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Philippe Quinault

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Philippe Quinault ( French: [kino] ; 3 June 1635 – 26 November 1688), French dramatist and librettist , was born in Paris.

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34-554: Quinault was educated by the liberality of François Tristan l'Hermite , the author of Marianne . Quinault's first play was produced at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1653, when he was only eighteen. The piece succeeded, and Quinault followed it up, but he also read for the bar; and in 1660, when he married a widow with money, he bought himself a place in the Cour des Comptes . Then he tried tragedies ( Agrippa , etc.) with more success. He received one of

68-475: A murder mystery play which is the longest-running West End show , it has by far the longest run of any play in the world, with its 29,500th performance having taken place as of February 2024. Contemporary playwrights in the United States are affected by recent declines in theatre attendance. No longer the only outlet for serious drama or entertaining comedies, theatrical productions must use ticket sales as

102-511: A burlesque novel, the Page disgracie . He was, in succession, poet to Gaston d'Orléans , to the duchesse de Chaulnes and the duke of Guise . His first tragedy , Marianne (1636), was also his best. It was followed by Penthée (1637), La Mort de Seneque (1644), La Mort de Crispe (1645) and the Parasite (1654). He was also the author of some admirable lyrics. Three of his best plays are printed in

136-431: A hand, and which was set to the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully . Here he showed a remarkable faculty for lyrical drama, and from this time until just before his death he confined himself to composing libretti for Lully's work. This was not only very profitable (for he is said to have received four thousand livres for each, which was much more than was usually paid even for tragedy), but it established Quinault's reputation as

170-635: A playwright, winning awards for his play The Phoenix at both the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999 and the Route 66 American Playwriting Competition in 2000. Today, theatre companies have new play development programs meant to develop new American voices in playwriting. Many regional theatres have hired dramaturges and literary managers in an effort to showcase various festivals for new work, or bring in playwrights for residencies. Funding through national organizations, such as

204-535: A poet, not a playwright, since plays during that time were written in meter and so were regarded as the province of poets. This view was held as late as the early 19th century. The term "playwright" later again lost this negative connotation. The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are the Ancient Greeks . These early plays were for annual Athenian competitions among play writers held around

238-408: A reaction to the decadence of Charles II era productions, sentimental comedy grew in popularity. Playwrights like Colley Cibber and Richard Steele believed that humans were inherently good but capable of being led astray. The Italian Renaissance brought about a stricter interpretation of Aristotle, as this long-lost work came to light in the late 15th century. The neoclassical ideal, which

272-525: A source of income, which has caused many of them to reduce the number of new works being produced. For example, Playwrights Horizons produced only six plays in the 2002–03 seasons, compared with thirty-one in 1973–74. Playwrights commonly encounter difficulties in getting their shows produced and often cannot earn a living through their plays alone, leading them to take up other jobs to supplement their incomes. Many playwrights are also film makers . For instance, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock began his career as

306-423: Is coincidental.) The first recorded use of the term "playwright" is from 1605, 73 years before the first written record of the term "dramatist". It appears to have been first used in a pejorative sense by Ben Jonson to suggest a mere tradesman fashioning works for the theatre. Jonson uses the word in his Epigram 49, which is thought to refer to John Marston or Thomas Dekker : Jonson described himself as

340-561: Is intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading . Ben Jonson coined the term "playwright" and is the first person in English literature to refer to playwrights as separate from poets . The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are the Ancient Greeks . William Shakespeare is amongst the most famous playwrights in literature, both in England and across

374-534: Is still useful to playwrights today is the " French scene ", which is a scene in a play where the beginning and end are marked by a change in the makeup of the group of characters onstage rather than by the lights going up or down or the set being changed. Notable playwrights: Greek theater was alive and flourishing on the island of Crete. During the Cretan Renaissance two notable Greek playwrights Georgios Chortatzis and Vitsentzos Kornaros were present in

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408-454: The City Dionysia's competition (the most prestigious of the festivals to stage drama), playwrights were required to present a tetralogy of plays (though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or theme), which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play. For the ancient Greeks, playwriting involved poïesis , "the act of making". This is the source of

442-600: The National Endowment for the Arts and the Theatre Communications Group , encouraged the partnerships of professional theatre companies and emerging playwrights. Playwrights will often have a cold reading of a script in an informal sitdown setting, which allows them to evaluate their own plays and the actors performing them. Cold reading means that the actors haven't rehearsed the work, or may be seeing it for

476-523: The Théâtre français of 1737. He took his pseudonym from Tristan l'Hermite , a shadowy figure of the late Middle Ages who was provost of the marshals of the King's household under Louis XI of France . He died of tuberculosis . Attribution: Dramatist A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays , which are a form of drama that primarily consists of dialogue between characters and

510-453: The interregnum , and Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, there was a move toward neoclassical dramaturgy. Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. This period saw the first professional woman playwright, Aphra Behn . As

544-461: The 13th century. The majority of these plays come from France and Germany and are similar in tone and form, emphasizing sex and bodily excretions. The best known playwright of farces is Hans Sachs (1494–1576) who wrote 198 dramatic works. In England, The Second Shepherds' Play of the Wakefield Cycle is the best known early farce. However, farce did not appear independently in England until

578-579: The 16th century with the work of John Heywood (1497–1580). Playwright William Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, as critics agree Shakespeare did, mostly early and late in his career. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. In England, after

612-473: The 5th century BC. Such notables as Aeschylus , Sophocles , Euripides , and Aristophanes established forms still relied on by their modern counterparts. We have complete texts extant by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides . The origins of Athenian tragedy remain obscure, though by the 5th century it was institutionalised in competitions ( agon ) held as part of festivities celebrating Dionysos (the god of wine and fertility ). As contestants in

646-424: The English word poet . Despite Chinese Theatre having performers dated back to the 6th century BC with You Meng , their perspective of theatre was such that plays had no other role than "performer" or "actor", but given that the performers were also the ones who invented their performances, they could be considered a form of playwright. Outside of the Western world there is Indian classical drama , with one of

680-451: The best—are much better. In assessing Quinault's comedy work, Patricia Howard noted the influence of Préciosité , especially in the female roles: "For if in French theatre in the second half of the century, women's roles are preeminent, it was the précieux movement which made them so." In 1671 he contributed to the singular miscellany of Psyché , in which Pierre Corneille and Molière also had

714-561: The famous, ancient Greek myth: Fran%C3%A7ois Tristan l%27Hermite François l'Hermite (c. 1601 – 7 September 1655) was a French dramatist who wrote under the name Tristan l'Hermite . He was born at the Château de Soliers in the Haute Marche . His adventures began early, for he killed his enemy in a duel at the age of thirteen, and was obliged to flee to England. The story of his childhood and youth he embroiders in

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748-607: The first exchanges in what would later become known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns . All these were classical in subject, and so was Proserpine (1680), which was superior to any of them. The Triumph of Love (1681) is a mere ballet, but in Persée (1682) and Phaëton (1683) Quinault returned to the classical opera. Then he finally deserted it for romantic subjects, in which he

782-486: The latter part of the 16th century. The plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Friedrich Schiller , and other Sturm und Drang playwrights inspired a growing faith in feeling and instinct as guides to moral behavior and were part of the German romanticism movement. Aleksandr Ostrovsky was Russia's first professional playwright). Author and playwright Agatha Christie wrote The Moustrap ,

816-657: The literary pensions then recently established, and was elected to the Académie française in 1670. Up to this time he had written some sixteen or seventeen comedies, tragedies, and tragi-comedies , which began at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1653, and of which the tragedies were mostly of very small value and the tragi-comedies of little more. But his comedies—especially his first piece Les Rivales (1653), L'Amant indiscret (1654), which has some likeness to Molière 's Étourdi, Le Fantôme amoureux (1659), and La Mère coquette (1665), perhaps

850-399: The ludicrous doggerel which has made the name libretto a byword, and they have quite enough dramatic merit to carry the reader, much more the spectator, along with them. It is not an exaggeration to say that Quinault, coming at the exact time when opera became fashionable out of Italy, had very much to do with establishing it as a permanent European genre. His first piece after Psyché (1671)

884-608: The master of a new style—so that even Boileau , who had previously satirized his dramatic work, praised, not the opera, which he did not like, but Quinault's remarkably ingenious and artist-like work in it. His libretti are among the very few which are readable without the music, and which are yet carefully adapted to it. The very artificiality of the French lyric of the later 17th century, and its resemblance to alexandrines cut into lengths, were aids to Quinault in arranging lyrical dialogue. They certainly do not contain very exalted poetry or very perfect drama. But they are quite free from

918-433: The oldest known playwrights being Śudraka , whose attributed plays can be dated to the second century BC. The Nāṭya Shāstra , a text on the performing arts from between 500BC-500AD, categorizes playwrights as being among the members of a theatre company, although playwrights were generally the highest in social status, with some being kings. In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle wrote his Poetics , in which he analyzed

952-435: The principle of action or praxis as the basis for tragedy. He then considered elements of drama: plot ( μύθος mythos ), character ( ἔθος ethos ), thought ( dianoia ), diction ( lexis ), music ( melodia ), and spectacle ( opsis ). Since the myths on which Greek tragedy were based were widely known, plot had to do with the arrangement and selection of existing material. Character

986-481: The unities. Decorum fitted proper protocols for behavior and language on stage. In France, contained too many events and actions, thus, violating the 24-hour restriction of the unity of time. Neoclassicism never had as much traction in England, and Shakespeare 's plays are directly opposed to these models, while in Italy, improvised and bawdy commedia dell'arte and opera were more popular forms. One structural unit that

1020-426: The world. The word "play" is from Middle English pleye , from Old English plæġ, pleġa, plæġa ("play, exercise; sport, game; drama, applause"). The word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsperson or builder (as in a wheelwright or cartwright ). The words combine to indicate a person who has "wrought" words, themes, and other elements into a dramatic form—a play. (The homophone with "write"

1054-424: Was a kind of classical masque, Les Fêtes de l'Amour et de Bacchus (1672). Then came Cadmus et Hermione (1674), Alceste ou le Triomphe d'Alcide (1674), Thésée (1675), Atys (1676), one of his best pieces, and Isis (1677). Alceste was received very negatively by some critics, and this inspired a debate of published opinions by the writers Jean Racine and Charles Perrault which constitutes one of

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1088-703: Was determined by choice and by action. Tragedy is mimesis —"the imitation of an action that is serious". He developed his notion of hamartia , or tragic flaw, an error in judgment by the main character or protagonist , which provides the basis for the "conflict-driven" play. There were also a number of secular performances staged in the Middle Ages, the earliest of which is The Play of the Greenwood by Adam de la Halle in 1276. It contains satirical scenes and folk material such as faeries and other supernatural occurrences. Farces also rose dramatically in popularity after

1122-561: Was even more successful. Amadis de Gaule (1684) and Roland (1685) are arguably his masterpieces, although Armide (1686) is probably the best known opera. Lully died in 1687, and Quinault, his occupation gone, became devout, and began a poem called the "Destruction of Heresy". He died on 26 November 1688, in Paris. Among his less known works is the lyrical, theatrical drama "Bellerephon", in 2 parts: ( one probably first published on 1671 and one probably first published on 1679 ), based on

1156-495: Was to reach its apogee in France during the 17th century, dwelled upon the unities , of action, place, and time. This meant that the playwright had to construct the play so that its "virtual" time would not exceed 24 hours, that it would be restricted to a single setting, and that there would be no subplots. Other terms, such as verisimilitude and decorum, circumscribed the subject matter significantly. For example, verisimilitude limits of

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