Action and plot

Abstract

The last two chapters have attempted to show some of the conventional constraints which seventeenth-century France placed upon the outward shape of its tragedies and the material incorporated into them. Other restrictions which dramatists had to cope with or get round will be mentioned later—the choice of language, the call for verisimilitude (probability, more or less), observance of the proprieties. And while it is the aim of this book to point out not just the facts and their drawbacks but also the advantages to be gained, it may seem that the writer of French classical tragedy was faced with considerable obstacles in putting his play together. At least, you will say, he must have had free rein when it came to injecting activity and movement into his plot. Yet what strikes the modern English-speaking reader of Corneille, Racine and their contemporaries perhaps most is the apparent absence—or the whittling down to an absolute minimum—of physical movement in tragedy, the priority which seems to be given to words over deeds, and the suspicion grows that Cinna and Rodogune, Andromaque and Mithridate are more concerned with psychology than the portrayal of events, with characterisation rather than action.