LA MORT DE MITRIDATE - University of Liverpool

Introduction
defence in both cases, Sinope being mentioned in Plutarch as the city where
Mithradates was buried, and Pompey being the Roman general credited with his
death. 77 As regards the latter, nevertheless, the defensive note is still there as he
assures the reader that he knows that Pompey was far away at the time of
Mithradates’ death. To rebut again the arguments that La Calprenède is more
historian than dramatist, such changes and additions all have as their aim the
aesthetic rearrangement of history in favour of the dramatic.
Undoubtedly the most important sign of La Calprenède striving to be modern is
the psychological dimension to his tragedy. In listing the legacy of Mairet’s
Sophonisbe to French tragedy of the 1630s, Scherer mentions of the characters:
‘L’activité essentielle est psychologique plus que matérielle, action constituée par
des conflits entre ces personnages aussi bien qu’au sein de l’esprit d’un ou de
plusieurs d’entre eux’. 78 From the moment that critics started looking at La Mort
de Mitridate, even someone like Médan, who is generally not favourable to the
dramatist, could write of the characters Pharnace and Bérénice: ‘Ces germes de
psychologie sont précieux; en se développant, ils rendront nécessaire une nouvelle
conception tragique’ (p. 63). In its depiction of a family in turmoil, its members
torn by contradictory emotions of filial, paternal and conjugal love as they grapple
desperately with a life-and-death crisis, the psychology has as its source another
legacy of Sophonisbe: the conflict between the personal and the political. We
know from the Au Lecteur that La Calprenède was pleased that Bérénice moved
audiences to tears and that he intended Pharnace to evoke horror. Ultimately La
Calprenède’s conception of tragedy, therefore, is of its time, running along
Aristotelian lines of inspiring pity and fear. Modern too is its dramatic sense of
concentration, urgency and suspense.
As a young dramatist presenting his first published play to the public, La
Calprenède strikes a defensive note in the Au Lecteur: ‘J’ay voulu prevenir la
mauvaise opinion que vous auriez justement conceuë d’un Soldat ignorant…’
(p. 79). As conventional as such a protestation might be, what La Calprenède’s
explanations reveal is that he knows that dramatists now run the risk of being
criticized on the score of fidelity to history and bienséance and vraisemblance
(even if he does not use the last word). The fact that he takes such things into
consideration in composing his play in 1635 and then in defending his dramatic
method in the preface in late 1636 shows that all the rules regarding how to write
a good tragedy are already in place. This is why Christian Delmas can talk of the
furore over Le Cid, which will explode upon the Parisian theatrical scene a few
months after the publication of La Mort de Mitridate, as actually being ‘l’épilogue
de ce débat’. 79 La Calprenède provides his audience with enjoyment according to
77
78
79
La Calprenède uses apparence in its seventeenth-century sense of vraisemblance
when he writes of Hypsicratée’s presence at the end: ‘Mais il y a beaucoup
d’apparence…’ (p. 79).
Théâtre du XVII e siècle, I, 1287.
La Tragédie de l’âge classique (1553-1770) (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 15.
23