Jean de Rotrou

• Born: August 21, 1609
• Birthplace: Dreux, France
• Died: June 1, 1650
• Place of death: Dreux, France

Other Literary Forms

Jean de Rotrou wrote exclusively for the stage.

Achievements

After his death in 1650, Jean de Rotrou’s plays, with a few notable exceptions, were neglected for more than two centuries. The probable reason for this is that Rotrou, the author, was forgotten while Rotrou, the man, was cloaked in the mythic mantle of the “mayor-martyr.” His premature death by the plague while he was steadfastly serving a term as mayor of Dreux was taken as a beautiful example of civic duty and sacrifice. The aura of this noble death tended to distort other aspects of his life, and the distinction between fact and legend became more blurred with the passing years. By extension, erroneous notions cropped up in the literary domain. It is only in the second half of the twentieth century that a reevaluation of Rotrou’s contribution to the French stage has begun; excellent studies and critical editions have appeared that deal with various aspects of his dramatic output. The immediate impression one receives from these scholarly works is that Rotrou should be ranked after Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière as one of the foremost playwrights of his century. For a long time, he was, indeed, one of France’s neglected classics. Modern scholarship has redressed historical injustice.

Rotrou excelled in the imbroglio type of play made popular by the Italian performers who came to France at the end of the sixteenth century. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Rotrou did not discard primacy of plot in favor of portrayal of manners or character. Indeed, his primary appeal lay in his plots. He liked a good story, a complex intrigue, and he knew how to develop it neatly. Moreover, it is doubtful that he could have attempted innovations in the genre of drama if he had so desired, at least not at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the theater for which he wrote his plays. A playhouse, then as now, was in business to make money. To do so, it had to supply its audiences with the kind of entertainment that they desired, and in plays performed during this period, audiences wanted an abundance of movement, action, and surprise. Furthermore, to better accommodate the spectators’ hunger for variety and exuberance, the Hôtel de Bourgogne had invested a huge sum in a system of complex and picturesque decor. It is likely, then, that when the directors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne chose Rotrou as their principal playwright, they expected him to continue producing action-filled, fast-moving plots. Rotrou did not disappoint them.

In the late 1620’s when Rotrou began writing his plays, profound aesthetic changes were taking place in the French theater. There was a kind of purification taking place in author and spectator alike. Before 1630, many of the spectators were rabble-rousers, and more often than not, mediocre authors of salacious plays catered to their tastes. Around 1630, the theater ascended the social scale. The patronage of the aristocracy, headed by Cardinal Richelieu himself, led to much greater prestige for drama. Rotrou played an important role in this metamorphosis of the French theater. He and his fellow playwright, Pierre Corneille, were instrumental in helping develop a keener sense of propriety among the new theatergoers. The playwrights adapted and altered their texts according to the new exigencies of the times. (For example, they eliminated all obscene language from the stage.) They incorporated the classical unities in their plays and adopted the Alexandrine couplet as the standard meter instead of continuing to write plays in prose. This was the beginning of the famous bienséance in the French theater. Because Rotrou, during the decades from 1630 to 1650 wrote more plays than any other playwright, he was more instrumental than any other playwright in making the theater one of the principal divertissements of the so-called honnêtes gens (honest, or regular, people).

It is especially in his six tragedies that one sees the hand of the professional playwright who is in constant contact with the stage and who does not miss an opportunity to exploit any potential tragic situation or dramatic confrontation. In an age when it was common practice for playwrights to borrow freely from other dramatists, sometimes presenting entire scenes from another drama as their own work, Rotrou showed what could be done with the same raw material and enough originality. The tragedies show how, drawing on the same store of situations and characters as in a previous play, Rotrou availed himself of the tragic plot to blend these elements into a new dramatic whole. The manner in which he wrought changes enabled him to produce heightened stage effects and to create more balanced plays. Many playwrights following in his footsteps would use his approach in the area of dramatic transposition and invention. Other dramatists borrowed freely from him without ever acknowledging their debt. It is true that, with a single exception, these tragedies fall short of being masterpieces. The sole exception—La Véritable Saint-Genest—is now considered by critics to be the best representation of a Baroque tragedy on the French stage. Though these plays are lacking in profound psychological insights, they reveal other qualities. They not only exhibit great technical skills on the part of the author but also show a powerful imagination at work and a fine discretion in the choice of what is shown on the stage. They were written in a verse whose equal, rhythmic movement, together with the precision and sober force of the language, answered fully to the aesthetic ideas that were then coming into vogue. It is for these reasons that Rotrou was hailed by Voltaire as the founder of French classical drama.

Biography

Jean de Rotrou was born into a family of magistrates on August 21, 1609, in the town of Dreux. Official records show that his ancestors had already been living there for several centuries at the time of his birth. Over the years, his forebears had provided this small Normandy town with many of its administrators and notaries. Rotrou would himself join their ranks. When he died there on June 28, 1650, it was in his official capacity as mayor. Very little is known about his early life except that he began his studies in the humanities at the college of Dreux and completed them in Paris. When he arrived in Paris, he was only thirteen. He studied philosophy under a benign tutor-priest, Father de Breda, who indulged his young student’s penchant for versification. Rotrou earned his law degree in 1630.

There is no evidence to indicate what made Rotrou turn to the theater at such an early period in his life. The production of his first play, l’Hypocondriaque, took place before he was twenty. Tradition has it that he led a bohemian existence during the first years of his theatrical career. Like most young men engaged in belles lettres, he sought a patron and protector. He found one in the comte de Belin, who provided him with generous financial help until the count’s death in 1637. Rotrou found another stable source of income as the official poet of the most prestigious theatrical playhouse in Paris, the Hôtel de Bourgogne. It was his function to furnish the playhouse’s actors with plays at regular intervals. At about this time, he became associated with some of the great literary figures of his era, such as Jean Chapelain, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, and Pierre Corneille. His early plays were enormous successes and even found favor with the royal couple. He soon became the protégé of the king’s minister, Cardinal Richelieu, who commissioned Rotrou and four other famous dramatists to write plays together. This group, known as the Cinq Auteurs (five authors), wrote in collaboration only two plays, both of which were failures.

By 1639, Rotrou had gained enough respectability to purchase a civil office in Dreux and, the following year, to marry a lady from good bourgeois stock, Marguerite Camus de Mantes. His responsibilities as husband, father, and civil servant forced him to stay in Dreux, but he continued writing for the theater; indeed, his best works were produced during this period. Not much is known about the remaining years of his life. He did not write about his activities, nor did his contemporaries have much to say about him. He seems to have become more withdrawn and more religious during his last years. In 1650, a plague descended on Dreux. Rotrou, who was mayor at the time, refused to abandon his official duties. In a letter to his brother dated June 22, 1650, he wrote the following memorable lines: “The bells are sounding today for the twenty-second person to die. They will sound for me when it pleases God.” He died a few days later of the plague at the age of forty.

Analysis

Jean de Rotrou’s plays are seldom performed, yet his reputation has not suffered from this theatrical neglect. His plays are still read and appreciated by scholars and students alike. He was a prodigious composer during his short life, writing thirty-five plays that are extant; there were probably others that have been lost. His talent as a playwright was admired by the literati, and his success inspired many contemporary French authors to cultivate the imbroglio play. Indeed, his plays became a veritable gold mine for other dramatists. The appeal of his dramas lay in Rotrou’s ability to construct a well-knit plot that holds together in every respect.

In the context of Rotrou’s entire theater, one can say that it is, above all, eclectic. Rotrou borrowed freely not only from the classical past, but also from the courtly tradition, pastoral literature, history, and contemporary Spanish and Italian sources. The importance of his theater does not lie in profound character portrayals or in any poetic beauty of the language; it lies, instead, in the area of dramaturgy. The problem of dramaturgy doubtless occupied much of Rotrou’s time, because he consistently strove to write exceptionally well-constructed scenes and acts. He gave his plays an air of verisimilitude by linking his scenes whenever possible and by arranging them in a logical pattern, by transposing or omitting scenes from the source material, and by inventing some original scenes of his own. He tried to observe a proper lapse of time between events and justified encounters of characters whenever feasible, as well as their entrances, exits, and motivations. His alterations in staging are proof that he paid particular attention to staging techniques when their effects had a significant bearing on total dramatic interest. For these reasons, Rotrou proved to be an innovative adapter who paved the way for other playwrights. At a time when the theater in France was groping toward a new direction, Rotrou showed his countrymen what good theater could be.

All of Rotrou’s plays can be grouped into one of three dramatic genres: tragicomedy, comedy, or tragedy. Of the thirty-five plays that have survived, eighteen are in the genre of tragicomedy; these are typically adventure plays with characters from the upper classes or royalty, the denouements of which are almost invariably happy. The only “tragic” aspect of this type of play is the threat of death for the hero (usually in the fourth act), a threat that is quickly dispelled. Tragicomedy is, in fact, a hybrid genre, but one that was immensely popular with theatergoers of the period. The primary source for most tragicomedies was either the pastoral or the cloak-and-dagger adventure novels fashionable with the public. The nature of these plays is such as to demand a constant attention to external details, which were intended to create complicated situations. Rotrou accentuated the Romanesque elements usually associated with this genre (such as disguises, duels, mistaken identities, trickeries, and numerous intrigues). Moreover, with him, the Terentian double plot—two closely related actions involving two sets of characters—became the basic element of plot construction.

Wenceslaus

It is the consensus of critics that Wenceslaus is Rotrou’s finest tragicomedy. He borrowed the plot from a play by Fernando de Rojas, No hay ser padre siendo rey (pr. 1522). Nevertheless, Rotrou altered so extensively his source material that more than half the play is new. The plot centers on the twin themes of fraternal rivalry and paternal self-sacrifice. Wenceslas is an old monarch who is weary of ruling. He has two sons, Ladislas and Alexandre, both of whom are in love with the same woman, Cassandre. She prefers the more gentle Alexandre to the tempestuous Ladislas. A double love intrigue concerns the love of the minister, Frédéric, for the king’s daughter, Théodore. In a case of mistaken identity, Ladislas enters Cassandre’s palace one evening and kills her presumed lover. Unbeknownst to him, he has inadvertently killed his brother. Cassandre rushes to the king to demand justice for the death of Alexandre, slain at night by Ladislas. The king condemns the latter to death, but when he is about to be executed, Cassandre and Théodore beg for his life. Frédéric has been informed by Théodore that if he aspires to marry her, he must prevent the execution of her brother. In the meantime, the people have overrun the place of execution and revolted at the thought of their prince being put to death. The aged king solves the problem by abdicating in favor of his son, who is henceforth placed above the law of the realm. King Ladislas now gives his sister to Frédéric in marriage and asks Cassandre to marry him. She indicates her intent of doing so after a suitable period of mourning.

Many critics have been drawn to this play in spite of the broader moral implications of showing vice seemingly rewarded. They praise the profound psychological portrayal of the characters, especially Wenceslas and Ladislas, and the play’s excellent structural cohesiveness. The suspenseful plot is based largely on anxiety and fear and is constructed in accord with the classical unities. Certain changes in staging enabled Rotrou to achieve greater theatrical effects than were achieved in the original play. For example, the fact that the audience is kept in ignorance of the person whom Ladislas has killed makes the revelation of the fratricide in the fourth act even more dramatic than it might otherwise be. In his monumental study, A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century (1929-1942), Henry Carrington Lancaster considers this scene to be one of the most effective in all French classical drama. Lastly, the generational conflict, the confrontation between parent and children depicted in the play, has always been a popular motif with the public. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that more than thirty editions of Wenceslaus appeared between 1648 and 1980, and that it was performed two hundred and fifty-seven times at the Comédie-Française between 1680 and 1980.

Les Sosies

Rotrou affixed the label comédie to eleven of his plays. One of them, La Bague de l’oubli, shows close affinities with tragicomedy; the influence of the pastoral is evident in five others—La Diane, Filandre, Célimène, Florimonde, and Clorinde—all written between 1633 and 1635; three follow closely the comic tradition of antiquity found in Plautus’s theater, Les Ménechmes, Les Sosies, and Les Captifs; and two are Italian adaptations, Clarice and La Sœur. Such is Rotrou’s comic theater—eleven plays that reflect a variety of influences. Unquestionably, comedy of intrigue constitutes their principal ingredient. His two best-known comedies are Les Sosies and La Sœur.

Les Sosies proved to be immensely popular with Parisian audiences when it was first performed, rivaling Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid (1636; The Cid, 1637) in setting new attendance records. The plot was taken from Plautus’s Amphitryon, a comic play based on mistaken identity. Mercury has assumed the identity of Amphitryon’s slave, Sosie, in order to aid his father, Jupiter, in the latter’s scheme to seduce Amphitryon’s wife, Alcmena. This disguise gives rise to a series of burlesque situations. The plot depends on random encounters among the characters. The characters cannot determine or influence the course of events: The action of the play progresses, not because of what the characters do, but because of what happens to them. Rotrou’s method here is to develop his situations, not by concentration, but by pursuing as many ramifications as possible. He constantly shifts the characters on the stage, introducing a new character to give a new twist to the situation. For example, the exchange motif is frequently employed until it reaches a crescendo of confusions through a rapid shift of characters and situations in acts 4 and 5: The real husband is unable to prove his identity before the impostor, and the servant, Sosie, has to admit that somebody else is himself. In Rotrou’s version, relations become more and more confused until finally every character is embroiled.

La Sœur

La Sœur was the last comedy that Rotrou wrote, and it is perhaps his finest. It was among his most successful productions: It remained in the repertory of the Hôtel de Bourgogne long after the author’s death and was given several performances by Molière himself. Indeed, there are many scenes worthy of the master of French comedy, some of which the latter did incorporate into his plays. Furthermore, the play is probably the best example of the type of comedy that Rotrou wrote—comedy of intrigue. In La Sœur, the characters are so hopelessly mixed up by the end of the fourth act that nothing short of a deus ex machina can extricate them from their predicament. There is only one important comic figure in the play, but that figure, Ergaste, the hero’s valet, is the best-developed model of the servant to be found in Rotrou’s comic theater and embodies much of the type’s comic potential. Last, La Sœur serves also as a good example of serious comedy—the type of comedy that emphasizes pathos and sentimentality. It was this kind of play that Rotrou favored late in his literary career.

He drew the plot of La Sœur from the Italian playwright Giambattista Della Porta, whose play bearing the title La Sorella was published in 1604. Long before the action of the play begins, Anselme, Lélie’s father, has lost his wife and daughter to Turkish pirates, who kidnapped them. Years later, he sends Lélie with the ransom money to buy their freedom; unknown to him, the boy goes no farther than Venice. There, he falls in love with a beautiful servant girl, Sophie, uses the ransom money to buy her freedom, and secretly marries her. Because Anselme has not seen his daughter for years, he accepts Lélie’s story that his wife is dead and that Sophie is Lélie’s sister. The play opens then, with Lélie and his “sister” living together under the paternal roof, and will turn on the hero’s efforts to hide from his father the fact that the girl he ostensibly ransomed from the Turks is not his sister. The play emphasizes those elements necessary to keep its plot complicated at all times: a dual love intrigue that is introduced early in the play, the attempts of the father to reveal the truth, the valet’s multiple schemes, the recurring entanglements of the protagonist, the threat of incest introduced at the moment the outcome seems assured—the combination of all these represents the imbroglio comedy at its best. Because of the reduced set of characters, a certain economy in plot construction, and the elimination of extraneous materials and of coarse language, Rotrou’s play is more polished than the original. Furthermore, La Sœur marks a culmination of the influence of Italian high comedy in the French theater. Comedy that displayed a dominant Italianate quality was to disappear from the French stage with the death of Rotrou, not to thrive again for more than a hundred years, until the great Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni was invited to Paris to rejuvenate the Théâtre Italien.

Cosroès

Rotrou wrote six tragedies only. When he began to write plays, this genre did not enjoy the prestige that it would claim during the second half of the century. Nevertheless, two of his tragedies—Cosroès and La Véritable Saint-Genest—rank among the best written in France during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Cosroès was the last tragedy that Rotrou wrote. It is a passionately violent play centering on kinship ties and the struggle for a throne. Cosroès, king of Persia, has two sons—one by a previous marriage, Syroès, and the other, Mardesane, by his current marriage to Syra. Syra is a domineering queen who wishes to secure the throne for her son; she plots her stepson’s arrest and murder. The army and the people are for Syroès, however, and it is Queen Syra who ends up imprisoned. Syroès, who is in love with Narsée, Syra’s supposed daughter, surrenders to her supplications to save her mother. He then finds out, however, that Narsée is not Syra’s daughter; she is a girl who has been substituted in the cradle for the infant that Syra lost. Consequently, Syroès has Syra drink the poison that she had prepared for him. His stepbrother, Mardesane, then commits suicide. When the deposed Cosroès sees that his younger son is dead and that Syra has just taken poison, he drinks the rest of the fatal potion.

Cosroès is Rotrou’s most classical tragedy, not only because of its complete adherence to the classical rules of dramaturgy but also because of the intense psychological portrayal of the main characters. Syroès is a victim of events that he is incapable of controlling. His stepbrother, Mardesane, is physically overwhelmed in a drama he does not fully comprehend. Their father, Cosroès, proves to be a weak and indecisive man driven to fits of insanity, while Syra is depicted as evil incarnate. The denouement is pessimistic and open-ended: Unaware of his father’s suicide, will Syroès follow him to his grave as he had threatened to do if he could not prevent his father’s death? The feeling of remorse and doom, which casts a pall over the play, along with the dramatic exposition and the constant clash of the protagonists, makes Cosroès a good example of French classical tragedy.

La Véritable Saint-Genest

La Véritable Saint-Genest is generally acclaimed as Rotrou’s masterpiece. It is the best representation of a Baroque tragedy on the French stage during the seventeenth century, and it is perhaps the finest example in dramatic literature of a play-within-a-play. Rotrou’s drama is also permeated with major Baroque motifs such as illusion and metamorphosis. Moreover, the subject of the play—religious conversion—attests the Christian presence in the theater of that time. The play, then, successfully integrates secular and religious themes in spite of the belief by theorists of the period that the sacred and the profane should not be mixed.

The plot is relatively simple. In order to celebrate the engagement of his daughter, Valérie, to the victorious Roman general, Maximin, the emperor, Diocletian, wishes to have the court see a play depicting the martyrdom of Adrien, who was put to death by Maximin for converting to Christianity. The great actor, Genest, and his troupe have been invited onstage for this performance. During the course of the presentation, Genest is touched by divine grace and converts to the new faith in the presence of Diocletian and his court. The enraged emperor has him put to death for this blasphemous transgression. The play ends with Valérie and Maximin going off to be married. It is the structure of the plot that has elicited the most comments by critics. The play operates on three levels: The spectators are watching a play in which the characters, in turn, become spectators who are watching another play. The play-within-a-play, the martyrdom of Adrien portrayed by Genest and his troupe, begins in act 2 and ends in the fifth scene of act 4, in which Genest drops the actor’s mask. The martyrdom of Genest begins at this point in the play, a martyrdom that will be similar to Adrien’s.

One of the most important elements in the play is the long discussion about the theater, in general, and about acting, in particular. The difference between art and nature is emphasized, as is the problem of how to differentiate between illusion and reality in the context of the theater. For example, in the first scene of act 2, Genest is fearful that the decor is not natural enough to deceive the audience, and he makes suggestions that will enhance the illusion of reality. Genest himself is supremely confident in his ability to present lifelike illusions. He is such a good actor that, watching him, spectators do not know where illusion ends and reality begins. This is made manifest in the play when he passes from the illusionistic world of the theatrical performance to the real world of his conversion. At this moment, Diocletian and the court can no longer tell the difference between what is real and what is unreal. In playing with the problem of illusion and reality, Rotrou has engineered a metamorphosis. The change of Genest, actor, into Genest, martyr, is a change of illusion into truth. Paradoxically, this great actor is condemned to death for having abandoned his role on the stage—that is to say, for having shown himself to be a bad actor. The emperor came to the theater to see the martyrdom of Adrien, not to witness the conversion of Genest. In the end, Genest proves to be a less successful actor in his life than in his plays. It is this penetrating look into the problems of the actor and the illusion of the theater that makes Rotrou’s La Véritable Saint-Genest such a unique and interesting play for modern viewers.

Bibliography

Knutson, Harold C. The Ironic Game: A Study of Rotrou’s Comic Theater. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Knutson examines the comedic plays of Rotrou. Bibliography.

Morello, Joseph. Jean Rotrou. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A basic biography of Rotrou that also discusses his works. Bibliography.

Nelson, Robert. Immanence and Transcendence: The Theater of Jean Rotrou, 1609-1650. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969. This scholarly study looks at the concepts of immanence and transcendence in the plays of Rotrou. Bibliography.