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Gaillard's Criticism of Corneille, Rotrou, Du Ryer, Marie de Gournay, and Other Writers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

H. Carrington Lancaster
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Extract

A quaint piece of dramatic writing, the Cartel or Monomachie of Antoine Gaillard, is one of the earliest of seventeenth-century French plays in which an author puts his contemporaries on the stage and makes fellow writers the butt of his jests. It clears the way for Desmarest's Visionnaires, Saint-Evremond's Académistes, a half-dozen of Molière's plays, and a number of other pieces by Molière's contemporaries, whose satire is devoted to living individuals or to groups of literary persons; but the work has so little dramatic value that it would remain merely a date, were it not for the fact that by selecting real persons as the object of his satire, Gaillard has criticized from the standpoint of a contemporary a number of writers who flourished with greater or less distinction in 1633. In discussing the work I shall therefore dwell upon its biographical qualities, rather than upon its slender merit as a drama.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , 1915 , pp. 500 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1915

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References

1 The play has been little studied. A short analysis can be found in La Vallière, Bibliothèque du théâtre français, i, pp. 556, 557. The frères Parfaict, iv, pp. 472, 495, 511, mention it briefly. Goujet, Bibliothèque, xv, pp. 328–333, gives the most complete account of it, citing a large number of verses.

2 No. 1024 and first supplement, No. 189.

3 Pp. 27 f.

4 iv, p. 472.

5 Cf. especially the dictionaries of Bayle and Jal; and Goujet, op. cit., vi, pp. 156–161.

6 An illusion to her false teeth, which Saint-Evremond ridicules in Académistes, i, sc. 3, and which are mentioned by Tallemant, Historiettes, edition of Monmerqué and Paris, 1862, ii, p. 154.

7 L'Estoille, Colletet, Colombi, Racan, Godeau, Barro, Malville, Cerisé [Serisay or Cerisy], Alber [Habert?], Faret, Gombaut, Mainard.

8 Pp. 33, 34.

9 Les Caractères, des Jugements.

10 Historiettes, edition of Monmerqué and Paris, 1862, v, p. 491.

11 Ibid., vi, p. 58.

12 Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Litteratur, 1894, pp. 13, 14.

13 Pierre Du Ryer Dramatist, Washington, 1912, p. 13.

14 Cf. Goujet, op. cit., xviii, p. 126.

15 Bibliographie des Recueils collectifs de poésies, Paris, 1901–1905, iii, p. 192. He does not give the special authority for the statement that Jean Auvray died in 1622 and, as I have not had access to all the works he mentions in his bibliography for Auvray, I have been unable to verify it.

16 Op. cit., xv, p. 322.

17 Lettre apologétique du Sr Corneille.