FRENCH CLASSICAL TRAGEDIES ON A MYTHOLOGICAL PLOT: "THE DYING HERCULES" (1634) BY J. DE ROTROU

Abstract

The article examines the earliest play of the Rotrou tragic genre "The Dying Hercules", which is associated with the return of tragedy to the Parisian stage after her displacement by tragicomedy. It is proved that Rotrou to a certain extent manages to overcome (including through the inclusion of tragicomedy and comedy techniques) the exhausted motives associated with dependence on the traditions of the humanistic tragedy of the XVI century: the omnipotence of rock, family and ancestral affiliation, passion as blindness, infidelities, violence, etc. Rotrou opposes these engines of intrigue and utterance, which served at the same time in the Ardi theater, with a new tragic conflict, which consists in a person's dependence on the bodily principle, dooming him to physical torment and death: the physical pain experienced by Hercules is the cause of his desperation and rebellion, the way out of which is the awareness of the need to overcome physical pain as "weakness" by effort spirit (it is the victory over faithlessness and the fear of doom, which becomes the most significant heroic act, that will be fixed by Rotrou in his next tragedies - "Antigone" and "Iphigenie"). Along with this, the discursive-rhetorical structure of the tragedy here continues to line up relative to the dominant meanings given by the mythological model. There is a clear contradiction in the development of intrigue and in the image of the main character: the discovery of the tragic as essentially contradictory, conflictual and the persistent consolidation of the mythological as harmonizing, ordering, eliminating any conflict. The analysis of "The Dying Hercules" allows us to see the perspective of the development of the French tragedy on a mythological plot, to identify unproductive, outdated and at the same time new, promising approaches to the dramatic development of a mythological source.