Robert Garnier (1545-1601) was a far stronger man than any of these three. He was born at La Ferté-Bernard, was a magistrate all his life, and was finally made Counsellor of State by Henry IV. Garnier was much less open to the reproach of being “a barren rascal” than Jodelle, Grevin, or La Taille. His list of plays is of respectable length. Porcie was written in 1568, Cornélie (translated into English by Kyd) in 1574, and Marc Antoine in 1578. L’Hippolyte, the Troade, and the Antigone are translations or adaptations of Sophocles and Euripides. There are two other plays more original than either of these—Les Juives (1583), a “Sacred Tragedy” founded on the story of Zedekiah; and Bradamante (1582), a romantic drama founded on passages in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.[100] These two plays are of special interest. Les Juives is an example of all that could be done with Garnier’s model. The story supplies just such a catastrophe as was fit to be treated in the measured, and, when good, stately Senecan fashion. The prophet, to whom Garnier gives no name, Zedekiah and his mother Amutal (Sédécie and Amital in the French), the King of Babylon and his general Nabuzardan, are exactly the characters required; while the chorus is abundantly provided with matter for lamentations, reflections on the instability of all human things, the justice of God, and the cruelty of the wicked. In this case also the chorus of Jewesses, to which the play owes its name, though less truly a personage in the drama than it is in the Œdipus the King or the Agamemnon, is not a mere voice used to fill up the intervals between the acts. Garnier was very free from the want of taste which allowed Jodelle to drop into vulgarity. He had an instinct for the “grand manner,” and does not fall below his subject. The Bradamante is a still more interesting play than Les Juives. There is something almost pathetic about it, for in the Bradamante Garnier may be said to have brought French literary drama to within touch of emancipation from the tyranny of Seneca’s form. If he had gone a step further, or had found a worthy follower, the work of Corneille might have been antedated by half a century, and in happier circumstances. The subject is neither classical nor Biblical, and this perhaps gave Garnier the courage to drop the chorus. As the Bradamante is not, in the full sense of the word, a tragedy, since it has a happy ending, the chorus was not strictly necessary; but as it was not meant to be a comic piece, the natural course at the time would have been to supply one. As has been noted above, the chorus was habitually introduced into pieces which were meant to be serious even when the subject was not classical. At the same time Garnier showed, by introducing a “confidant,” that he had a real sense of the theatre. He knew that over and above the main personages there must always be some who explain, or to whom explanations are made, and to whom it falls to render the action intelligible. The name does not alter the nature of the thing. Horatio is a confidant, and Mercutio is not much else, though we do not call them by the title. That they are also interesting human beings is an argument for incorporating the chorus in the play, not a proof that some such wheel in the machinery is superfluous.[101] Then, as he was not under the obligation to maintain the perpetual gravity proper to classical and Biblical subjects, Garnier felt free to relieve the heroic passages by comedy. Aymon, the father of Bradamante, is a human, peppery, and peremptory old gentleman, very much the barba of the Spanish comedia, and a true figure of comedy. This, it need hardly be said, is quite a different thing from the introduction of scenes of clowns who have nothing to do with the action. It is a detail worth noting that Garnier, who does not seem to have cared much whether his play was acted or not, adds a note to his preliminary argument to tell any manager who chooses to bring it out that he is free to replace the absent chorus by interludes between the acts, “in order that they may not be confounded, and not to join together what requires a certain interval of time.” This, besides proving how fully the French dramatists of the day accepted Scaliger’s most disputable theory, that the chorus served only to separate the acts, is an example of what has already been said of the Spanish and the English stages—namely, that an audience expected something more than the play, which the Spaniards gave in saynetes and dances between the acts, and the English inserted in the body of the piece.

Antoine de Montchrestien, the last survivor of the French dramatists of the sixteenth century, may by a slight stretch of charity be described as the Racine of the epoch in which Garnier was the Corneille. The date of his birth is unknown, but he was killed in a skirmish during a Huguenot rising in 1621, after a very agitated life. At one time he was an exile in England on a charge of homicide, and owed his pardon to the intercession of James I., whose favour he had earned by a play on the death of Mary Queen of Scots, called L’Écossaise. It is sad to relate that he was afterwards accused of coining false money. In 1615 he published a Traité de l’Économie Politique, and was indeed the first to use the term. Montchrestien wrote a poem Suzanne, and a Bergerie, or Pastoral, in addition to his six tragedies—Sophonisbe, or La Cartagénoise (translated from Trissino), Les Lacènes, David, Aman, Hector, and L’Écossaise. Montchrestien was an accomplished writer of the school to which he belonged, but his plays show no great originality. They were published in 1601, and were probably all written in his youth. It does not appear that they were ever acted.

The comedy of this school was less a pure imitation of classic models, but it was also on the whole less interesting, and cannot be described as original, since it took freely from the Italians. Every one of the nine surviving plays of Pierre Larivey (1540?-1611?) has an Italian original. He was descended from the family of the Giunti, printers at Florence and Venice.[102] His father had settled at Troyes, and had translated his name into L’Arrivé, which was again corrupted into Larivey. Pierre was a copious translator from his father’s native language. The nine comedies he left are adaptations as well as translations. He subjected his originals to the revision which the English playwright has so often applied to French plays, but it was not for the purpose of forcing them to become decent. Through Larivey much of the common matter of comedy was handed on to Molière, who may also have owed his predecessor something on the side of the technical skill. It is, however, mainly on this ground that they belong to French literature. The comedy of the later sixteenth century is on the whole unimportant. It cannot be said to have had any particular character of its own. One piece has indeed some promise and considerable merit of execution. This is the Reconnue of Belleau.[103]

The story has the merit of being drawn from the real life of the time. A young lady named Henriette has been placed while a child in a religious house at Poitiers. She has no vocation, and escapes from the convent to become a Huguenot. In the storm of the city by the king’s army she is made prize by a certain Captain Rodomont, whom (a pleasing touch of the manners of the age) she fully recognises as her lawful master. The captain is a very honest man, who is well disposed to marry his captive. But he is summoned away to take part in the recovery of Havre from the English, and leaves her, having always “treated her as a sister,” in charge of an old lawyer in Paris. At this point the play begins. The old lawyer falls in love with Henriette, and thereby arouses the jealousy of his wife. To quiet her he arranges to marry Henriette to his clerk, Jehan, who is likely to prove a complacent husband. He tells Henriette that the captain has been killed at Havre. In the meantime we learn that a certain young advocate has fallen in love with Henriette. She, who would willingly marry either the captain or the advocate—for she is a downright though honest young person—nevertheless resigns herself to marry Jehan, seeing that the captain is dead, and she dare not go home. At this crisis the captain turns up enriched by booty, and immediately afterwards Henriette’s father. The “recognition” gives its name to the play. Henriette is married to the advocate. The captain is consoled with the promise of another wife, and all ends happily. Here are the elements of a very lively play, and one can imagine what Lope de Vega or Dekker would have made of them. Belleau falls much short of what was possible, largely because his respect for classic models made him feel it incumbent on him to tell his story, not by dialogue and action, but by narratives. The return of the captain, for instance, which might have made an excellent scene, is only described by the old lawyer’s servant. The merits of the comedy are none the less considerable. They lie in the brisk flowing verse of the dialogue, which, as was to be expected of “le gentil Belleau,” is wholly free from mere grossness, and in the human truth of the characters. Even the author’s excessive deference to the classics is partly atoned for. His descriptions of what it would have been better to tell by action are mostly given by Jeanne, the lawyer’s servant, who is an excellent study of that very French personage, the Bonne à tout faire, the general servant, who is partly the drudge, but also partly the friend, and a little the tyrant, of the family. Jeanne is truly the ancestress of the servante of Molière. With La Reconnue, as with Garnier’s Bradamante, we feel that only a little was wanted to make a complete success. But that little was not supplied, and the difference between the complete and the incomplete is in itself infinite. |Causes of failure of the early dramatic literature.| Of the dramatic work of the French poets of the later sixteenth century it has to be said that on the whole it was lost labour. The tragedy is too artificial, too slavishly imitated from a poor model. The comedy, as all can see who will look at the Eugène of Jodelle, or the Esbahis of Grévin, was incoherent, being partly a rehandling of the “sotties” and the “farces” of the Middle Ages, partly an imitation of Plautus and Terence, nowhere an original growth. Its authors were men of letters, doing exercises in kinds of literature to which they were attracted by their prestige. They did not really work for the stage. Now the theatre, in the material sense, is as necessary to the dramatist as the model is to the painter. The most “learned” of artists will soon find that his work loses life and reality unless he keeps the living figure constantly before his eyes. A play is meant to be talked and acted to an audience. When it is written only to be read, it soon loses life. From “the cart of Thespis” down to the “four boards” of Lope de Rueda in the Spanish market-place, there has always been the stage first, and then the dramatic literature. That is equally true in France. The history of the French stage is continuous from the Confrérie de la Passion, through the Enfants sans Souci, and the professional actors who succeeded them at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, down to the “maison de Molière.” But in the sixteenth century it skirted literature, and the alliance was not made between them till the time of Rotrou and Corneille. So the earlier dramatic literature remains a curiosity, or at the most an indication of what was to come. Its best tragedy is an “essai pâle et noble,” and its comedy a rough experiment, too often the very reverse of noble. In order to show how the writers of the great time, and of the eighteenth century classic school, while working on the same fund of principles, and with similar aims, differed from their predecessors, it would be necessary to go beyond the scope of this book.