SOURCE: Hubert, Judd D. “A Theatrical Reading of Cinna.” In Convergences: Rhetoric and Poetic in Seventeenth-Century France, Essays for High M. Davidson, edited by David Lee Rubin and Mary B. McKinley, pp. 101-09. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Hubert provides a metadramatic interpretation of Cinna.

In interpreting Cinna, not only do I favor a metadramatic approach, but I go so far as to postulate that a given character's so-called tragic flaw coincides with performative failure, or sometimes self-defeating success, as dramatist, director, actor, spectator.

Auguste, in substituting Cinna and Maxime for Maecenas and Agrippa, has hardly shown skill in casting. He has picked as advisers the leaders of a conspiracy against his life; he has substituted for his wayward daughter a firebrand eager to destroy him. Grown weary of the imperial role he himself had imposed, he wishes to abdicate and thus cease altogether...