Pierre Corneille

CORNEILLE, Pierre. b. 6 June 1606; d. 1 Oct 1684. Born at Rouen into an affluent bourgeois family, Corneille was educated at the Jesuit college and studied law at the university of his native town His skill in Latin verse composition was not matched by success in advocacy, so his father bought him a position in the local magistracy. Though Corneille took his legal duties seriously, he soon went to Paris where theatres were springing up after the Wars of Religion. After comedies and Le Cid, a drama based on the Spanish epic, Corneille adopted strict classical techniques for Roman subjects in Horace and Cinna, as for his ‘Christian tragedy’, Polyeucte. In 1647, after earlier rejections, he...