Pierre Corneille

Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) was born in Rouen, the son of a magistrate, and was educated by the Jesuits there. He trained as a lawyer but turned to the stage, and after early comedies he made his name with the tragicomedy Le Cid (1637), whose success provoked a famous critical quarrel over the rules of drama. He is regarded, with Racine, as one of the two great tragic poets of the French seventeenth century.

His tragedies of the 1640s, among them Horace, Cinna and Polyeucte, are written in rhymed alexandrine couplets and centre on heroic characters who master their passions through will and reason. Polyeucte (1643), the story of a newly converted Christian martyr in Roman Armenia, was one of his most admired religious dramas. After the failure of Pertharite in 1651 he withdrew from the theatre for some years, then returned and went on writing plays until the early 1670s.

He was elected to the Académie française in 1647 and also made verse translations of devotional works, but his reputation rests on his plays. In the archive he is represented by Polyeucte in the English verse translation of Thomas Constable, published in the Harvard Classics in 1909.