LA MORT DE MITRIDATE - University of Liverpool

La Mort de Mitridate
the rules, but an important point to note in the Au Lecteur, and which further
places La Calprenède honourably amongst his contemporaries, is his reference to
the public’s reaction to Bérénice and which was enough not only to excuse any
invention but also a vindication of the decision the author had taken, and so the
vindication of the power of audience enjoyment. A few months after writing his
liminary pieces, La Calprenède no doubt watched, along with the rest of Paris,
Rodrigue appearing before Chimène, bloody sword in hand, on the very day he
had killed her father. Despite the infringement of all sorts of ‘rules’, Corneille
would later remark on that ‘certain frémissement dans l’assemblée’ he noticed as
Act III, scene 4 of Le Cid began, just as he would later write that ‘la poésie
dramatique a pour but le seul plaisir des spectateurs’. 80 What we have in both
cases are examples of what Lyons has stated: ‘Tragedy is shaped according to the
needs, prejudices, and feelings of the audience’ (xi).
Jacques Truchet writes of tragedy post-Sophonisbe: ‘Cette production reste à
bien des égards baroque’. 81 La Mort de Mitridate bears witness to its author being
on the cusp of changing mentalities. La Calprenède writes a tragedy which
through its regularity and discipline shows him striving to be modern and
consequently contributing to the development of what would, only centuries later,
be called ‘classical’ dramaturgy. At the same time, his dramatic method has been
seen to hark back to an earlier age of tragedy-writing. Then again, the spirit of the
work, the way the characters think and feel, calls to mind that other epithet
‘baroque’. Jean Rousset listed as baroque preoccupations: ‘Le changement,
l’inconstance, le trompe-l’œil et la parure, le spectacle funèbre, la vie fugitive et le
monde en instabilité’. 82 All are products of a zeitgeist of uncertainty, instability,
and impermanence which had been felt as early as Montaigne’s ‘rien de certain’,
and which, by the 1630s, only seemed to be intensifying, and all are preoccupations
which one finds the characters of La Mort de Mithridate wrestling
with. Although, by all accounts, La Calprenède revelled in the excitement of the
Parisian theatre world of the 1630s and, as we have seen, threw himself into the
new dramaturgical precepts in composing his first play, underneath the surface
also seems to have lurked the young man born into a pre-Cartesian world and who
is not immune from that other spirit of the age which is disturbed by the changes
happening so quickly in every sphere. La Calprenède was aged about 6 when
Copernicus appeared before the Inquisition (1616), 14 when Richelieu came to
80 ‘Examen du Cid’ and ‘Discours de l’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique’ in
Writings on the Theatre, ed. by H.T. Barnwell (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), pp. 104, 3.
81 La Tragédie classique en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975),
p. 133. Truchet adds: ‘Hercule mourant ou Médée apparaissent comme moins
“classiques” que Sophonisbe ou Mort de Mitridate, tragédies romaines; il s’agissait
néanmoins d’une transformation profonde et décisive’.
82 La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France: Circé et le paon (Paris: Corti, 1953), p. 8.
The dates of the baroque period are often taken as being as large a timespan as 1580 to
1660. The ‘plein-baroque’ in France is seen by Rousset as extending from 1625 to
1665, into which series of years La Calprenède’s entire literary career falls.
24