SOURCE: Barnwell, H. T. “‘They Have Their Exits and Their Entrances’: Stage and Speech in Corneille's Drama.” The Modern Language Review 81, no. 1 (January 1986): 51-63.

In the following essay, Barnwell considers “some of the ways in which Corneille orders and constructs the successive episodes of his plays and some of the connexions between that arrangement and speech.”

1984 saw the commemoration of the tercentenary of the death of Pierre Corneille.¹ Since a glance through the titles of papers presented at the international colloquium held at Rouen in October would hardly suggest to the uninitiated that we were remembering a great playwright, it is perhaps timely to take one small step on his behalf in the direction which René Bray took for Molière some thirty years ago.² While often acknowledging that Corneille was a talented dramatist, critics tend to denigrate his pursuit of the dramatic on the grounds that it...