Louis XIV of France Critical Essay | Geoffrey Brereton

Geoffrey Brereton

SOURCE: "After Racine and Conclusion," in French Tragic Drama in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Methuen & Co Ltd, 1973, pp. 282–93.

Brereton is an English scholar who has written extensively on French literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In the following excerpt, Brereton analyzes the lack of development within the genre of tragedy during the end of Louis XIVs reign.

After Racine until the end of Louis XIV's reign there were no significant developments in French tragedy. The most successful of the older dramatists, Thomas Corneille and Quinault, had already abandoned it in the 1670s. The Abbé Claude Boyer (1618–98), a good journeyman who had been writing tragedies since the forties in search of a success which never came conclusively, had nothing new to offer. Having followed fashion conscientiously, he came nearest to a theatrical triumph with the biblical play of Judith which, with his earlier Jephté,...
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