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John D. Lyons. The Tragedy of Origins: Pierre Corneille and Historical Perspective. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. xv + 236. $37.50.
Corneille's tragedies often deviate from the conventions of French classical theater. Many of his plays depict events that, though historically true, are improbable and unexpected. The reversals of Corneille's tragedies are also distinctive because they rarely depend on recognition. The characters know their relationships to one another, so the peripeteia does not occur when a character's true identity is revealed but when there is a change in circumstances. Thus, in Le Cid, Chimene is forced into a dilemma when loyalty to the king becomes more important than familial obligations and when Rodrigue earns a new status-and immunity-by defeating the Moors. This change in circumstances is often one which the characters could not foresee and which, even at the conclusion, they have trouble assimilating. In The Tragedy of Origins, John Lyons proposes rich, stimulating readings of several of Corneille's plays that fit this pattern. He examines the intersection of history and tragedy as ways of explaining unexpected change in social, political, and cultural circumstances. In addition to being an indispensable reference for scholars working on French classical theater, this study should interest anyone studying tragedy or historical drama.
After an introduction in which he uses Le Cid to explain his topic, Lyons offers readings of Horace, Cinna, Polyeucte, Sertorius, and Attila. Each play, he argues, depicts a pivotal episode in Roman history. "Within these plays a present, a moment of Roman history, is confronted with its past. The thesis of The Tragedy of Origins is that this confrontation, which requires the recognition of an irreversible transformation, founds a new political and social order. The experience of this transformation is, for the protagonists, a wrenching dislocation. ... Such a transformation is, in historical terms, an origin, and in dramatic terms, a tragedy" (xiv).
Lyons's introduction and conclusion, offering insightful reflections on the nature of origins, emphasize the point that an origin can only be identified retrospectively. People living through an event that will later be recognized as the origin of a new order are inevitably blind both to the new order and to the nature of the events they are experiencing. For the author this...