Grévin and La Taille.
The names of Jacques Grévin and Jean de la Taille are entitled to little more than bare mention among the followers of Jodelle. Grevin (1540?-1570) was for a time a favourite with Ronsard; but he was a strong Calvinist, and broke with the Prince of Poets in resentment against the Discours sur les Misères du Temps. Ronsard retaliated by cancelling his praise of Grévin. One tragedy, César, and two comedies, La Trésorière and Les Esbahis, all three written in his youth, still survive.[98] Jacques de la Taille (1540?-1608), a soldier, and in poetry a follower of Ronsard, lives in all literary histories by a piece of unjust ill-luck. He wrote the two famous lines at which everybody has laughed—
“Ma mère et mes enfans aye en recommanda ...
Il ne put achever car la mort l’engarda (l’empêcha).”
M. Suard, who habitually took a contemptuous tone to the early dramatists of his country, made the remark—a very fair example of the silly would-be clever—that La Taille found it easier to shorten his words than to lengthen his line. Yet such a stroke of mistaken realism as this is less essentially foolish than the flat absurdity which Jodelle puts into the mouth of Æneas. The attempt to be true to life was at least meritorious in intention, and there is force in La Taille’s tragedy of Les Gabaonites, on the story of the sons of Rizpah.[99]
Garnier.
Robert Garnier (1545-1601) was a far stronger man than any of these three. He was born at La Ferté-Bernard, was a magistrate all his life, and was finally made Counsellor of State by Henry IV. Garnier was much less open to the reproach of being “a barren rascal” than Jodelle, Grevin, or La Taille. His list of plays is of respectable length. Porcie was written in 1568, Cornélie (translated into English by Kyd) in 1574, and Marc Antoine in 1578. L’Hippolyte, the Troade, and the Antigone are translations or adaptations of Sophocles and Euripides. There are two other plays more original than either of these—Les Juives (1583), a “Sacred Tragedy” founded on the story of Zedekiah; and Bradamante (1582), a romantic drama founded on passages in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.[100] These two plays are of special interest. Les Juives is an example of all that could be done with Garnier’s model. The story supplies just such a catastrophe as was fit to be treated in the measured, and, when good, stately Senecan fashion. The prophet, to whom Garnier gives no name, Zedekiah and his mother Amutal (Sédécie and Amital in the French), the King of Babylon and his general Nabuzardan, are exactly the characters required; while the chorus is abundantly provided with matter for lamentations, reflections on the instability of all human things, the justice of God, and the cruelty of the wicked. In this case also the chorus of Jewesses, to which the play owes its name, though less truly a personage in the drama than it is in the Œdipus the King or the Agamemnon, is not a mere voice used to fill up the intervals between the acts. Garnier was very free from the want of taste which allowed Jodelle to drop into vulgarity. He had an instinct for the “grand manner,” and does not fall below his subject. The Bradamante is a still more interesting play than Les Juives. There is something almost pathetic about it, for in the Bradamante Garnier may be said to have brought French literary drama to within touch of emancipation from the tyranny of Seneca’s form. If he had gone a step further, or had found a worthy follower, the work of Corneille might have been antedated by half a century, and in happier circumstances. The subject is neither classical nor Biblical, and this perhaps gave Garnier the courage to drop the chorus. As the Bradamante is not, in the full sense of the word, a tragedy, since it has a happy ending, the chorus was not strictly necessary; but as it was not meant to be a comic piece, the natural course at the time would have been to supply one. As has been noted above, the chorus was habitually introduced into pieces which were meant to be serious even when the subject was not classical. At the same time Garnier showed, by introducing a “confidant,” that he had a real sense of the theatre. He knew that over and above the main personages there must always be some who explain, or to whom explanations are made, and to whom it falls to render the action intelligible. The name does not alter the nature of the thing. Horatio is a confidant, and Mercutio is not much else, though we do not call them by the title. That they are also interesting human beings is an argument for incorporating the chorus in the play, not a proof that some such wheel in the machinery is superfluous.[101] Then, as he was not under the obligation to maintain the perpetual gravity proper to classical and Biblical subjects, Garnier felt free to relieve the heroic passages by comedy. Aymon, the father of Bradamante, is a human, peppery, and peremptory old gentleman, very much the barba of the Spanish comedia, and a true figure of comedy. This, it need hardly be said, is quite a different thing from the introduction of scenes of clowns who have nothing to do with the action. It is a detail worth noting that Garnier, who does not seem to have cared much whether his play was acted or not, adds a note to his preliminary argument to tell any manager who chooses to bring it out that he is free to replace the absent chorus by interludes between the acts, “in order that they may not be confounded, and not to join together what requires a certain interval of time.” This, besides proving how fully the French dramatists of the day accepted Scaliger’s most disputable theory, that the chorus served only to separate the acts, is an example of what has already been said of the Spanish and the English stages—namely, that an audience expected something more than the play, which the Spaniards gave in saynetes and dances between the acts, and the English inserted in the body of the piece.
Montchrestien.
Antoine de Montchrestien, the last survivor of the French dramatists of the sixteenth century, may by a slight stretch of charity be described as the Racine of the epoch in which Garnier was the Corneille. The date of his birth is unknown, but he was killed in a skirmish during a Huguenot rising in 1621, after a very agitated life. At one time he was an exile in England on a charge of homicide, and owed his pardon to the intercession of James I., whose favour he had earned by a play on the death of Mary Queen of Scots, called L’Écossaise. It is sad to relate that he was afterwards accused of coining false money. In 1615 he published a Traité de l’Économie Politique, and was indeed the first to use the term. Montchrestien wrote a poem Suzanne, and a Bergerie, or Pastoral, in addition to his six tragedies—Sophonisbe, or La Cartagénoise (translated from Trissino), Les Lacènes, David, Aman, Hector, and L’Écossaise. Montchrestien was an accomplished writer of the school to which he belonged, but his plays show no great originality. They were published in 1601, and were probably all written in his youth. It does not appear that they were ever acted.
The comedy.