Blood and the Stage: Death and Violence in the Works of Pierre Corneille

The first English-language monograph on Corneille in a generation, Blood and the Stage uses the themes of death and violence as an introduction to Corneille’s poetics and dramatic practice more generally. Corneille was a restlessly experimental playwright, whose engagement with death reveals his readiness to defy theatrical convention and to set himself dramatic challenges. For example, while tragedy traditionally brings about aesthetic and ethical closure through the hero’s death, some of Corneille’s most famous works trace the political fallout of a death that occurs partway through, thus turning death into a dramatic problem that itself requires resolution. While dominant ideals of tight-knit narrative causality known as ‘vraisemblance’ ostensibly prohibit deaths by chance, misadventure, or natural causes, Corneille has certain characters die in battle, of lovesick grief, in childbirth, and even (in one case) from a torrential haemorrhage. Sometimes he develops a general dramatic precept only to flout it himself: for example, just after formulating one of his own most distinctively counterintuitive axioms – that tragic heroes should actually survive, for fear of frustrating the spectators’ wishes – he then proceeds to write two of his most traditional tragedies ever (Sertorius and Sophonisbe). As Blood on the Stage demonstrates, Corneille is thus constantly in discussion and negotiation with his own ideas and principles.
The book also places Corneille’s plays within the theatrical landscape of his own age. It flags up the distinctiveness of Cornelian theatre by reading his plays alongside both his classical models and sources (Aristotle, Horace, Sophocles, Livy, Seneca…) and his own contemporary rivals, collaborators, and critics (Scudéry, La Mesnardière, d’Aubignac, Molière, Racine…). The book shows death’s implication in a wide range of topics: from emotion (fear and despair; grief and mourning) to politics (judicial punishment and bio-power; regicide and dynastic succession), from religion (martyrdom; the Christian and pagan afterlife) to aesthetics (dramatic spectacle; plot construction and tragic theory). So although Blood and the Stage centres on a single writer, the questions it raises challenge and shake up the theoretical terrain of tragic theatre more generally.