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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: V. LE CID The Cid, represented for the first time in December, 1636, or January, 1637, was a great success, a veritable triumph, for Corneille. All Paris, the court and the people, noblemen and bourgeois, were carried away by it. Very strange, indeed, would it have been, had such a tremendous success not aroused the jealousy and envy of his rivals. Their wrath was unchained. The very men who, not so very long before, had sounded his praises, and greeted him, at his debut, as a great poet, now turned against him in a body, and the Cid was declared by savants and poets alike to be inferior by far to the author's preceding plays, the mere titles of which are scarcely remembered to-day. The taste of the public was of no account, it was claimed, and its verdict had to yield to that of men who knew Aristotle, and who could discourse about the rules laid down by him in his Poetics. The names of all the great poets of antiquity were hurled at the author's head. There broke out one of the liveliest pen-and-ink wars known in literary history, waged both in prose and in verse, and occupying some three years. Rotrou alone stood by Corneille in this strife against critics like Chapelain and the Abbe d'Aubignac, and against such poets as Mairet, Scudery, Claveret, and many others, who in this way mainly transmitted their names to posterity. Even Richelieu himself was mixed up in the affair. Relations between them had been rather strained since Corneille refused to remain one of his five authors; the introduction upon the French stage of the national .hero of Spain could not quite suit Richelieu's anti- Spanish politics; and the justification of the duel and of private vengeance, the spirited pride and insubordination manifested by the count, might well have been thought to militate agai... Top page

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Publisher & Imprint: General Books

Pages: 68

More info: height 229 mm width 152 mm weight 113 gr thickness 4 mm

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Age recommended: General/trade

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