Thomas Corneille

Thomas Corneille studied at Lycée Pierre-Corneille. The recorded working language is French. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are comedy. Positions recorded include seat 14 of the Académie française. Work by Thomas Corneille is recorded in the collections of Geldersch Landschap en Kasteelen.

Born in Rouen some nineteen years after his brother Pierre, the "great Corneille", Thomas's skill as a poet seems to have shown itself early. At the age of fifteen he composed a play in Latin which was performed by his fellow-pupils at the Jesuit school in Rouen, the Collège de Bourbon (now the Lycée Pierre Corneille). His first play in the French language, Les Engagements du hasard, was probably first performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1647, although not published until 1656. Le Feint Astrologue, imitated from the Spanish of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and itself imitated in Dryden's An Evening's Love, came the following year. His play Le Galant doublé (1660) was later the basis for Susanna Centlivre's 1706 play into Love at a Venture. After his brother's death, Thomas succeeded his vacant chair in the Académie française. He then turned his attention to philology, producing a new edition of the Remarques of CF Vaugelas in 1687. His Le Dictionnaire des Arts et des Sciences first appeared in 1694 as a supplement to the first edition of Le dictionnaire de l'Academie françoise—also published that year—and as a competitor to Furetière's Dictionaire universel of 1690. Corneille's Dictionnaire is regarded by Kafker as one of the nine Notable encyclopaedias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that preceded Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie. A complete translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (he had published six books with the Heroic Epistles some years previously) followed in 1697. In 1704 he lost his sight and was constituted a "veteran," a dignity which gave him the privileges of an academician, while exempting him from the duties. He did not allow his blindness to put a stop to his work, however, and in 1708 produced a large Dictionnaire universel géographique et historique in three volumes folio. This was his last major work. He died at Les Andelys at the age of eighty-four.

• Les Engagements du hasard (1647) • Le Feint astrologue (1648) • Don Bertrand de Cigarral (1650) • L'Amour à la mode (1651) • Le Charme de la voix (1653) • Les Illustres ennemis (1654) • Le Geolier de soi-même (1655) • Timocrate (1656) • Bérénice (1657) • La Mort de l'empereur Commode (1658) • Stilicon (1660) • Le Galant doublé (1660) • Camma (1661) • Maximian (1662) • Persée et Démétrius (1663) • Antiochus (1666) • Laodice (1668) • Le Baron d'Albikrac (1668) • La Mort d'Annibal (1669) • La Comtesse d'Orgueil (1670) • Ariane (1672) • La Mort d’Achille (1673). • Don César D'Avalos (1674) • Circé (1675) • L'Inconnu (1675) • Le Festin de pierre (1677) • Le Triomphe des dames (1676) • Le Comte d'Essex (1678) • La Devineresse (1679) • Bradamante (1695)

• Médée for Charpentier (1693, adapted from Pierre Corneille's play of the same name and Euripides)