Robert Garnier
Robert Garnier's portrait.
Robert Garnier's portrait.
Bornc. 1545
La Ferté-Bernard, Sarthe, Kingdom of France
Diedc. 20 September 1590 (aged 45)
Le Mans, Kingdom of France[1]
Resting placeChapelle du cimetière du Luart
Occupation
  • Playwright
  • poet
LanguageEarly Modern Fench
Alma materUniversité de Toulouse
PeriodBefore 1568 – 1590
Literary movementFrench Renaissance

Robert Garnier, born in La Ferté-Bernard, Sarthe around 1545[2] and died in Le Mans on September 20, 1590, was a French poet and playwright. His plays are considered the pinnacle of french tragedy during the Renaissance. Strongly marked with echoes of the Wars of Religion, these works exerted a great influence in their time, particularly in the English Renaissance theatre.[3] · .[4]

Biography

He published his first work while still a law-student at Toulouse, where he won a prize (1565) in the Académie des Jeux Floraux. It was a collection of lyrical pieces, now lost, entitled Plaintes amoureuses de Robert Garnier (1565). After some legal practice at the Parisian bar, he became conseiller du roi au siège présidial and sénéchaussée of Le Maine, his native district, and later lieutenant-général criminel. His friend Lacroix du Maine says that he enjoyed a great reputation as an orator. He was a distinguished magistrate, of considerable weight in his native province, who gave his leisure to literature, and whose merits as a poet were fully recognized by his own generation.[5]

In his early plays he was a close follower of the school of dramatists who were inspired by the study of Seneca. In these productions there is little that is strictly dramatic except the form. A tragedy was a series of rhetorical speeches relieved by a lyric chorus. His pieces in this manner are Porcie (published 1568, acted at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1573), Cornélie and Hippolyte (both acted in 1573 and printed in 1574). In Porcie the deaths of Cassius, Brutus and Porcia are each the subject of an eloquent recital, but the action is confined to the death of the nurse, who alone is allowed to die on the stage. His next group of tragedies Marc-Antoine (1578), La Troade (1579), Antigone ou la Piété (acted and printed 1580) shows an advance on the theatre of Étienne Jodelle and Jacques Grévin, and on his own early plays, in so much that the rhetorical element is accompanied by abundance of action, though this is accomplished by the plan of joining together two virtually independent pieces in the same way.[5] In 1592 The Countess of Pembroke wrote The Tragedy of Antonie, an English version of Garnier's play.

In 1582 and 1583 he produced his two masterpieces Bradamante and Les Juives. In Bradamante, which alone of his plays has no chorus, he cut himself adrift from Senecan models, and sought his subject in Ariosto, the result being what came to be known later as a tragicomedy. The dramatic and romantic story becomes a real drama in Garnier's hands, though even there the lovers, Bradamante and Roger, never meet on the stage. The contest in the mind of Roger supplies a genuine dramatic interest in the manner of Corneille.[5]

Les Juives is the moving story of the barbarous vengeance of Nebuchadnezzar on the Jewish king Zedekiah and his children. The Jewish women lamenting the fate of their children take a principal part in this tragedy, which, although almost entirely elegiac in conception, is singularly well designed, and gains unity by the personality of the prophet. (The critic M. Faguet says that of all French tragedies of the 16th and 17th centuries it is, with Athalie, the best constructed with regard to the requirements of the stage. Actual representation is continually in the mind of the author; his drama is, in fact, visually conceived.)[5]

Gamier must be regarded as the greatest French tragic poet of the Renaissance and the precursor of the baroque theater of the 17th century.[5] He exercised a major influence on the development of Elizabethan tragedy. Thomas Kyd is the likely author of an English translation of Cornélie published in England in the early 1590s.

Plays

  • Porcie, tragedy , Paris, Robert Estienne, 1568 (éd. J.-C. Ternaux, Paris, Champion, 1999)
  • Hippolyte, tragedy , Paris, Robert Estienne, 1573 (éd. R. Lebègue, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1949 et J.-D. Beaudin, Paris, Garnier, 2009)
  • Cornélie, tragedy , Paris, Robert Estienne, 1574 (éd. J.-C. Ternaux, Paris, Champion, 2002)
  • Marc-Antoine, tragedy , Paris, M. Patisson, 1578 (éd. J.-C. Ternaux, Paris, Garnier, 2010)
  • La Troade, tragedy , Paris, M. Patisson, 1579 (éd. J.-D. Beaudin, Paris, Champion, 1999)
  • Antigone ou la Piété, tragedy , Paris, M. Patisson, 1580 (éd. J.-D. Beaudin, Paris, Champion, 1997)
  • Bradamante, tragicomedy, Paris, M. Patisson, 1582
  • Les Juives, tragedy , Paris, M. Patisson, 1583 (éd. par S. Lardon, Paris, Champion, 1999; éd. Michel Jeanneret, Gallimard, Folio- Théâtre, 2007)

References

  1. ↑ https://www.britannica.com/art/theatrical-production
  2. ↑ L'année de naissance est sujette à caution. La BnF retient la forme "1545?". Tout comme l'éditeur Les Belles Lettres, et l'Encyclopédie de la littérature. La Pochothèque (in French). Paris: Le Livre de Poche. 2004. p. 1828. ISBN 2-253-05301-5.. On notera cependant que d'autres ouvrages, plus anciens, donnent 1534 comme année de naissance. Tels : Claude Augé dir. (1922). Larousse universel en 2 volumes, tome premier (in French). Paris: Maison Larousse., et : Les Écrivains célèbres, tome II. La galerie des hommes célèbres (in French). Paris: Éditions d'art Lucien Mazenod. 1951. p. 356.
  3. ↑ Daniel Cadman. ""Quick Comedians": Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel and the Theatrum Mundi in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra". Société française Shakespeare..
  4. ↑ Belle, Marie-Alice; Cottegnies, Line (2017). Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England : Mary Sidney Herbert’s ‘Antonius’ and Thomas Kyd’s ‘Cornelia’. Cambridge: MHRA. p. 336. ISBN 978-1-78188-632-8..
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Garnier, Robert". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 11 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 472.
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