Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/334

314 the first as the Falstaff of the Merry Wives with the hero of Henry IV.

In Rodogune (1644) there is no sign of any abatement of Corneille's power. The brilliance of his oratorical verse is in its zenith; but the elaborateness with which the main situation is constructed, and the characters balanced against one another, marks a recession from the tragedy of character which the Cid had inaugurated towards tragi-comedy or melodrama. Both Cleopatra and Rodogune are monsters, and the virtuous twins a trifle absurd. As thrilling melodrama it would have gained from the more complete catastrophe with which an Elizabethan dramatist would indubitably have closed the fifth act. Théodore (1645), a saint-play on the trying subject of the virgin who, to preserve her vow, will submit to dishonour, rather than to marry the man whom she loves, was deservedly a failure. Heraclius (1646-47), from which Calderon borrowed suggestions for Life is a Dream, with its confusion of persons and consequent perils of incest and death, is frankly melodrama—that is, drama which thrills us not by the vivid and adequate presentation of the chances and sorrows to which life is inevitably exposed, but by the accumulation of improbable horrors. Don Sanche d'Aragon (1650)—which Corneille entitled a "comédie héroïque" because of the exalted rank of the characters—is a delightful romantic play inspired by the same chivalrous and gallant spirit that animates the Cid. It was immediately preceded by Andromède, a