The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky

regardless of the genuine quality of the play: “the People who judge with their eyes, allow themselves to be deceived by that sense which is, of all the senses, the easiest to fool.” Only a closer and more expert examination, in light of the “principles and rules of dramatic poetry,” will indicate what a play is really worth. And in the case of Le Cid such analysis unearths serious flaws, which Scudéry enumerates in detail: “That the subject is worth nothing at all; … that it lacks judgment in its construction; that it has a lot of bad verses.”⁴⁵ With the public’s reception delegitimized as a gauge of the play’s quality, Corneille’s high opinion of his own work based on this acclamation no longer has a reasonable basis, but is now revealed to be an effect of self-delusional and ungainly arrogance. Responding to the following lines from Corneille’s “Excuse”:

      Et [je] pense toute fois n’avoir point de rival

      A qui je fasse tort en le traittant d’égal,

      [And I believe that I have no rival

      To whom I do wrong by treating him as an equal,]

      Scudéry censures the playwright for such misguided pride with a trenchant appraisal of his writing, which illustrates the inseparability of the doctrinal critique from the ethical attack:

      Now as to the versification, I admit that it is the best we have seen from this Author. Yet, it is not perfect enough such that he can say himself that he is leaving the earth; that his flight hides him away in the heavens; that he laughs at the despair of those who envy him; and that he has no rival who is not highly honored when he consents to treat him as an equal.⁴⁶

      It is in the context of this fierce polemic on Corneille’s arrogance that the classic image of the playwright as excessively invested in the commercialization of his works takes shape, not for the first time, of course, but in an urgent and reinvigorated elaboration. The image is invoked as further proof of Corneille’s ethical failing. For not only did he deign to sing his own praises, Scudéry writes, “he even had the high opinions he has of himself printed.”⁴⁷ In fact, more than as additional evidence, the passage to print is rendered in anti-Corneille tirades as the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It is a gesture that finally pushes Corneille over the line, whereas until that point he had merely skirted the limit. Le Cid pushed the envelope, yet despite its errors it could be excused. What had to be called out was the unseemly choice to print it. “This, my friend, is why you are generally blamed, not for having written Le Cid with all the irregularities that can be detected throughout,” explains Mairet, “but only for your indiscretion in delivering it so quickly to a bookseller.”⁴⁸ Another pamphleteer similarly contrasts the fatal decisiveness of publication with other less serious missteps: “You have made just two mistakes that cannot be repaired,” affirms the unnamed author, “one, having your play, which was so well-liked on stage, printed; and the other, having responded to he who criticized you.”⁴⁹

      In particular, the anti-Corneille polemic constitutes the gesture of commercial publication in two key and interrelated ways. First, print is represented as a privileged medium for Corneille’s moral failings, one that concentrates and channels his greed and self-regard, transforming them from normal everyday moral lapses into something abnormal, excessive and odious. One broadside, possibly by Scarron, denounces the “excess of avarice which made you have Le Cid printed.”⁵⁰ Another lambastes the “freshly ennobled” playwright for projecting his renown “not by acts of valor, but by newspaper hawkers [crieurs de gazettes],” who do not just circulate Corneille’s arrogance in print: “for the past month [they] have pounded the ears of everyone.”⁵¹ Second, as a conduit of his out-of-control amour propre, print becomes a powerful symbol for Corneille’s inattentiveness to the feelings and well-being of others, and thus of the playwright’s lack of sociability. Mairet criticized Corneille’s rush to print Le Cid because in so doing the playwright repudiated his friends and their sage advice to correct his play before publishing it.⁵² Further on, he represents the move as a selfish rebuke of the actors—“those who obliged you by making your Alchemy worth something”—since it denied them the chance to recoup the profits that were their due given that the circulation of the play in print opened up the possibility for other troupes to stage their own performances and compete for an audience.⁵³

      Consequently, Corneille’s publication activities will be closely associated with a representation of his social isolation, conveyed through images of the playwright’s gracelessness and outlandishness. Print thus becomes a mechanism for the transformation of the writer as a veritable monster. Jean Claveret’s “modest” concession to Corneille—“I was prepared to grant that you are a greater Poet than I am, without it being necessary for you to use the voices of all the hawkers [Colporteurs] of the Pont-Neuf to announce it all over France”⁵⁴—renders the latter grotesque by the hyperbolic valence of the adjective “all,” repeated twice, and the reference to “France.” He goes on to propose a deal, agreeing to believe in Corneille’s singular talent as a dramatic poet, so long as the author of Le Cid accepts for his part, as the price of his genius, the radical deterioration of his social persona and stature; indeed, so long as he accepts his fundamental unsuitability for le monde, marked in a single gesture by his precipitous departure once he has sold his works:

      But recognize in return that you are, in prose, the most impertinent of those who know how to speak, that the coldness and stupidity of your wit are such that your company makes one pity those who must suffer your visits, and that … you pass in high society [le beau monde] as the most ridiculous of all men. These are truths that will always be confirmed among the most honorable people [les plus honnestes gens] of Paris, of both sexes, where stories of your gracelessness are told that make melancholy itself laugh. You have good reason to flee as soon as you have sold your Poetic goods [denrées Poëtiques].⁵⁵

      Later admirers of Corneille would spin this by then legendary awkwardness positively as a sign of the playwright’s dedication to the integrity of his work, marked by his lack of interest in the frivolities of high society⁵⁶; and in light of this reinterpretation of his social ineptness, Corneille’s equally mythologized efforts to sell his “Poetic goods” would themselves be revalorized as significant expressions of this seriousness and authorial independence. But such reasoning says far more about later ideals than about anything that might have been going through Corneille’s head as he transacted with libraires or requested letters patent from the administration, or through the minds of his detractors as they pointed derisively to these negotiations. The discourse of the anti-Corneille forces presented a strong connection between a vision of the playwright’s autonomy and his publishing activities. Yet it was a distinctly symbolic association forged by the use of images of Corneille’s commercial literary activities as powerful figurations of his isolation by those who sought, indeed, to isolate him. The rhetoric does not allow us to conclude that Corneille desired this autonomy, and turned to commercial publishing in order to establish the conditions in which he might claim it. In fact, in its polemical aspect, the invective suggests a relation of influence that goes in the exact reverse direction; publishing activities do not lead to autonomy. It is instead the positing of autonomy—or the perception and imputation of a certain type of autonomy manifested in Corneille’s rude and antisocial demeanor—that leads to the production of images in which publishing activities and venal motives are highlighted.

      Thus, if Corneille was assailed for not having sufficiently respected his social ties and obligations, it was not because he sought to go it alone in the “market.” The equation goes the other way; a depiction of the playwright seeking to earn his living commercially became current because of his failure to be integrated into le monde. The social isolation was prior to commerce, and had its roots elsewhere, in a natural aversion for court life and in his attachment to older forms of elite selfhood, which he would articulate against the model of the courtier.⁵⁷ To be sure, the self-sufficiency Corneille celebrates in the “Excuse à Ariste” is set against an image of the court poet who goes obsequiously from “Réduit en Réduit” looking for voices of support:

      We speak of ourselves with complete frankness [franchise],

      False humility does not