‘Crisante’ (1639) by J. de Rotrou, a Play Based on a Historical Plot: The Search for a New Tragedy

Abstract

The article deals with the features of the tragic conflict and the nature of the construction of the discursive-rhetorical structure of Crisante, Rotrou’s first play on a historical plot, while determining the place of this play in the genesis of the French classic tragedy. The main problem is identifying the paradigm of dramatic thinking of classicism, which is understood as the principle of building a conflict picture of the historical world in the tragedy. The structural-semiotic approach is used in the study as the major one: it helps trace the functioning of the sign-semantic structure, the organizing role in which belongs to the absolute meaning – Power (associated with the figure of the ruler, the image of the state, political interest, laws, behavior being determined by official roles, etc.). Despite the archaic features, primarily related to the understanding of the tragic as terrible, bloody (violence, a series of suicides), Rotrou, through turning to the historical theme and highlighting the contradiction between the rational system of the general and individual arbitrariness, raises political issues, thereby opening the way to Corneille’s theater. Among the authors writing for the theater of the first half of the 17th century, Rotrou was one of the first to discover the productivity of dramatizing the problem of power due to the semantically activated image of Rome as an example of ideal statehood and a person included in this order and comprehending himself in relation to it, as well as to make the problem of the ‘Roman’ the driver of a dramatic statement. The crime caused by passion and the retribution for it discursively and rhetorically unfold as the undermining and as subsequent restoration of a reasonably justified order. However, Rotrou could not extend this new principle of tragic conflict to the entire action of the play: the figure of Antiochus, the king of Corinth (acts IV and V), falls out of the historical and political context, explicitly contradicts the heroic semantics of the first three acts, so the finale affirms the triumph of violence, cruelty, and arbitrariness. Rotrou returns to the individual tragedy of passions, determined by the influence of the aesthetics of the 16th-century theater, which assigns everyone the role of victim or executioner. All this indicates the impossibility for Rotrou to create a political tragedy without the influence of Corneille.