LA MORT DE MITRIDATE - University of Liverpool

La Mort de Mitridate
As regards the last of Yarrow’s ‘contradictions’, Marlies Kronegger sums up the
essential difference:
L’esthétique classique de la mesure, de l’ordre, de la clarté et de
l’harmonie s’oppose à la réalité baroque, caractérisée par le hasard (la
« fortune » selon l’expression de Souiller), les contradictions, le
désordre et l’instabilité, l’irrationnel, la thématique de l’être et du
paraître, et du monde à l’envers. 88
With such mots-clé in mind, La Calprenède’s characters can be said to live in a
baroque world. Things and people are no longer what they once were; the world
seeming to have gone mad, the vagaries of time and fortune preoccupy characters
experiencing disillusionment and uncertainty. While his plays distill the anxieties
of the period, the world of the stage and playwriting in the 1630s is also exciting.
Fully committed to the new dramaturgy, La Calprenède imposes a classical
harness of regularity and discipline on his subject matter, but, as the
contradictions of the age filter through, he also registers the disquiet of the
collective French imaginary of his time. Nor is he prevented from offering his
audiences those other signs of a baroque sensibility: the pleasures of variety,
conflict, spectacle, theatricality and shock. As Vuillemin has pointed out: ‘la
pensée baroque est la prise de conscience tragique, certes, mais aussi, et dans le
même temps, ludique du nouvel état du monde et de l’homme’ (p. 493). In
looking backwards and forwards, La Mort de Mitridate bears witness to the
consciousness of an age of shifting mentalities. It is also exemplary of the
difficulty of categorizing seventeenth-century French theatre in the 1630s. La
Calprenède did not think of himself as pre-classical, classical or baroque, or as
having any kind of label. He just thought that he was writing a modern regular
tragedy. 89
Characters
La Calprenède’s dramatic method proceeds by antithesis, La Mort de Mitridate
functioning via the symbiotic relationship between two antithetical poles, the
protagonist Mitridate and the antagonist Pharnace. But each of these characters
harbours further dualities as neither father nor son is now what he once was. The
historical sources provided detailed treatment of the events but only rudimentary
comments on the characters or conflicts of the participants. In Appian and
88
89
‘Introduction au Baroque’ in ‘Le Baroque en question(s)’, Littératures classiques, 36
(1999), 17-22 (p. 19).
As John Lyons has written: ‘the seventeenth century did not know that it was
classical’, in ‘What Do We Mean When We Say “classique”?’, in Racine et/ou le
classicisme (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2001), 497-505 (p. 505).
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