Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Gaillard's Criticism of Corneille, Rotrou, Du Ryer, Marie de Gournay, and Other Writers

1915; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1632/456946

1938-1530

H. Carringtoń Lancaster,

French Literature and Criticism

A quaint piece of dramatic writing, the Cartel or Monomachie of Antoine Gaillard, is one of the earliest of seventeenth-century French plays in which an author puts his contemporaries on the stage and makes fellow writers the butt of his jests. It clears the way for Desmarest's Visionnaires, Saint-Evremond's Académistes, a half-dozen of Molière's plays, and a number of other pieces by Molière's contemporaries, whose satire is devoted to living individuals or to groups of literary persons; but the work has so little dramatic value that it would remain merely a date, were it not for the fact that by selecting real persons as the object of his satire, Gaillard has criticized from the standpoint of a contemporary a number of writers who flourished with greater or less distinction in 1633. In discussing the work I shall therefore dwell upon its biographical qualities, rather than upon its slender merit as a drama.