrand de Cabrère (1647) is a tragi-comedy of merit; Venceslas (1647; pr. 1648) is considered in France his masterpiece, and has had several modern revivals; Cosroès (1649) has an Oriental setting, and is claimed as the only absolutely original piece of Rotrou.
These masterpieces follow foreign models, and Rotrou's genius is shown in the skill with which he simplifies the plot and strengthens the situations. Saint Genest followed Lope de Vega's Lo fingido verdadero; Venceslas followed the No ay ser padre siendo rey of Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla
. In this play Ladislas and his brother both love the princess Cassandra; Ladislas makes his way into her house and in the darkness kills a man whom he thinks to be the duke of Courland, but who is really his brother Alexandre, the favoured lover. In the early morning he meets the king and is confronted by the duke of Courland. The outline of this incident is in the Spanish play, but there the spectators are aware of the ghastly mistake at the time of the murder. Rotrou shows his dramatic skill by concealing the real facts from the audience until they are revealed to the horror-struck Ladislas himself.
In 1650 the plague
broke out at Dreux. Rotrou remained at his post, although urgently desired to save himself by going to Paris; caught the disease, and died in a few hours. He was buried at Dreux on 28 June 1650. Rotrou's great fertility (he left thirty-five collected plays besides others lost, strayed or uncollected), and perhaps the uncertainty of dramatic plan shown by his hesitation almost to the last between the classical and the romantic style have injured his work. He has no thoroughly good play, hardly one thoroughly good act. But his situations are often pathetic and noble, and as a tragic poet properly so called he is at his best almost the equal of Corneille and of Jean Racine
. His single lines and single phrases have a brilliancy and force not to be found in French drama between Corneille and Victor Hugo
.
A complete edition of Rotrou was edited in five volumes by Viollet-le-Duc in 1822. In 1882 Louis de Ronchaud published a handsome edition of six plays--Saint Genest, Venceslas, Don Bertrand de Cabrère, Antigone, Hercule Mourant and Cosroes. Venceslas and Saint Genest are also to be found in the Chefs-d'œuvre Tragiques of the Collection Didot.
Rotrou's brother, Pierre Rotrou de Saudreville, left a memoir of him which is unfortunately lost, but this is cited by the Abbé Brillon (1671–1736) as his authority in a Notice biographique sur Jean Rotrou, first printed in 1885 at Chartres under the editorship of L. Merlet. Other good earlier authorities are:
Later works are by:
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
and tragedian
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
.
Dreux
Dreux is a commune in the Eure-et-Loir department in northern France.-History:Dreux was known in ancient times as Durocassium, the capital of the Durocasses Celtic tribe. Despite the legend, its name was not related with Druids. The Romans established here a fortified camp known as Castrum...
in Normandy
Normandy
Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...
. He studied at Dreux and at Paris, and, though three years younger than Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian who was one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine...
, began writing before him. In 1632 he became playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
to the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. (This hall is the setting for the first act of Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac, and Rotrou's name is mentioned - as is Corneille's) With few exceptions, the only events recorded of Rotrou's life are the successive appearances of his plays and his enrolment in 1635 in the band of five poets who had the duty of turning Richelieu's dramatic ideas into shape.
Rotrou's own first piece, L'Hypocondriaque (first produced in 1631), dedicated to the Comte de Soissons
Louis de Bourbon, comte de Soissons
Louis de Bourbon, Count of Soissons , was a French nobleman, the son of Charles de Bourbon, Count of Soissons and Anne de Montafié...
, seigneur of Dreux, appeared when he was only eighteen. In the same year he published a collection of Œuvres poetiques, including elegies, epistles and religious verse. His second piece, La Bague de l'oubli (1635), an adaptation in part from the Sortija del Olvido of Félix Lope de Vega, was much more characteristic. It is the first of several plays in which Rotrou endeavoured to naturalize in France the romantic comedy which had flourished in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
and England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
instead of the classical tragedy of Seneca
Seneca the Younger
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero...
and the classical comedy
Comedy
Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...
of Terence
Terence
Publius Terentius Afer , better known in English as Terence, was a playwright of the Roman Republic, of North African descent. His comedies were performed for the first time around 170–160 BC. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, brought Terence to Rome as a slave, educated him and later on,...
.
Corneille had leanings in the same direction. Rotrou's brilliant but hasty and unequal work showed the marks of a stronger adhesion to the Spanish model. In 1634, when he printed Cleagénor et Doristée (acted 1630), he said he was already the author of thirty plays; but this probably includes adaptations. Diane (acted 1630; pr. 1633), Les Occasions perdues (acted 1631; printed 1635), which won for him the favour of Richelieu, and L'Heureuse Constance (acted 1631; pr. 1635), which was praised by Anne of Austria
Anne of Austria
Anne of Austria was Queen consort of France and Navarre, regent for her son, Louis XIV of France, and a Spanish Infanta by birth...
, succeeded each other rapidly, and were all in the Spanish manner.
In 1631 Rotrou imitated Plautus
Plautus
Titus Maccius Plautus , commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus...
in Les Mentyhmes, and in 1634 Seneca in his Hercube mourant. Comedies and tragi-comedies followed. Documents exist showing the sale of four pieces to Antoine de Sommarille for 750 binres tournois in 1636, and in the next year he sold ten to the same bookseller. He spent much time at Le Mans
Le Mans
Le Mans is a city in France, located on the Sarthe River. Traditionally the capital of the province of Maine, it is now the capital of the Sarthe department and the seat of the Roman Catholic diocese of Le Mans. Le Mans is a part of the Pays de la Loire region.Its inhabitants are called Manceaux...
with his patron, de Belin, who was one of the opponents of Corneille in the quarrel over Le Cid
Le Cid
Le Cid is a tragicomedy written by Pierre Corneille and published in 1636. It is based on the legend of El Cid.The play followed Corneille's first true tragedy, Médée, produced in 1635. An enormous popular success, Corneille's Le Cid was the subject of a heated polemic over the norms of dramatic...
. It has been generally assumed, partly because of a forged letter long accepted as Corneille's, that Rotrou was his generous defender in this matter. He appears to have been no more than neutral, but is credited with an attempt at reconciliation between the parties in a pamphlet printed in 1637, L'Inconnu et veritable amy de messieurs de Scudéry et Corneille.
De Belin died in 1637, and in 1639 Rotrou bought the post of lieutenant particulier au baüliage at Dreux. In the next year he married Marguerite Camus, and settled down as a model magistrate and père de famille. Among his pieces written before his marriage were a translation of the Amphitryon
Amphitryon
Amphitryon , in Greek mythology, was a son of Alcaeus, king of Tiryns in Argolis.Amphitryon was a Theban general, who was originally from Tiryns in the eastern part of the Peloponnese. He was friends with Panopeus....
of Plautus
Plautus
Titus Maccius Plautus , commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus...
, under the title of Les Deux Sosies (1636), Antigone (1638), and Laure Persecutie (acted 1637; pr. 1639), in the opposite style to these classical pieces.
In 1646 Rotrou produced the first of his four masterpieces, Le Veritable Saint Genest (acted 1646; pr. 1648), a story of Christian martyrdom containing some amusing byplay, one noble speech and a good deal of dignified action. Rotrou uses with considerable success the device of a play within a play to assert a Christian perspective on the theatrum mundi theme. The Roman actor Genest becomes a real convert while playing the part of a Christian martyr. Incidentally (Act i. Sc. v.) Rotrou pays a noble tribute to the genius of Corneille. Don Bertrand de Cabrère (1647) is a tragi-comedy of merit; Venceslas (1647; pr. 1648) is considered in France his masterpiece, and has had several modern revivals; Cosroès (1649) has an Oriental setting, and is claimed as the only absolutely original piece of Rotrou.
These masterpieces follow foreign models, and Rotrou's genius is shown in the skill with which he simplifies the plot and strengthens the situations. Saint Genest followed Lope de Vega's Lo fingido verdadero; Venceslas followed the No ay ser padre siendo rey of Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla
Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla
Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla was a Spanish dramatist. The main pieces of Rojas Zorrilla are Del rey abajo ninguno and No hay padre siendo rey .-Biography:...
. In this play Ladislas and his brother both love the princess Cassandra; Ladislas makes his way into her house and in the darkness kills a man whom he thinks to be the duke of Courland, but who is really his brother Alexandre, the favoured lover. In the early morning he meets the king and is confronted by the duke of Courland. The outline of this incident is in the Spanish play, but there the spectators are aware of the ghastly mistake at the time of the murder. Rotrou shows his dramatic skill by concealing the real facts from the audience until they are revealed to the horror-struck Ladislas himself.
In 1650 the plague
Bubonic plague
Plague is a deadly infectious disease that is caused by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis, named after the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. Primarily carried by rodents and spread to humans via fleas, the disease is notorious throughout history, due to the unrivaled scale of death...
broke out at Dreux. Rotrou remained at his post, although urgently desired to save himself by going to Paris; caught the disease, and died in a few hours. He was buried at Dreux on 28 June 1650. Rotrou's great fertility (he left thirty-five collected plays besides others lost, strayed or uncollected), and perhaps the uncertainty of dramatic plan shown by his hesitation almost to the last between the classical and the romantic style have injured his work. He has no thoroughly good play, hardly one thoroughly good act. But his situations are often pathetic and noble, and as a tragic poet properly so called he is at his best almost the equal of Corneille and of Jean Racine
Jean Racine
Jean Racine , baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine , was a French dramatist, one of the "Big Three" of 17th-century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition...
. His single lines and single phrases have a brilliancy and force not to be found in French drama between Corneille and Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
.
A complete edition of Rotrou was edited in five volumes by Viollet-le-Duc in 1822. In 1882 Louis de Ronchaud published a handsome edition of six plays--Saint Genest, Venceslas, Don Bertrand de Cabrère, Antigone, Hercule Mourant and Cosroes. Venceslas and Saint Genest are also to be found in the Chefs-d'œuvre Tragiques of the Collection Didot.
Rotrou's brother, Pierre Rotrou de Saudreville, left a memoir of him which is unfortunately lost, but this is cited by the Abbé Brillon (1671–1736) as his authority in a Notice biographique sur Jean Rotrou, first printed in 1885 at Chartres under the editorship of L. Merlet. Other good earlier authorities are:
- NicéronJean-Pierre NicéronJean-Pierre Nicéron was a French lexicographer.He was born in Paris. After his studies at the Collège Mazarin, he joined the Barnabites . He taught rhetoric in the college of Loches, and soon after at Montargis, where he remained ten years.While engaged in teaching, he made a thorough study of...
, Mémoires pour servir de l'histoire des hommes illustres (1731), vol. xvi. pp. 89–97 - the duke de la Vallière, Bibl. du théâtre français depuis son origine (Dresden, 1768), vol. ii. pp. 155–273
Later works are by:
- J. Jarry, Essai sur les œuvres dramatiques de Jean Rotrou (Paris and Lille, 1868)
- Léonce Person, Hist. du Venceslas de Rotrou, suivie de notes critiques et biographiques (1882), in which many legends about Rotrou are discredited
- Hist. du veritable Saint Genest de Rotrou (1882), Les Papiers de Pierre Rotrou de Saudreyule (1883)
- Henri Chardon, La Vie de Rotrou mieux connue (1884)
- Georg Steffens, Jean Rotrou als Nachahmer Lope de Vega's (Berlin, 1891).