Le Vert's Docteur amoureux (1637) has a nourrice with dentures and a wig,
Thomas Corneille's Dom Bertrand de Cigarral (1651) has an old maid who faints seven times a day, Tristan L'Hermite's Parasite (1653-4) features a vieille servante with a savage tongue who calls her master 'simulacre platre, antiquaille mouvante, / Squellette decharne, sepulture ambulante' [plaster simulation, jiggling piece of old junk, bag of bones, walking sepulchre].
12: 'La Devineresse ou les faux enchantements' by Jean Donneau de Vise and
Thomas Corneille. Ed.
The latter include principally Francois Le Metel de Boisrobert, Jean Rotrou, and Paul Scarron, and more incidentally Pierre and
Thomas Corneille, Antoine Le Metel, sieur d'Ouville, and Philippe Quinault.
Birthmarks: The Tragedy of Primogeniture in Pierre Corneille,
Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine.
Teuzzone (1706) is based on two French tragedies, Racine's Bajazet and
Thomas Corneille's Le Comte d'Essex, with the scene transposed to China and the funesto fine changed to a lieto fine.
Both works gave audiences what had proved popular since
Thomas Corneille's Timocrate of 1656, a new mould of tragedy that placed the claims of romance centre stage.
Few dramatists writing in the early 1650s wrote anything as accomplished as L'Amant indiscret and, while it would be wrong to claim for Quinault the importance of a Scarron or a
Thomas Corneille in this period, his contribution to pre-Moliere comedy is eminently worthy of this level of critical recognition.
In a lively introduction, Wendy Gibson considers
Thomas Corneille's play of 1678 in relation to La Calprenede's earlier version (1639) and, as is so often the case with Thomas, in terms of literary fashions of the day.
This assessment is conducted by means of close readings of selected tragedies, including works by Desjardins, Rotrou,
Thomas Corneille, Quinault, Gilbert, Magnon, and Pradon, though centre-stage is inevitably occupied by Pierre Corneille and especially Racine.
By Part iii, however, the socio-psychological emphasis predominates in discussions of Pierre Corneille's Rodogune and Nicomede together with
Thomas Corneille's Persee et Demetrius and La Mort d'Annibal as contrasting explorations of sibling rivalry and the uncertainties of ideological inheritance.
Thomas Corneille's bland verse rendering suppresses the problematic atheism and even La Grange's 1682 edition was heavily censored.
