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The Paris Context

This chapter considers Descartes’s connections with Guez de Balzac and his circle, and looks more closely at the language of contemporary poetic practice and theory. In his 1623 preface to Marino’s Adone, Jean Chapelain develops a critical vocabulary of novelty, generic hybridity, and verisimilitude. Meanwhile, Alexandre Hardy accuses modern dramatists of neglecting dispositio, or the coherent ordering of dramatic subject matter. The state of tragicomedy in France is exemplified in the 1628 tragicomic reworking of Schélandre’s 1608 tragedy Tyr et Sidon, prefaced by Balzac’s apologist François Ogier. At the crux of these debates, we find the question of how to balance the need for variety to dispel boredom with the need for structure to dispel distraction.