Je faisais Amarante, on Cloris, ou Sylvie,
Et de mes actions la cour était ravie.
Alors, il me souvient que mille fois le roi
A fait comparaison de Floronde et de moi.
Dieux! disait-il à tous, la ressemblance extrême
Voilà son même geste, et son visage même."
Rotrou's best known plays were written after the appearance of Le Cid, and are tragedies with a good many elements of tragi-comedy. Le Véritable Saint Genest (1645), adapted from Lo fingido verdadero of Lope de Vega, is a martyr-tragedy which catches in a simpler way some of the ardour and elevation of Polyeucte. There are no subtle cross-currents of feeling, however, and our attention is concentrated on the actor-martyr. Venceslas (1647), taken from a Spanish play by Francisco de Rojas, and Cosroès (1648) have more of the characteristically Corneillean conflict of motive managed, if not with the greater poet's strength and eloquence, with very considerable sincerity and dignity. The later contemporaries of Corneille who connect him most closely with his great successor, as his brother Thomas and Quinault, lie outside the range of this essay.
The salient features in the history of comedy[1] have been touched in passing. Represented at the beginning of the century by farce, not by the academic comedy of the sixteenth century, it made a fresh departure about 1629 in the work of Mairet, Corneille,
- ↑ Several of the comedies of this period, including Mairet's Duc d'Ossonne, Rotrou's La Sœur, and Saint-Sorlin's Les Visionnaires, have been reprinted, with biographical introductions, in Le Théâtre Français au XVIe et au XVIIe Siècle, ed. M. Édouard Fournier, Paris, n.d.
