Le theatre de P. Corneille. Revue et corrigé par l'auteur

Collected edition, partly first edition, of the plays of Pierre Corneille, printed in Rouen by Laurens Maurry and sold in Paris by Augustin Courbé and Guillaume de Luyne. Illustrated with three allegorical engraved frontispieces and 23 full-page copper-engravings, largely designed by François Chauveau and engraved by artists including Jérôme David, Mathéus and Louis Spirinx.

All three frontispieces are dated 1660. The title-pages and privileges of the first and third volumes are likewise dated 1660, while those of the second volume bear the date 1664. The second volume therefore belongs to the 1664 reissue, in the same format and following the composition of the 1660 edition, though with a different collation of the preliminary matter.

Twentieth-century full chocolate morocco by Alix, signed at the foot of the pastedowns. Spines with raised bands and four compartments elaborately tooled à la grotesque, author, title, volume number and date in gilt; covers framed with a gilt triple fillet, broad and richly gilt inner dentelles, all edges gilt. The slightest traces of rubbing. Exceptionally fresh and clean internally. Housed in matching morocco-edged slipcases covered with old marbled paper.

A magnificent copy.

The 1660 edition marks a new stage in the way Corneille presented his theatre to the public. It was no longer simply a matter of collecting plays that had already appeared separately: he revised the body of his dramatic work, arranged it in three carefully conceived volumes, and for the first time surrounded it with a critical and theoretical apparatus that fundamentally altered the manner in which it was to be read. The three volumes were carefully printed by Laurent II Maurry in an octavo format somewhat larger than several of Corneille's earlier collections.

At the beginning of each volume Corneille placed a Discours written specifically for the edition. The first considers the purpose and constituent parts of dramatic poetry; the second tragedy, probability and necessity; and the third the unities of action, time and place. These are not abstract theoretical treatises detached from his own work: Aristotle, probability, catharsis and the dramatic unities are continually tested against the experience accumulated over some thirty years of writing for the stage.

Corneille himself was fully conscious of the difficulty of the undertaking. In a letter to the Abbé de Pure dated 25 August 1660, as the edition was nearing completion, he wrote: « Je suis, dit-il, à la fin d'un Travail fort pénible sur une matière fort délicate. J'ay traité en trois Préfaces les principales questions de l'art poétique sur mes trois volumes de Comédies. » He also referred to his new interpretations of Aristotle and to questions on which he intended to differ from contemporary critical doctrine.

The three general essays are accompanied, more significantly still, by the Examens placed before each play. First published here, they replace the dedications, addresses to the reader and prefaces that had previously accompanied the plays individually. From Mélite to Œdipe, Corneille thus returns to his own works, sometimes after an interval of more than twenty-five years: he recalls their circumstances, discusses their construction, defends particular choices and elsewhere acknowledges the liberties he had taken with the very rules he was now attempting to define.

The scale of the undertaking is remarkable. Corneille becomes at once the intellectual editor, critic and theorist of his own work. The reader is presented with three complementary levels: the play itself, the retrospective Examen in which Corneille judges its execution, and the Discours in which he attempts to formulate broader principles. Theory is therefore not simply imposed upon the plays retrospectively; it emerges from Corneille's confrontation with thirty years of dramatic practice.

The project also has a polemical dimension. More than twenty years after the controversy surrounding Le Cid, Corneille returns to the questions that had opposed him to his earliest critics and to the rules against which his theatre had been judged. His reading of Aristotle allows him to defend a less mechanical understanding of probability, necessity and the unities than that advanced by certain contemporary theorists, notably the Abbé d'Aubignac. The three Discours are therefore neither a surrender to classical rules nor a simple codification of them, but an attempt by a practising dramatist to test those rules against the evidence of his own plays.

The illustrations contribute to this new coherence. Each of the 23 plays is accompanied by an engraving, most of the compositions associated with François Chauveau and executed by several different engravers. Some rework earlier illustrations while others were conceived for the present edition; gathered across the three volumes, they provide a visual continuity for the greater part of Corneille's theatre then in print.

Corneille continued to revise his texts in subsequent editions, and the 1660 Théâtre should therefore not be regarded as a permanently fixed final text. It does, however, establish the critical architecture that would henceforth accompany his plays, bringing together for the first time the dramatic works, the author's own retrospective examination of them, and a general theory of dramatic art.

A rare and magnificent copy of this collected edition, partly first edition, containing the first appearances of Corneille's three Discours and his Examens, complete with the important series of 23 engravings, with volumes I and III dated 1660 and volume II in its 1664 reissue: the edition in which Corneille brought together, revised and, for the first time, systematically commented upon the body of his theatre.