LA MORT DE MITRIDATE - University of Liverpool

La Mort de Mitridate
scene Pompée, speaking to Pharnace, evokes the years of war and refers to
Mitridate’s cruelty; from his first scene, Mitridate, surrounded by his family,
refers to his past tussles with Pompée (I.2) and later provides further impressions
of the past (IV.3). There is no need to distinguish between First, Second or Third
Mithradatic Wars; it is sufficient to create an atmosphere of years, indeed decades,
of war between Rome and Pontus in order to justify the war-weariness of
someone like Pharnace. Detail can be multi-functional. As well as providing
characters with a pre-dramatic past, references to past battles on land and at sea
contrast with the present sequestered state of Mitridate and his family and their
ever-diminishing room for manœuvre over the course of the play. ‘Flacce, Cotta,
Fimbrie, & Triaire, vaincus’ (IV.3.1203), Mitridate throws at Pharnace as proof of
what he has been capable of in the past. And a few lines later he is countering his
son’s argument with other names: ‘Tu peux encore mieux confirmer ta pensée, /
En m’alléguant Siphax, ou Jugurte, ou Persée.’ (IV.3.1214). It would not be
vraisemblable to have any explanation of who these names refer to because
Pharnace, who has fought beside his father for years, knows exactly who they are.
But the texture of the play is made denser, the contours of this world richer, by the
use of such strings of proper names, all of which La Calprenède will have readily
found in Appian, Plutarch or Florus. 55 It does not matter if the audience does not
know who each individual figure is or what role they played in Mithradates’ life,
for the aesthetic value of such names rises above the mere factual. Strung together
as enumerations, they also offer the aural pleasure of euphony.
In 1907, comparing La Calprenède and Racine, Médan felt that La Mort de
Mitridate had been marred by its author’s ‘souci de faire œuvre d’historien’. 56 A
century later, Charles Mazouer can still write: ‘Comme dans ses romans, La
Calprenède se veut historien dans ses tragédies’. 57 As proof, Médan cited the Au
Lecteur as showing ‘le plus grand respect pour la vérité historique’ (p. 48), but, as
Forestier has pointed out: ‘On n’invoque la vérité historique que pour expliquer
que l’on avait les meilleures raisons de prendre des libertés avec elle’. 58 More
interesting than such conventional protestations on La Calprenède’s part is rather
the freedom that he demonstrates in his attitude to the historical sources.
55
In Mithridate Racine will tend to use place names, giving a geographical
expansiveness to the play.
56
Pierre Médan, ‘Un Gascon précurseur de Racine: La Mort de Mithridate de La
Calprenède et le Mithridate de Racine’, Revue des Pyrénées, 19 (1907), 44-63 (p. 58).
Twenty-five years earlier Bernardin, in his edition of Mithridate, also commented that
the earlier play was ‘bien plus fidèle à l’histoire que celle de Racine’ (p. 6).
57 e
Le Théâtre français de l’âge classique, I: Le Premier XVII siècle (Paris: Champion,
2006), p. 366.
58
‘Théorie et pratique de l’histoire dans la tragédie classique’, Littératures classiques,
11 (1989), 95-107 (p. 101). In his edition of Mairet’s Marc-Antoine, for example,
Alain Riffaud quotes from La Calprenède’s Au Lecteur in order to prove his point that
‘la liberté que Mairet prend avec l’Histoire était partagée par la majorité de ses
contemporains’, in Théâtre complet, I (Paris: Champion, 2004), p. 223.
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