Actors, Actress and Playwrights

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Actors, Actress and Playwrights
The French Renaissance took place between the 15th and 17th century and was marked by a cultural and artistic explosion in France. Even though many changes were observed during this time as the renaissance theatre evolved, the plays still maintained most of the dramatics and genres of the medieval times. There was still focus on mystery plays, exaggerated comedies (farces), soties, tragedy plays, and morality plays and for all these, there was a guild system that was used to control the performances. For instance, the mystery plays were controlled by the “les Confreres de la Passion” guild. Two guilds were in charge of the farces and sorties, the “Clercs de la Basoche” and Enfants Sans-Souci.” A review board was responsible for scrutinizing and authorizing the various plays before they were allowed to be performed in the theatre. There were playwrights, actors and actresses that contributed quite a lot to the development of the renaissance theatre. This paper will therefore focus on the contributions of the playwright Pierre Corneille, the actor Michel Baron and actresses Madeleine and Armande Bejart.
Pierre Corneille contributed much to the French renaissance through his writing. His works mainly focused on tragedy and comedy in a way that made him to be considered amongst the playwrights that redefined the French Renaissance period. In the early years of the period, tragedy had become an uncommon topic in the theatre since all plays under this genre followed the same boring format. However, the 1630s and 40s brought a great change in this field through the works of Pierre Corneille. His most successful tragedies “Le Cid” and “Horace” helped in redefining the genre and reintroducing it into the French theatre. Unlike the former playwrights before him, Corneille’s tragedies focused on happy endings, in a way that resulted into some of his plays being referred to as tragicomedy. He also featured noble characters in his comedies and tragedies unlike the farce, which usually involved the use of low-characters. The uniqueness and great impact of Corneille’s works stemmed from the fact that he did not restrict himself to the Aristotian rules followed strictly by most other playwrights of the time. This inability to conform to the set rules also made Corneille’s theatrical methods to be largely criticized since they were somewhat irregular. The irregularity placed him in a disadvantageous position especially with the emergence of new successful playwrights such as Jean Racine even though he continued to w...