Le style et le canevas verbal des tragédies de Pierre Corneille

Abstract

Pierre Corneille is a great master of language and style. The playwright’s language is inseparable from his style. For Corneille, words are the magical semantic units that create an autonomous, harmonious and elevated style of his dramaturgy. By Corneille’s time, the ground had already been laid for the definitive formation of classical aesthetics. Therefore, he tries not to harm the “noble style”. There are no words in his vocabulary that would shock the theater audience of that time, (for example belly, breast, chest). On the other hand, words characteristic of the gallant style are not so rare ( the object – a beloved person, flame – the feeling of love).

Four centuries have passed since the creation of Corneille’s plays. The evolution of the French language itself has led to the need to comment on Corneille’s tragedies. The complexity of the playwright’s perception of the language is determined not so much by the versatility of the vocabulary of his plays, but by the metaphorical nature of poetic forms. French editions of Corneille are accompanied by long commentaries and necessary glossaries which reflect the specificities of Corneille’s dramatic discourse. Common characteristics of Corneille’s style of tragedies are: heroic pathos, eloquence, expressiveness, deliberate use of Alexandrian meter, musicality, abundance of sentences, clarity and harmony. Corneille uses all the lexical elements in the artistic-linguistic embroidery of tragedies with a determined purpose. The pathetic and noble style of the tragedies perfectly conveys characters’ spiritual states, peculiarities and aspirations.

The purpose of this article is to study the stylistic particularities of Pierre Corneille’s tragedies.