Tristan L'Hermite

• Born: c. 1601
• Birthplace: Soliers, France
• Died: September 7, 1655
• Place of death: Paris, France

Other Literary Forms

Tristan L’Hermite was one of the most eclectic writers of the seventeenth century. His first published work, of 1626, was the scenario of a ballet, Vers du ballet de Monsieur Frère du Roi. An impressive ode, La Mer, followed in 1628, and his first collection of poetry, Les Plaintes d’Acante, in 1633. Numerous individual poems and collections of all types—erotic, heroic, religious, burlesque—followed in a fairly steady stream; the most notable of these are Les Amours de Tristan (1638), La Lyre (1641), L’Office de la Sainte Vierge (1646), and Les Vers héroïques (1648). It is principally for this poetic output that he is remembered today, but in addition to that—and to his multifaceted dramatic endeavors—he penned numerous letters (Lettres mêlées, 1642), a treatise on cosmography, Principes de cosmographie (1637), a fine picaresque novel, Le Page disgracié (1643), and a series of debates, Plaidoyers historiques (1643). With the exception of Le Page disgracié, which is receiving increasing critical attention, Tristan’s prose works have fallen into a not-undeserved neglect. Such is not the case with his poetry, which was frequently edited and well-represented in every major anthology of his time. Neglected for two centuries, his poetry returned to the limelight at the time of the Symbolists (Claude Debussy set some of Tristan’s best lines to music) and today, thanks in large part to the efforts of poets such as Amédée Madeleine and Carriat, he is universally recognized as the greatest lyric voice of the age of Louis XIII.

Achievements

One of Cyrano de Bergerac’s extraterrestrial travelers said of Tristan L’Hermite, “He is the only poet, the only philosopher, and the only free man that you have.” The author who has been called the predecessor of Symbolism and the precursor of Jean Racine was basically an anachronism. His first play, La Mariane, was a huge success, artistically and critically. Though lyric and oratorical, it revealed to the audience of seventeenth century France what psychological drama could be and do. By the time he died, some twenty years later, he was already out of step with his time and ready for oblivion. Much the same can be said of his poetry, but it is precisely those qualities that made the classical age reject it that allow the modern reader to appreciate it fully. His poetry is replete with conceits, prolonged metaphors, and preciosity, but beyond these commonplaces of baroque expression lie a sensitivity and sensibility so universal as to reduce all artifice to subservience. All the thematic and metaphoric commonplaces of his day are to be found in his work, yet they are imbued with such a personal coloration and such deep conviction that they strike responsive chords in a modern reader. What first appears to be a mere rhetorical exercise is shown by careful scrutiny to be a sterling expression of profound sensibilities. A court poet, Tristan had to play a game, one that had to be played consciously and seriously. “The Muses have no brush that I cannot handle with some dexterity,” he once said, and though his work is not of uniform merit, he was right. His poetry is once again finding its way into numerous anthologies, both academic and commercial, and his drama is being dusted off by academics and actors alike.

Biography

François L’Hermite was born in the old castle of Soliers in 1601. It was not until much later that he assumed the name “Tristan” to call attention to his illustrious ancestry. He was barely three when he was taken to Paris, and, sometime before 1609, he became the page of the duc de Verneuil, son of the king. One day, having wounded someone in a fit of anger, he ran away from the court, took refuge in England, and eventually returned to France by way of Scotland and Norway—if one is to believe his account in Le Page disgracié. In the years that ensued, he had many masters, including Nicolas de Sainte-Marthe, a poet and dramatist, and that man’s more famous uncle, Scévole de Sainte-Marthe. Reader and librarian of Scévole, Tristan expanded his literary horizons and acquired a taste for poetry he was to keep the rest of his days. In 1620, he entered the royal household and one year later became attached to the person of Gaston d’Orléans, the rebellious young brother of Louis XIII, whose political embroilments and misfortunes he shared for nearly twenty-five years. His steadfast loyalty to his volatile master was not reciprocated, and Tristan, an incorrigible gambler, was constantly buffeted by alternating waves of good and bad fortune. Add to that chronic bad health, and his vacillations between elation and despondency are easily understood.

During the first ten years at the court of Gaston, Tristan followed his master in and out of exile. In such turmoil, the composition of works of any breadth was out of the question. Tristan did, however, write some superior occasional poetry and, above all, Les Plaintes d’Acante, one of the finest lyric collections of the century and the nucleus of the later—and equally successful—Les Amours de Tristan.

By 1634, Gaston and Tristan were back in France, and the poet began to frequent the theaters, particularly that of his actor friend Mondory, the Théâtre du Marais. It is to this troupe that he gave his first play, La Mariane, the hit of the 1636 season. Panthée, produced in 1638, deservedly failed. Returning to his purely lyric tendencies, Tristan brought out in quick succession Les Amours de Tristan, La Lyre, and several major isolated poems. He also published his letters, many of them gems of pastoral fiction, and his autobiographical novel Le Page disgracié. In 1643, fate seemed to smile on him. Louis XIII had died, and Gaston had been made lieutenant-governor of the realm. Tristan gave his third tragedy, La Mort de Sénèque, to Molière’s troupe; it was a hit. Once again, however, fate proved to be fickle: Gaston forgot his poet, and the success of the play was short-lived. Despondent, Tristan finally gave up his loyalty to Gaston. His next play, La Mort de Chrispe, was dedicated to his new patron, the duchesse de Chaulnes. That patronage did not last long, and knowing himself to be dying of consumption, Tristan went, although he hated so much to “lie like a dog at some lord’s feet,” to do just that at the court of the duc de Guise.

Tristan’s last years were plagued by worsening health and frequent poverty but were fairly productive nevertheless. He compiled L’Office de la Sainte Vierge, a collection of religious poems interspersed with prose. Osman, another tragedy, was performed in 1647, though not published until after Tristan’s death. The following year saw the appearance of his Les Vers héroïques, a collection of occasional poems reflecting an entire life spent as a courtier. In 1649, there was a single ray of light in his dark firmament, as he was elected to the Académie Française. In 1652, Tristan, despite his deteriorating health, brought out Amarillis, a reworking of Jean de Rotrou’s pastoral, La Célimène (pr. 1631, pb. 1637), and in 1653, Le Parasite, a rowdy and vivacious comedy. He celebrated his patron’s feats—a feat in itself—in his last long occasional poem, “La Renommée,” but time and his health were running out. He had several projects in process, including a novel and the translation of the hymns of the Roman Breviary, when he died on September 7, 1655. He was buried in the church of Saint-Jean-en-Grève, which was destroyed during the Revolution. Of his native castle, only a mantel-stone survives, in a nearby barn.

Analysis

Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, whatever their differences, were very much attuned to a new social order that was moving toward order, decorum, and polish, one in which there was little room for the self-centered artist or hero. There are some vestiges of the feudal ideal in Corneille; there are none in Racine. The French have rightfully enshrined these two great dramatists, but in so doing, they have set them up as standards by which all other writers are to be judged, extrapolating from their dramas rules that are the essence of these works but that were never meant as universal guidelines. Tristan L’Hermite, as a man and as an artist, did not belong to, and could not enter, the new order. To treat him as an incomplete Racine, or a precursor, is to be deaf to the specific timbre and tonality of this great writer. In every way, Tristan was a stranger in his own time, in his own land. His plays are populated with reflections of himself, noble souls out of tune with their milieus—strangers.

The tragic hero is, almost by definition, an idealist—whether his ideal be one of good or evil—lost in a practical world of relative values. Such a conflict is obviously insoluble, and the only suspense possible is not centered on “what” but on “how,” for it is only in his rejection of facile contingencies and compromises that the hero can achieve greatness—that is, fulfill his destiny, his essence. The wrong sacrifices, the wrong choices predicated on false values, these are the dangers confronting tragic heroes, evils they must reject by rejecting the world of contingencies. Racine’s heroes do reject the world but not its basic values. That is precisely what makes their farewells so long and agonizing. Tristan’s protagonists, on the contrary, reject the world because they cannot abide its values. The crux of the action, then, is not the crisis leading to a decision, but the crisis resulting from one. Walls are erected to preserve the integrity of a spirit; these walls frustrate those who would possess and so destroy the strangers. Thus, destiny, imposed but not accepted, may well crush a mortal; it cannot triumph over his will. As Blaise Pascal states in his Pensées (1670; Monsieur Pascal’s Thoughts, Meditations, and Prayers, 1688; best known as Pensées), at that fatal moment, the hero is triumphant, because he knows why he dies while the executioner lacks that understanding.

Tristan’s heroes are unable—or unwilling—to communicate with their fellow human beings. The resulting isolation is the basis of their tragic situation. These rebels, with concentrated introspection, seek to establish their own identities, to find answers within themselves to basic ontological questions, hoping to derive viable or at least acceptable modi operandi. In short, the typical Tristanian protagonist seeks to establish an authentic and dynamic moi in a fundamentally unauthentic and static world, a situation that can only lead to a nauseous and noxious anxiety. The greatness of these characters—what makes them so attractive, even to the modern reader—resides in their painful lucidity: Fully aware of the absurdity of the world, they refuse the balms of unconsciousness no less than those of compromise. They die because they willfully choose not to live a lie. In that sense, they are active contributors to their destiny, succumbing because of their intransigence, proud witnesses of their foes’ inferiority, and in the final analysis, they are victors over them because these foes must witness in turn the enshrinement of their victims’ superiority made inviolate by death.

Tristan wrote only five tragedies; not all are of equal value. It cannot be said that his dramaturgy was ever set in a firm mold, for he constantly experimented. He failed at times, but he always learned a lesson from these attempts. Therefore, even these lesser plays shed some light on the better ones.

La Mariane

Performed in 1636, La Mariane is a landmark in the transition of French tragedy from the stiff, rhetorical style of the humanistic theater to what is now known as the classical period. It had an instant and lasting success that not even the appearance of Corneille’s Le Cid (pr., pb. 1637; The Cid, 1637) some months later, was able to overshadow. Some have credited Mondory, creator of the role of Hérode, for the unusually large crowds that flocked to the theater, and indeed, some of the credit should go to that sterling actor who was struck down by apoplexy while playing this demanding role in 1637. It would be a mistake, however, to look no further, for his performance and following can in no way explain the ten editions of the play in the relatively few years remaining in Tristan’s short life; nor could they explain the fact that Molière’s troupe performed it more than thirty-four times between 1659 and 1680, while the Comédie-Française put it on more than thirty-eight times from 1680 to 1703. For the rest of the century, and well into the eighteenth, the play was very popular, both in France and abroad, as can be seen by the many translations that were published. A true psychological drama—the first theatrically viable one in France—it contains some of the best lines in French drama, and certainly the best before Corneille’s The Cid, though it is perhaps too declamatory and lyrical for modern tastes.

The story of Hérode and Mariane was well known at the time, and several dramatists had treated it before Tristan, both in France and elsewhere. Tristan’s innovation lies in that he readily understood what his predecessors had not—that a broad fresco of history, with a large cast of characters and a plethora of psychological entanglements, could not yield a cohesive and effective drama. He saw that the basic idea of two people misunderstanding each other, with others fostering that misunderstanding, was quite sufficient to give birth to an intensely dramatic nucleus. Critics weaned on less declamatory plays than those favored by pre-Cornelian spectators and readers often find the play static; there is some justification in this, but La Mariane is a dramatic poem of solitude, of estrangement. That is its limitation and also its beauty. It is to be fully enjoyed for its intrinsic merits, not compared to something it was never meant to be.

In the first act, Hérode declares his need for a physically absent yet psychologically omnipresent Mariane. The second act reverses the situation, and one readily realizes that Mariane and Hérode cannot live without each other. The tragedy resides precisely in the fact that Mariane, failing to see that Hérode is as necessary to her hatred as she is to his love, rejects all his overtures and makes communication impossible. For all of her words of rejection, her isolation is a posture: Her constant goading, as she taunts her husband with her moral superiority, cannot be aiming at isolation, but seeks a reaction, which eventually comes. When Hérode’s mounting frustration makes him blurt out words of hate, she welcomes these manifestations of a sentiment he does not harbor but which she desperately needs to feel truly free. Mariane is an eminently moral being in an amoral, Machiavellian world. To find inner peace, she opts for values in which she can believe and which demand the reaction she seeks from Hérode as well as make any externally imposed verdict meaningless. By her decision and the position she assumes, she forces Hérode into an impasse from which he can exit only by murdering the unbearable witness to his debasement. His reaction—rather, the reaction she dictated—and the ensuing death of Mariane enshrine Hérode’s impotence and dependence. Before he met her, he was nothing; without her, he goes mad.

Panthée

Tristan’s second play, Panthée, managed to maintain itself in the repertoire some twenty-five years, but it cannot be considered a success, either on stage or in print. Part of its failure has been ascribed to the fact that Tristan had intended the play specifically for Mondory, who was incapacitated before the play could be staged. It is true that this play, like its predecessor, has some beautiful tirades; unfortunately, it does not have La Mariane’s dramatic cohesiveness. Badly disjointed, it has no single dramatic focus, no smooth rise to the necessary climax. That too may be blamed on Mondory’s apoplexy, but such considerations do not redeem the play.

In Xenophon’s Kurou Paideia (The Cyropaedia: Or, Education of Cyrus, 1560-1567), the story of Panthea is a political footnote to the history of Cirus’s reign. It deals with the reluctant betrayal of a cause by a husband desperately in love with a misguided wife and on the consequences of that betrayal. Tristan, in the employ of Gaston d’Orléans, could not keep that tack, since his master was frequently taking up arms against his royal brother for rather tenuous personal reasons. He therefore decided to reduce in importance the roles of the political figures, the husband and the king, and to center attention on the wife and a would-be lover, Araspe. An interesting political story was thus transformed into a drama of unhappy love. The problem does not stop there. Tristan had taken two episodes from Xenophon, but he failed to weld them together. The fault is perhaps not entirely his own: In the first three acts, Araspe plays a major role; in the last two acts, he has only twenty-eight lines. Most of the time, he is out of sight and out of mind, while the focus of the play changes radically. It is logical to surmise that the role, initially conceived for Mondory, was reduced when that actor suffered his stroke; it is equally logical to suggest that Tristan, ill and demoralized at the time, did not bother to revise what he had already written, and simply reduced that role in the acts he had yet to write. There is another, cardinal flaw. The three main characters function on three separate planes in such a way as to make dramatic intercourse impossible. They take turns expounding, but never exchange ideas. The results are frequent passages of great lyricism but no drama of any consequence. These beautiful lines are eminently worth reading; they will probably never be heard from a stage again.

La Mort de Sénèque

Molière’s troupe first performed Tristan’s third tragedy, La Mort de Sénèque, shortly after the death of Louis XIII. It was a success on stage and in print, but after 1647, there were no further editions and few performances, and the play soon fell into oblivion. That was to be expected: Certain technical demands of the play made it unsuitable for the classical stage, and the crudity of its tone made it unfit for the elite of the age of Louis XIV. The changes in dramatic conventions chased this powerful drama from the stage; the changes in taste kept it from returning. Here again, the critics have been blinded by extraneous considerations to what a modern audience could readily consider sterling dramatic qualities. These qualities caused the directorship of the Comédie-Française to return the play to the permanent repertory as of the 1984 season.

La Mort de Sénèque deals with a complex plot against the emperor Néron. Epicaris, a freedwoman, leader of the plot, and Sénèque, innocent but implicated because he stands in Néron’s way, are accused, condemned, and put to death (Sénèque being allowed to commit suicide in a less painful way). The technical demands are many: a large cast, great mobility (for the sake of verisimilitude), and intricate staging. None of these is insurmountable today.

The main reasons for the play’s eventual failure lie elsewhere. As France moved toward the age that was to be consecrated at Versailles, the tragic stage, along with the pulpit, became a prime instrument for the propagation of the new credo; tragedy was therefore expected to be decorous and unsullied by earthy or comic contacts. The label “Shakespearean,” which has been attached to La Mort de Sénèque by French critics with derogatory intentions, refers to these impure, nonclassical traits of the play. Socially, Tristan had erred; artistically, he was right. The world of Nero was one in which values had been reversed and in which decorum was either trampled underfoot or used as a thin and easily cracked veneer. It was a world of the absurd, in which the grotesque invaded all realms of human endeavor. Tristan’s genius resides precisely in his ability to capture this mood, to translate it into an artistic coherence, and to put it on stage. The earthy duels of wits between Sabine, the sister of Néron, and Epicaris, the freedwoman, or the teeth-grinding laughter that is evoked at the most horrendous moments are but contributors to a general feeling of disorientation, of loss and, eventually, of fear, that first grips the characters of the play and engulfs the spectator or the imaginative reader. Such a manic hell, from which there is no escape but death or madness, had never before been experienced on the French stage. Tristan was to refine the process for his last tragedy, Osman; it was Racine who adapted it to the new exigencies in masterpieces such as Britannicus (pr. 1669; English translation, 1714) and Bajazet (pr., pb. 1672; English translation, 1717).

La Mort de Chrispe

The theme of La Mort de Chrispe—that of a young wife in love with her stepson—is one that had been frequently dealt with before Tristan; it was to yield one of the great masterpieces of all time, Racine’s Phèdre (pr., pb. 1677; Phaedra, 1701). Phèdre was a success from the start, La Mort de Chrispe a failure; the public has been right in both cases.

Historically, Fausta, wife of the emperor Constantine, fell in love with her stepson, Chrispus; rebuffed, she accused the young man of making improper advances. Constantine had Chrispus arrested and put to death; informed of the truth, he ordered Fausta drowned. Such a barbaric father and wanton stepmother would have disgusted Tristan’s public, and he decided to make some major changes; unfortunately, in trying to make history palatable, Tristan gutted it of any dramatic potential. The role of Constantin is episodic; that of Constance, beloved of Chrispe, is not sufficiently delineated to draw the reader’s sympathy; Chrispe himself plays a rather limited role, in turn passive or impervious. Fauste is thus the only interesting character in the entire play, devoid of any worthy foil. Also, for the sake of propriety, Fauste is not allowed to declare her passion explicitly. Her inner turmoil, though touching, does not bear constant repetition. Chrispe’s death is no longer imputed directly to either Fauste (the cause) or to Constantin (the agent), but is the result of a silly accident attributable only indirectly to Fauste. The expurgation diluted whatever dramatic intensity might have pervaded the play, a mistake that Racine was careful to avoid in his handling of the same theme.

Osman

In 1647, Tristan took out an unusually long copyright (twenty years; five to ten was the norm) for his last tragedy, Osman. For reasons that remain a mystery to this day, he then buried the play, which was published only after his death by his admirer and protégé, Philippe Quinault, himself a fairly good dramatist. The subject was taken from contemporary history: Osman had been raised to the throne of Turkey in 1618 at the age of fourteen, then strangled four years later by the same Janissaries who had brought him to power. In his play, Tristan remained quite faithful to history; for dramatic purposes, he altered the manner of the young sultan’s death—he dies fighting in the streets rather than strangled in a cell. He also invented a character, Osman’s sister, and gave prominence to an obscure historical figure, the Mufti’s daughter, in love with Osman. In the play, it is the Mufti’s daughter who, scorned, sets off the Janissaries’ rebellion.

Tristan was also faithful to the well-entrenched unities, though he opted for a variation then coming into its own, one that Racine was to bring to full fruition: Instead of a single action, to which some minor side issues could be grafted, Tristan offers two parallel plots, the political struggle of Osman and the erotic one of the Mufti’s daughter, both inseparably intertwined into a single entity that can only be loosened by death.

Like Mariane, Osman is a stranger in his own land. Proud of his station and of his worth, he is bitterly disappointed in all his human relations and, justifiably or not, rejects them. The Mufti’s daughter tries repeatedly to enter into his world, but is rebuffed, just as the Janissaries, who demand only to be reassured about their role in governance, are denied a simple answer because the young prince feels it beneath his dignity to give an account to his soldiers. He rejects all the compromises—erotic and political—that are proffered. His values never change, his resolve never wavers. Cruelly truthful to the end, he accepts his assured death and exits like a sultan, his honor and his isolation intact.

This is Tristan’s ultimate statement of his estrangement, so much so that it is often too dialectical to be consistently dramatic. With comparison inevitable, it is probably well that, with Racine’s Bajazet permanently entrenched in the repertory, Osman never be performed, but the poetry, the magnificent pomp of the tirades, do not deserve to be buried and forgotten. Of even greater importance is the fact that, whether one wishes to see Tristan as a writer on his own terms or as a precursor of Racine, in Osman, he managed to create an atmosphere as no one had done before and as only Racine was to do after him. From the first line of the sultan’s sister’s nightmare to the dying gasp of the Mufti’s daughter, the reader with imagination and sensitivity is immersed in a claustrophobic and stifling atmosphere such as the one that must have prevailed in the seraglio (palace). The barbaric grandeur echoed by the sonorous Alexandrines, the ominous mystery of court intrigues, the passions engendered by human beings who consider life an expendable commodity, all this is part of a mantle of psychological verisimilitude that covers the empathetic reader and grants him a deeper understanding of the human experience.

This Turkish atmosphere is a strange one, totally foreign to the norms of French classical tragedy. Honor and glory are replaced by stealth and deception, heroism by anxiety. Anxiety, in Osman, is a dual curse, both social, the result of a cleavage between one human being and others, and spatial, resulting when material obstacles keep people from realizing themselves. Almost by definition, a seraglio is inductive to claustrophobia, yet Osman is able to leave the confines of its walls. To be sure, his freedom is an illusion, a dramatically ironic one, but one under which he operates. The claustrophobia cannot therefore be predicated exclusively or even principally on spatial considerations. If Osman is unable to leave the city, it is not because of stone walls but because of psychological ones erected by his pride. Unable to communicate, people cease to trust relationships and each other. Walls, in such a milieu, do not contain; they conceal and separate personalities, all the while fostering physical proximity. In fact, one has here two sets of walls, the physical and the psychological. The former are meant to keep in; the latter are carapaces necessary to those confined. Ironically, these barriers so necessary to certain psyches are also lethal: In these confines, social anxiety can only lead to deadly explosions. In short, it is not enough to see that the seraglio presents a physical enclosure; one must also see that it has a dramatic function, which is not to keep the protagonists closely confined, in direct contact with each other but, reinforced by the psychological walls, to alienate them. In ancient tragedies, walls were meant to circumscribe the city—that is, civilization—to protect it from the beasts without; here, the walls, physical and psychological, turn the city into a madhouse and its inhabitants into beasts.

La Folie du sage

Tristan’s only tragicomedy, La Folie du sage, was published in 1645, and seems to have achieved a certain success, both on stage and in print. Much of that success may be the result of its many allusions to notables and events of the day—or at least of what contemporaries viewed as such—and its heavy reliance on themes that could only appeal to a limited public for a limited time. Today, the play is of interest only to Tristan scholars.

Amarillis

In 1652, Tristan adapted Rotrou’s La Célimène, made a pastoral of it, and thus contributed to a surprising renewal of the genre. The play, Amarillis, had a brief but definite success, both in the city and at court. It is quite likely that Molière tried his hand at pastoral comedy because he saw in the success of Amarillis and its imitations an ideal prototype for spectacular court entertainment. For all that—and in spite of a few witty scenes—the play deserves its subsequent obscurity.

Le Parasite

That is not the case of Le Parasite, Tristan’s last play. In 1653, just when the French were getting ready for great comedies of manners and of characters, Tristan—as Racine was to do with Les Plaideurs (pr. 1668; The Litigants, 1715)—deliberately turned to antiquity and the commedia dell’arte for the inspiration of a piece of pure buffoonery, which is perpetrated by caricature-like archetypes.

The plot of Le Parasite, a mere vehicle for the reincarnation of the spirit of the commedia dell’arte, is of no consequence. The verbal fantasy unleashed by its characters, the wit and élan, the old, anachronistic language deliberately abused by Tristan for its comic effect, all these ingredients of a gigantic burlesque feast for the mind make this play the delight that it is. The undeniable Italian influences are less those of specific plays than the broad joyous qualities brought to France by the Italian players. As a result, though the play deals with young love and its travails, its interest is centered on the movers of the comic action, the parasitic Fripesauces, the miles gloriosus Capitan, and the nurse Phenice. If the Capitan’s bombastic tirades are witty parodies of the heroic ideal, those of the parasite are their equal in spoofing both lovers and heroes. It is in such delightful spoofs that Tristan is at his comic best. Unfortunately, Tristan’s heavy reliance on archaisms and on puns that are no longer operative causes much of the humor to be lost to the modern reader or viewer. It is particularly the latter—who cannot seek the help of lexical notes—who is bewildered by the play today, and that is unfortunate, for this is an important work of art. Deliberately relying on a language and a framework both antiquated and base, Tristan used these elements as sources of laughter in a way unknown since François Rabelais (1494-1553) and which only Molière was to resurrect with such gusto. His contribution to comedy is undeniable. He easily outdistanced his predecessors in the relief of his caricature-like figures and the verve of his poetry. At a time when farce and serious comedy were finally to be merged, he gave verbal fantasy and burlesque its finest hour. The classical generation, by subduing burlesque, fixing the language, and demanding psychological depth even in comedy, made Molière inevitable and Le Parasite passé.

Bibliography

Abraham, Claude. Tristan L’Hermite. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A basic biography examining the life and works of Tristan L’Hermite. Bibliography and index.

Grove, Laurence, ed. Emblems and the Manuscript Tradition: Including an Edition and Studies of a Newly Discovered Manuscript of Poetry by Tristan L’Hermite. Glasgow, Scotland: University of Glasgow, 1997. Although this discussion focuses on Tristan L’Hermite’s poetry, it also provides information on his life and dramatic works.

Gude, Mary Louise. Le Page disgracié: The Text as Confession. University, Miss.: Romance Monographs, 1979. This publication, in discussing Tristan L’Hermite’s autobiographical work, provides insights into his life. Bibliography.

Shepard, James Crenshaw. Mannerism and Baroque in Seventeenth Century French Poetry: The Example of Tristan L’Hermite. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Through his examination of the poetry of Tristan L’Hermite, Shephard sheds light on the dramatic works of Tristan L’Hermite. Bibliography and indexes.