"A first impulse was never a crime.""A good memory is needed after one has lied.""A liar is always lavish of oaths.""A true king is neither husband nor father; he considers his throne and nothing else.""A Victory without danger is a triumph without glory.""After having won a scepter, few are so generous as to disdain the pleasures of ruling.""Alas, I emerge from one disaster to fall into a worse.""Ambition aspires to descend.""An example is often a deceptive mirror, and the order of destiny, so troubling to our thoughts, is not always found written in things past.""As great as kings may be, they are what we are: they can err like other men.""Brave men are brave from the very first.""Clemency is the noblest trait which can reveal a true monarch to the world.""Danger breeds best on too much confidence.""Deceit is the game of petty spirits, and that is by nature a woman's quality.""Desire increases when fulfillment is postponed.""Do your duty and leave the rest to heaven.""Each instant of life is a step toward death.""Every man of courage is a man of his word.""Flee an enemy who knows your weakness.""Force is legitimate where gentleness avails not.""Guess, if you can, and choose, if you dare.""Happiness seems made to be shared.""He who allows himself to be insulted deserves to be.""He who allows me to rule is in fact my master.""He who can live in infamy is unworthy of life.""He who does not fear death cares naught for threats.""He who fears not death fears not a threat.""He who forgives readily only invites offense.""He who is hated by all can not expect to live long.""He who pardons easily invites offense.""He who plays advisor is no longer ambassador.""How delicious is pleasure after torment!""I agree to, or rather aspire to, my doom.""I can be forced to live without happiness, but I will never consent to live without honor.""I don't know how to defend myself: surprised innocence cannot imagine being under suspicion.""I have deserved neither so much honor or so much disgrace.""I see, I know, I believe, I am undeceived.""I would not like a king who could obey.""In recounting our woes, we often soothe them.""In the service of Caesar, everything is legitimate.""It is a crime against the State to be powerful enough to commit one.""It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.""It matters more how one gives than what one gives.""It takes good memory to keep up a lie.""Just vengeance does not call for punishment.""Love is a tyrant sparing none.""Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power.""My reason, it's true, controls my feelings, but whatever its authority, it doesn't rule them so much as tyrannize them.""My sweetest hope is to lose hope.""Oh rage! Oh despair! Oh age, my enemy!""Oh, how sweet it is to pity the fate of an enemy who can no longer threaten us!""One half of my life has put the other half in the grave.""One is often guilty by being too just.""One often calms one's grief by recounting it.""One ought to have a good memory when he has told a lie.""Peace is produced by war.""Reason and love are sworn enemies.""Self-love is the source of all our other loves.""Severity is allowable where gentleness has no effect.""The crime and not the scaffold makes the shame.""The greater the effort, the greater the glory.""The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.""The subject of a good tragedy must not be realistic.""They who overcome their desires once can overcome them always.""This dark brightness that falls from the stars.""Those who easily forgive invite offenses.""To conquer without danger is to conquer without glory.""To he who avenges a father, nothing is impossible.""To take revenge halfheartedly is to court disaster; either condemn or crown your hatred.""To vanquish without peril is to triumph without glory.""To win without risk is to triumph without glory.""Treachery is noble when aimed at tyranny.""True, I am young, but for souls nobly born valor doesn't await the passing of years.""We never taste a perfect joy; our happiest successes are mixed with sadness.""We never taste happiness in perfection, our most fortunate successes are mixed with sadness.""We triumph without glory when we conquer without danger.""When the patient loves his disease, how unwilling he is to allow a remedy to be applied.""When there is no peril in the fight there is no glory in the triumph.""When we conquer without danger our triumph is without glory."
Early life and plays
Corneille was born at Rouen, France, to Marthe le Pesant de Boisguilbert and Pierre Corneille, a distinguished lawyer.He was given a rigorous Jesuit education and at 18 began to study law. His practical legal endeavors were largely unsuccessful. Corneille’s father secured two magisterial posts for him with the Rouen department of Forests and Rivers. During his time with the department he wrote his first play. It is unknown exactly when he wrote it, but the play, the comedy Mélite, surfaced when Corneille brought it to a group of traveling actors in 1629. The actors approved of the work and made it part of their repertoire. The play was a success in Paris and Corneille began writing plays on a regular basis. He moved to Paris in the same year and soon became one of the leading playwrights of the French stage. His early comedies, starting with Mélite, depart from the French farce tradition by reflecting the elevated language and manners of fashionable Parisian society. Corneille describes his variety of comedy as "une peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens" ("a painting of the conversation of the gentry"). His first true tragedy is Médée, produced in 1635.
Les Cinq Auteurs
The year 1634 brought more attention to Corneille. He was selected to write verses for the Cardinal Richelieu’s visit to Rouen. The Cardinal took notice of Corneille and selected him to be among Les Cinq Auteurs (“The Five Poets”; also translated as “the society of the five authors”). The others were Guillaume Colletet, Boisrobert, Jean Rotrou, and Claude de Lestoile.
The five were selected to realize Richelieu's vision of a new kind of drama that emphasized virtue. Richelieu would present ideas, which the writers would express in dramatic form. However, the Cardinal's demands were too restrictive for Corneille, who attempted to innovate outside the boundaries defined by Richelieu. This led to contention between playwright and employer. After his initial contract ended, Corneille left Les Cinq Auteurs and returned to Rouen.
Querelle du Cid
In the years directly following this break with Richelieu, Corneille produced what is considered his finest play. Le Cid (al sayyid in Arabic; roughly translated as 'The Lord'), is based on the play Mocedades del Cid (1621) by Guillem de Castro. Both plays were based on the legend of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (nicknamed El Cid Campeador), a military figure in Medieval Spain.
The original 1637 edition of the play was subtitled a tragicomedy, acknowledging that it intentionally defies the classical tragedy/comedy distinction. Even though Le Cid was an enormous popular success, it was the subject of a heated polemic over the norms of dramatic practice, known as the Querelle du Cid or The Quarrel of Le Cid. Cardinal Richelieu's Académie Française acknowledged the play's success, but determined that it was defective, in part because it did not respect the classical unities of time, place, and action (Unity of Time stipulated that all the action in a play must take place within a twenty-four hour time-frame; Unity of Place, that there must be only one setting for the action; and Unity of Action, that the plot must be centred around a single conflict or problem). The newly-formed Académie was a body that asserted state control over cultural activity. Although it usually dealt with efforts to standardize the French language, Richelieu himself ordered an analysis of Le Cid.
Accusations of immorality were leveled at the play in the form of a famous pamphlet campaign. These attacks were founded on the classical theory that the theatre was a site of moral instruction. The Académie's recommendations concerning the play are articulated in Jean Chapelain's Sentiments de l'Académie française sur la tragi-comédie du Cid (1638). Even the prominent writer Georges de Scudéry harshly criticized the play in his Observations sur le Cid (1637).
The controversy grew too much for Corneille, who decided to return to Rouen. When one of his plays was reviewed unfavorably, Corneille was known to withdraw from public life.
Response to the Querelle du Cid
After a hiatus from the theater, Corneille returned in 1640. The Querelle du Cid caused Corneille to pay closer attention to classical dramatic rules. This was evident in his next plays, which were classical tragedies: Horace (1640, dedicated to Richelieu), Cinna (1643), and Polyeucte (1643). These three plays and Le Cid are collectively known as Corneille's 'Classical Tetralogy'. Corneille also responded to the criticisms of the Académie by making multiple revisions to Le Cid to make it closer to the conventions of classical tragedy. The 1648, 1660, and 1682 editions were no longer subtitled ‘tragicomedy’, but ‘tragedy’.Corneille’s popularity grew and by the mid 1640s, the first collection of his plays was published. Corneille married Marie de Lampérière in 1641. They had seven children together. In the mid to late 1640s, Corneille produced mostly tragedies: La Mort de Pompée (The Death of Pompey, performed 1644), Rodogune (performed 1645), Théodore (performed 1646), and Héraclius (performed 1647). He also wrote one comedy in this period: Le Menteur (The Liar, 1644).
In 1652, the play Pertharite met with poor critical reviews and a disheartened Corneille decided to quit the theatre. He began to focus on an influential verse translation of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, which he completed in 1656. After an absence of nearly eight years, Corneille was persuaded to return to the stage in 1659. He wrote the play Oedipe, which was favored by Louis XIV. In the next year, Corneille published Trois discours sur le poème dramatique (Three Discourses on Dramatic Poetry), which were, in part, defenses of his style. These writings can be seen as Corneille’s response to the Querelle du Cid. He simultaneously maintained the importance of classical dramatic rules and justified his own transgressions of those rules in Le Cid. Corneille argued the Aristotelian dramatic guidelines were not meant to be subject to a strict literal reading. Instead, he suggested that they were open to interpretation. Although the relevance of classical rules was maintained, Corneille suggested that the rules should not be so tyrannical that they stifle innovation.
Later plays
Even though Corneille was prolific after his return to the stage, writing one play a year for the 14 years after 1659, his plays did not have the same success as those of his earlier career. Other writers were beginning to gain popularity. In 1670 Corneille and Jean Racine, one of his dramatic rivals, were challenged to write plays on the same incident. Each playwright was unaware that the challenge had also been issued to the other. When both plays were completed, it was generally acknowledged that Corneille’s Tite et Bérénice (1671) was inferior to Racine’s play (Bérénice). Molière was also prominent at the time and Corneille even composed the comedy Psyché (1671) in collaboration with him (and Philippe Quinault). Most of the plays that Corneille wrote after his return to the stage were tragedies. They included La Toison d'or (The Golden Fleece, 1660), Sertorius (1662), Othon (1664), Agésilas (1666), and Attila (1667).
Corneille’s final play was the tragedy Suréna (1674). After this, he retired from the stage for the final time and died at his home in Paris in 1684. His grave in the Église Saint-Roch went without a monument until 1821.