Encyclopedia

1622–1673

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, French actor-playwright and master of comedy. Works include Tartuffe, The Misanthrope and The Imaginary Invalid. Enjoyed Louis XIV's patronage while satirizing courtly and religious hypocrisy.

1639–1699

Leading tragedian of French neoclassicism. Phèdre (1677) exemplifies the unities of time, place and action, and the restraint prized by the Académie.

1606–1684

Author of Le Cid (1637), whose success sparked the 'Querelle du Cid' — a debate over neoclassical rules adjudicated by Cardinal Richelieu's Académie française.

1562–1635

Prolific Spanish dramatist credited with hundreds of plays. His Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609) defended mixing tragic and comic to please the public. Fuenteovejuna depicts a village rising against a tyrant.

1600–1681

Court dramatist of Philip IV. La vida es sueño (c. 1635) and the allegorical El gran teatro del mundo give the era its defining metaphor.

1608–1678

Italian scenographer nicknamed 'the great sorcerer', famed for the chariot-and-pole system that changed scenery in seconds. Worked in Venice and Paris.

1638–1715

King of France who danced in court ballets and used festivals, theatre and Versailles itself as instruments of absolutist image-making.

1664 / 1669

Molière's comedy of a religious impostor. Banned under pressure from devout factions, it was permitted in revised form in 1669.

c. 1635

Calderón's philosophical drama of Prince Segismundo, imprisoned by his father on the strength of a prophecy; a meditation on free will, fate and kingship.

16th–17th c.

Open-air courtyard theatres in Spain, such as the Corral del Príncipe in Madrid, where audiences were segregated by class and gender but shared the same plays.

1585

Palladio's theatre in Vicenza, with Scamozzi's permanent forced-perspective streets — a bridge between Renaissance and Baroque scenography.

1664–1680s

Multi-day spectacles such as Les Plaisirs de l'Île enchantée (1664), combining theatre, ballet, fireworks and banquets to display royal magnificence.

17th c.

Rules derived (loosely) from Aristotle: one action, one place, one day. Paired with vraisemblance (verisimilitude) and bienséance (decorum).

Antiquity–Baroque

The idea that the world is a stage and humans are actors whose roles are assigned by God — or by the king.

Ancient–Baroque

A god lowered by machine to resolve the plot. In Baroque opera and court theatre it often flattered the monarch as the bringer of order.