Here are blank verse translations of ten of the best tragedies by French dramatists contemporary with Corneille and Racine, and two by the most noted successors. No great dramatist can be properly understood and appreciated without some knowledge of the lesser playwrights surrounding him. The fact has long been realized as regards to Shakespeare; but the lesser figures of the great age of French drama--men comparable to such Elizabethans as Middleton and Fletcher and Massinger--have been generally neglected. This book makes a selection of their best works available to English readers. French students who do not have access to the frequently rare French texts of these plays will find it valuable.

No play by any of these dramatists, except Voltaire, has ever before been translated into English. The faithfulness and literary qualities of Dr. Lockert's translations are avouched by his two previous volumes in this field, The Chief Plays of Corneille and The Best Plays of Racine.

Some plays of Corneille that were formerly considered masterpieces are no longer admired; others that were little liked are now much acclaimed by critics. Amid such changes—and such divergences—of evaluation, the student of drama who is lacking in knowledge of French, but who has a critical sense perhaps equal or even superior to that of many people who are better linguists, may wish that he could judge for himself. This he can do with reasonable assurance by means of translations, just as is commonly done with the dramas of Ibsen. Except as regards poetry, a play can be appraised in a good translation almost as well as in its own language.

In an earlier book, The Chief Plays of Corneille, Dr. Lockert translated the six most famous (but not necessarily the best) tragedies of that dramatist. The present volume makes available to English readers all his other plays, comedies aside, for which high claims have been or could be made. Some recent critics have pronounced some of them superior to everything else of Corneille but the Cid and Polyeucte.

A brief introduction is prefixed to each play, giving examples of the diverse opinions held by representative critics in the last eighty-five years.
 

A follow-up to Lacy Lockert’s classic The Chief Rivals of Corneille and Racine (Vanderbilt University Press 1956), More Plays by Rivals of Corneille and Racine consists of more French tragedies of the period—eleven plays from the great age of French drama in the seventeenth century, one play from the prolific pen of Alexandre Hardy, who preceded the great age, and one from the eighteenth century, the aftermath of that age. The volume contains plays Lockert typified as “excellent,” such as Tiridate and Mariamne, Géta, and Ariane, “smash hits” of the time like Timocrate and Astrate, and several other plays Lockert called “minor,” but that he felt would be of interest to scholars.