Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/317

Rh Tragedy remained for some years where Hardy had left it. Comedy was tentatively experimented in. Up to 1634, when Mairet's Sophonisbe was produced, the popular, almost the universal, type of play produced was the tragi-comedy, abounding in incident, romantic in sentiment, and generally not a little high-flown and super-elegant in style. The pastorals, which were especially admired in cultured circles, and about which literary discussion of the Unities chiefly gathered at first, were only a particular species of the general type. The great sources of inspiration were Italy and especially Spain. The plays of Lope de Vega and other Spanish dramatists were closely translated or freely adapted. The same was done with Italian novella comedies; and the Italian pastorals remained the unapproached models of all French plays of the kind. To give any detailed account of the authors of these plays is impossible in our space. Jean de Mairet, Jean de Rotrou, Balthasar Baro, La Calprenède, Georges de Scudéry, Tristan l'Hermite, Pierre du Ryer, all are at work from 1625 or 1628 onwards, and Corneille himself appears in 1629. We must confine ourselves to tracing the process by which, from tragi-comedy and its unreal world of romance, there emerged tragedy portraying the deepest passions of the human heart, and comedy reflecting the manners of actual life. In this connection the names of first importance are Jean de Mairet, and the great Corneille himself. Rotrou is intrinsically, doubtless, a worthier second to Corneille than Mairet, but Rotrou's genius was romantic. No one followed his Spanish masters with more