Corneille is one of France's most outstanding playwrights of the seventeenth century. Although he was considered a prolific writer for his time and is best known as a playwright, literature was not his main career.

Born on June 6, 1606, in Rouen, France, to a family that had a tradition of producing lawyers, Corneille was destined to follow in his father's footsteps. He studied law under the training of Jesuit priests and, at the early age of twenty-three, entered parliament. For the next twenty-one years, Corneille practiced law (under King Louis XIII and King Louis XIV) as the king's counselor in the department of waterways and forests. Fortunately for many Parisians, law was not the only thing that interested Corneille. No sooner was he established in parliament than he decided to try his hand at writing and soon discovered he had another fruitful talent. By the time he...