Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/315

Rh, Alceste, Ariadne, Le Ravissement de Proserpine, and La Gigantomachie—stand somewhat by themselves. These mythological subjects attracted dramatists in all countries at the Renaissance, but not generally with much result. The Alceste is a very free adaptation of Euripides, in which the character of Admetus is well sustained. The Ariadne, based on Ovid, is much inferior to Thomas Corneille's later play on the same subject.

To 1617 Hardy reigned without a rival. Indeed, until 1625 there was no sign of any general awakening of interest in the drama in that polite world which had begun to rule the destinies of French literature. The rise of new fashions in poetic style in the "correctness" of Malherbe and the elegant conceits of Marino's admirers; the efflorescence of a new prose in the splendid and polished periods of Balzac; the refinement of conversation; the interest in pastoral and polite romance awakened by d'Urfé's Astrée—these were sufficient to absorb attention. The theatre was neglected as barbarous. It was not till 1634 that Corneille could boast that it had superseded the romances in public interest.

The movement which led to that culmination began in 1617 with the publication of Théophile de Viau's Amours Tragiques de Pyrame et Thisbé, a tragedy, but in the spirit of Hardy's tragi-comedies, whose high-flown sentiment and Marinistic elegances of style fascinated the polite world. The purer taste of a later age ridiculed the dagger which