Whatever causes may be held to be responsible, the fact remains that the dramatic is the weakest part of the work of the poets of the Pléiade. Here they made little effort to assimilate and reproduce in genuine French form. They repeated the shape slavishly. In tragedy they did not try at all to go beyond the model given them by Buchanan in the Latin plays written for his pupils at Bordeaux, which again were taken from Seneca. In comedy there was less slavery, and less break with the mediæval literature. But the poets did comparatively little in comedy; and the liveliest comic writer of the later sixteenth century in France, Larivey, who was of Italian descent, did not achieve more than to give bold adaptations of Italian originals.
Jodelle.
The title of father of modern French dramatic literature, tragic and comic, belongs to Estienne Jodelle, Seigneur de Lymodin. He was born at Paris in 1532. Jodelle was a copious miscellaneous writer; but only two tragedies, one comedy, and some poetry written in his youth, survive.[97] His Cléopâtre Captive, and the comedy Eugène, were performed before King Henry II. in 1552 by Jodelle himself and his friends. The king was so pleased that he gave the dramatist five hundred crowns, a handsome sum of money at the time. In the pardonable joy of their hearts, Jodelle and his friends celebrated their success by a supper at Arcueil, which became the excuse for a scandal. Being full of a classic zeal, not always according to knowledge, the poets impounded a goat, crowned it, and chanted some nonsense verses, largely composed of Greek words, the work of Baïf. The New Learning had always been open to the reproach of paganism, and the Reformers accused the party of having performed a heathen sacrifice. The Confrérie de la Passion, glad of an excuse to bring rivals into trouble, joined in the cry. Jodelle’s second tragedy, Didon se sacrifiant, was written later, and apparently never played. In 1558 he fell into disgrace through the failure of a mask on the Argonauts, provided for the reception of Henry II. at the Hôtel de Ville. It is said that the stage carpenter mistook the word rochers for clochers, and provided bell-towers instead of rocks in the properties. Jodelle never recovered favour; but this accident is not accountable for the misfortunes of his later years. There is evidence that “much bad living kill’d Teste Noire at last,” for Jodelle, unlike his brother poets, who seem to have been orderly people, was of the character of our own Bohemian forerunners of Shakespeare. He died worn out, and in great distress, in 1573.
The Senecan plays.
Jodelle is of importance rather because of his date, and on the ground that he indicated the road which French literary drama was to follow, than for his intrinsic merits. His tragedies are little more than school exercises. His model was the Latin tragedy of Seneca, which in itself is a thin dry copy of the mere machinery of the Greeks. The popularity of these very tiresome pieces during the Renaissance can be partly accounted for by the fact that Greek was far less familiar than Latin. But it is easy to make too much of this. Sophocles and Euripides were not unknown. Buchanan caused Greek plays to be performed by his pupils at Bordeaux; while, if Jodelle could not read Greek himself, he might have had the help of Daurat, and he had the translations of Sophocles by Lazare de Baïf and others to guide him to a better model than Seneca. They would have been quite enough for a writer who had any dramatic instinct. But Seneca was easy to imitate. A well-known story, told mostly in long speeches, by a messenger or other “utility,” no play of character, and a chorus which chants commonplaces, having only a very general relation to the story these are the notes of the Senecan tragedy. It is obvious that they are easy to reproduce. The opening they afforded for serious moral reflection must have had an attraction for the poets of the Pléiade, who had a very definite purpose to expel “frivolity” from poetry.
A tragedy which began in such conditions as those described here could hardly hope to become a national drama. It is certainly the fact that very little which was written before the seventeenth century has much interest except as a curiosity. Jodelle and his immediate successors can hardly be said even to have written for the stage in the proper sense of the word. When they were acted at all, it was at the Court or in colleges. They had so far an influence that they succeeded in establishing the chorus as a necessity. It was introduced even into the wild anti-Royalist pieces of the League; but these writers understood the classic model so little that they treated the chorus as a mere means of filling in the intervals between the acts, and not as an integral part of the play. They in fact exaggerated one of the defects of Seneca, as is the way with the mere imitator. We have to wait for the generation of Rotrou and Corneille before seeing how an intelligent attempt could be made to give a new form to the principles of the classic drama. As for the earlier poets, as they chose to allow themselves to be bound by the pedantic rules laid down by Joseph Scaliger in his De Tragediis et Comediis (1560), which said that this and the other must be done by every right-minded man because Seneca had done them, their plays were doomed to want life.
Of Jodelle’s two tragedies, the Cléopâtre possesses, though by no merit of his, the better plot. The story of the death of the Queen of Egypt is in itself so picturesque and so complete that it would be difficult to spoil it altogether. His second tragedy is rather better written. There is more force in the dialogue, more poetry in the moral reflections of the chorus of Didon; but then the plot is inevitably inferior. It is difficult indeed to see what could be done with the story of Dido and Æneas on the stage, unless the intention is to make the hero odious or ridiculous. It is true that Jodelle does not fail to attain to a comic effect, which is, however, too obviously undesigned. The last words he puts into the mouth of Æneas are—
“Pauvre Didon, hélas! mettras-tu l’assurance
Sur les vaisseaux marins, que n’ont point de constance.”
These are too like the sailor’s traditional excuse to be worthy of the son of Anchises, who at least had the grace to sail “multa gemens, magnoque animum labefactus amore.” It is but just to add that not dissimilar plunges into the ridiculous where what was called for was the sublime, might be found in the great, the truly great, Corneille. It must also be remembered that Jodelle established the Alexandrine as the metre of French tragedy, though he did not submit to the strict rules enforced in the next century.