French Comedy on Screen: A Cinematic History by Rémi Fournier Lanzoni

2016 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 201-201
Author(s):  
Benoît Leclercq
Keyword(s):  
French Comedy

Money and Merit in French Renaissance Comedy*

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 852-882
Author(s):  
Jotham Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Natural System ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
French Renaissance ◽  
French Comedy

AbstractPierre Corneille’s Mélite (1629) resonated in part due to a social critique with deep roots in the French Renaissance. Corneille’s characters live by the canons of a (notionally) natural system of merit, divorced from money, implicitly noble, but open to upwardly-mobile commoners. Reconciling the traditional social order with the purchase of status and power by venal office-holders had preoccupied French comedy since the 1550s. While early playwrights hesitated to comment on this phenomenon (in which they took part), by about 1580 Odet de Turnèbe had already dramatized an educated elite’s transcendence of the economic, which Corneille would then go on to perfect. The biographies of these playwrights show that their plays’ ideological functions suited their own social situations.

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