The Crisis of Tragedy and the Ways to Overcome It in French Literature of the 1630s

The plays of Jean Mairet are a vivid illustration of the formation of a new dramatic poetics that overcome the archaic forms of humanistic drama of the 16th century. The purpose of the article is to identify the causes of the crisis of the tragedy genre in France in the first half of the 17th century and, using the example of the play The Death of Mustapha by Mairet, and taking into account the author’s experimental setting, to show one of the ways used by the dramatists of this period (J. de Rotrou, G. de Scudery, P. Corneille) to overcome it. The defining characteristics of the tragedy of the first half of the 17th century are intermittence and heterogeneity. New genre models in the works of its representatives (J. Mairet, J. de Rotrou, G. de Scudery, P. Corneille) are formed in the active interaction of features of different dramatic genres. The article substantiates the expediency of abandoning the traditionally used typological convergence of dramatic works of the period according to the principle of the basic idea, the nature of the conflict, the type of character, etc. within the framework of the conditional concept of classicism, and the productivity of shifting research attention to the technique of dramatic writing observed in each single text. At the level of the dramatic structure of The Death of Mustapha, the article considers the principles of activating the genre potential of tragedy by including elements of tragicomedy, coordinating the historical and love-adventure lines of intrigue, which determines the character and role in the action of the main characters. The revival of dramatic intrigue at the expense of tragicomedy compositional techniques is achieved at the cost of depersonalization and paralysis of Mustafa as an actor. The historical meaning doesn’t extend to the character and in general turns out to be collapsed, so that it can’t form a strong binding basis of the dramatic structure. Despite similar nature of the mechanism of interaction of different-genre structural and semantic elements, in some cases (Mustafa’s Death), there may be obvious contradictions between them, undermining the unity of the political plan

Art · Literature · French Literature and Criticism · Historical and Literary Analyses · History · Renaissance Literature and Culture

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