Fool me once with a character death, shame on you Pierre du Ryer. Fool me twice with a character death, shame on me. You cannot, I repeat, cannot, kill the same character three times in the same play and then have them come back three times. This play would put modern soap opera writers to shame for the frequency with which it tries to fool or shock its audience. I always thought that the rule of vraisemblance, or verisimilitude in neoclassical plays was a little silly. The subjects of most plays are outside of the realm of normal life, that’s what makes them dramatic. But now I understand that the rule was intended to prevent plays like this one from ever being conceived. I don’t want to say that the play was bad or not well written, it's simply the fact that there is enough material here for three separate plays. Many critics of the neoclassical plays says that the plot is too tight, that there is not enough going on to capture the audience’s attention, in contrast to Shakespearean drama that has subplots in its subplots, but it is this concise plot that makes those plays so gripping. Plays like Clitophon, where one can barely tell where the characters are, much less what is happening, is not immersive in the way Phèdre is because it is too concerned with being unpredictable and not enough about whether or not the audience actually cares what happens to its heroine the second or third time that she miraculously comes back to life.
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Jennifer KellettM.A. French Literature Florida State University Archives
June 2021
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