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Money and Merit in French Renaissance Comedy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Jotham Parsons
Jotham Parsons*
Affiliation:
Duquesne University
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Abstract

Pierre Corneille’s Mélite (1629) resonated in part due to a social critique with deep roots in the French Renaissance. Corneille’s characters live by the canons of a (notionally) natural system of merit, divorced from money, implicitly noble, but open to upwardly-mobile commoners. Reconciling the traditional social order with the purchase of status and power by venal office-holders had preoccupied French comedy since the 1550s. While early playwrights hesitated to comment on this phenomenon (in which they took part), by about 1580 Odet de Turnèbe had already dramatized an educated elite’s transcendence of the economic, which Corneille would then go on to perfect. The biographies of these playwrights show that their plays’ ideological functions suited their own social situations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , Fall 2007 , pp. 852 - 882
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

The ideas in this paper were first developed in a 2003 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar directed by Karen Newman. Further research and writing were supported by a Wimmer Foundation Faculty Summer Research Grant from Duquesne University, and a version was presented to the Pittsburgh Area Early Modern Group on 3 December 2005. My particular thanks to Professor Newman, Barbara Bowen, Elaine Parsons, Orest Ranum, François Rigolot, and Matthew Vester for their comments on various drafts. This paper also owes a great deal to my study with the late Gérard Defaux, to whose memory it may serve as an inadequate but sincere tribute. All translations are my own.

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