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Rh and in 1639 Rotrou bought the post of lieutenant particulier au bailliage at Dreux. In the next year he married Marguerite Camus, and settled down as a model magistrate and père de famille. Among his pieces written before his marriage were a translation of the Amphitryon of Plautus, under the title of Les Deux Sosies (1636), Antigone (1638), and Laure Persecutée (acted 1637; pr. 1639), in the opposite style to these classical pieces. In 1646 Rotrou produced the first of his four masterpieces, Le Véritable Saint Genest (acted 1646; pr. 1648), a story of Christian martyrdom containing some amusing by-play, one noble speech and a good deal of dignified action. Rotrou uses with considerable success the device of a play within a play. The actor Genest becomes a real convert while playing the part of a Christian martyr. Incidentally (Act i. Sc. v.) Rotrou pays a noble tribute to the genius of Corneille. Don Bertrand de Cabrère (1647) is a tragi-comedy of merit ; Venceslas (1647; pr. 1648) is considered in France his masterpiece, and has had several modern revivals; Cosroès (1649) has an Oriental setting, and is claimed as the only absolutely original piece of Rotrou. These masterpieces follow foreign models, and Rotrou's genius is shown in the skill with which he simplifies the plot and strengthens the situations. Saint Genest followed Lope de Vega's Lo fingido verdadero; Venceslas followed the No ay ser padre siendo rey of Francisco de Rojas. In this play Ladislas and his brother both love the princess Cassandra; Ladislas makes his way into her house and in the darkness kills a man whom he thinks to be the duke of Courland, but who is really his brother Alexandre, the favoured lover. In the early morning he meets the king and is confronted by the duke of Courland. The outline of this incident is in the Spanish play, but there the spectators are aware of the ghastly mistake at the time of the murder. Rotrou shows his dramatic skill by concealing the real facts from the audience until they are revealed to the horror-struck Ladislas himself.

In 1650 the plague broke out at Dreux. Rotrou remained at his post, although urgently desired to save himself by going to Paris; caught the disease, and died in a few hours. He was buried at Dreux on the 28th of June 1650. Rotrou's great fertility (he left thirty-five collected plays besides others lost, strayed or uncollected), and perhaps the uncertainty of dramatic plan shown by his hesitation almost to the last between the classical and the romantic style have injured his work. He has no thoroughly good play, hardly one thoroughly good act. But his situations are often pathetic and noble, and as a tragic poet properly so called he is at his best almost the equal of Corneille and of Racine. His single lines and single phrases have a brilliancy and force not to be found in French drama between Corneille and Hugo.

A complete edition of Rotrou was edited in five volumes by Viollet le Duc in 1822. In 1882 M. de Ronchaud published a handsome edition of six plays &mdash; Saint Genest, Venceslas, Don Bertrand de Cabrère, Antigone, Hercule Mourant and Cosroes. Venceslas and Saint Genest are also to be found in the Chefs-d'œuvre Tragiques of the Collection Didot.

Rotrou's brother, Pierre Rotrou de Saudreville, left a memoir of him which is unfortunately lost, but this is cited by the Abbé Brillon (1671-1736) as his authority in a Notice biographique sur Jean Rotrou, first printed in 1885 at Chartres under the editorship of L. Merlet. Other good earlier authorities are Nicéron, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des hommes illustres (1731), vol. xvi. pp. 89-97; and the duke de la Vallière, ''Bibl. du théâtre françois depuis son'' origine (Dresden, 1768), vol. ii. pp. 155-273. Modern works are by J. Jarry, Essai sur les œuvres dramaliques de Jean Rotrou (Paris and Lille, 1868); Léonce Person, ''Hist. du Venceslas de Rotrou,'' suivie de notes critiques et biographiques (1882), in which many legends about Rotrou are discredited; ''Hist. du véritable Saint'' Genest de Rotrou (1882), Les Papiers de Pierre Rotrou de Saudreville (1883); Henri Chardon, La Vie de Rotrou mieux connue (1884); and Georg Steffens, Jean de Rotrou als Nachahmer Lope de Vega's (Berlin, 1891).  ROTTA,, (Fr. Cithare, rotta; Ger ,  . Cythara, Rotta), a medieval stringed instrument derived from the Greek cithara. The rotta possessed, in common with all other forerunners of the violin, the chief structural features of the cithara, i.e. the box sound-chest composed of back

and belly either flat or delicately arched connected by ribs. The rotta represents the first step in the evolution of the cithara, when arms and cross-bar were replaced by a frame joined to the body, the strings being usually restricted to eight or less. Examples of these early rottas abound in miniatures from the 8th to the 12th century or even the 14th, such as Cotton MS. Vespasian A. I. (Brit. Mus.), 700, and the MS. copy in the Durham Cathedral Library of the Cassiodorus Commentary on the Psalms manu Bedae. The most interesting is a real specimen of wood found in an Alamannic tomb of the 4th to the 7th century at Oberflacht in the Black Forest, and now preserved in the Völker Museum, Berlin.

The next step was the addition of a finger-board and the consequent reduction of the strings to three or four, since each string was now capable of producing several notes. In the Carolingian Bible presented to Charles the Bald by Count Vivian of Tours there is a fine example of the rotta at this stage, in which the artist has reproduced the position of the fingers of the left hand stopping the strings, and of the right hand plucking them. The same instrument occurs in a companion Bible, known as the Bible of St Paul because it was preserved in the monastery of that name “without the walls” at Rome. Although these MSS. were executed in the 9th century, they do not represent contemporary scenes, but were inspired by Romano-Christian models, if not actually copied from older MSS. This is the only representation yet found of the finger-board thus applied to the rotta. In the final transition preceding the transformation into the guitar, the rotta appears as a guitar-shaped instrument without neck or head and having a hole large enough to allow the hand to pass through left in the body on each side of the strings. At first this instrument, which developed into the crwth, was twanged with the fingers, but in the 11th century it was played with a bow, the bridge having been slightly raised on feet.

The first (and perhaps also the second) of these transitions was accomplished in the Christian East, where, however, the upper frame of the earliest rotta seems to have been at once discarded in favour of a long neck with frets, for which the tanbur undoubtedly supplied the idea. This evolution is to be traced in the miniatures of a single MS., which supplies examples of all the transitions. The miniatures illustrate the Psalms in the Utrecht Psalter; they were beyond doubt originally designed to accompany a Greek or Syriac version. The Utrecht Psalter, executed in the diocese of Reims under Anglo-Saxon influence during the 9th century, is no servile copy, but it owes much of its inspiration and local colour to an unknown Greek or Syrian prototype.

As soon as the neck was added to the guitar-shaped body, the instrument ceased to be a rotta and became a (q.v.), or a (q.v.) if played with the bow. Of the rotta, there were two distinct types, the one derived from the cithara, the rotta proper, and the other derived from the lyre, which survived to the 18th century as the Welsh crwth. Although the various forms of the name came to be applied somewhat indiscriminately in different countries and epochs to both types, yet the structural features of both remained true to their respective archetypes.

The words rotta in England and cythara in Germany seem to have clung more especially to the first of these types, while the forms crwth, crowd, crouth were reserved for the bowed instruments, the earliest of which appeared in the 11th century.

The crwth or crowd, so popular in England during the 14th century, does not seem to have won equal favour in Germany, where at that time the nidel or guitar-fiddle had been popularized by the minnesingers. The crwth derived from the lyre underwent no further development. (K. S.)  ROTTENBURG, a town and episcopal see of Germany, in the kingdom of Württemberg, situated on the left bank of the Neckar, which is here crossed by two bridges connecting the