Looking back on his first thirty years as a playwright, Pierre Corneille wrote in 1660 that ‘la poésie dramatique a pour but le seul plaisir du spectateur’ (‘the objective of dramatic writing is simply the spectator's pleasure’). Though unusually emphatic, Corneille expressed a view that increasingly became the bedrock of dramatic theory during the first half of the seventeenth century: writers of tragedy should create a certain type of theatrical experience for the audience. Even Corneille's critics and rivals, such as Georges de Scudéry, the Abbé d'Aubignac, and Jean Chapelain did not dispute the importance of the spectator, but merely emphasised different aspects of audience requirements.

With the spectator in mind, we can see why seventeenth-century tragedy evolved towards an illusionistic spectacle with lively dialogue in contemporary diction, concentrated in time and space, and centring on protagonists whom the audience could like. This shift can be seen in the radical changes in tragedy between Antoine de Montchrestien's Hector (1607) and the dominant model of Corneille's tragedies from 1637 until at least mid-century.

The eclipse and return of tragedy

In the first decades of the century, tragedy was shaped by the ideal of recreating Greek and Latin models in French, in an often ornate and learned style but very highly wrought emotionally, with subjects from biblical and classical sources, and with much more pathos than action – that is to say that the characters spend a good deal of time deploring their misfortune. This is quite clear in Montchrestien's Hector.