Chance as Cornerstone of Poetics

It seems unlikely that Le Cid, which has been described as ‘our first true classic tragedy’ in a tradition emphatically marked by ‘a confidence in human power and authority’ and written by an author known for ‘confining the action of the play to a conflict between passion and duty’, would give chance a significant role. Yet when Corneille reflected on several decades of writing for the theatre in the sparkling commentary known as the Three Discourses on the Dramatic Poem he did not choose to start with passion, duty, power or authority, but rather with an assertion of the importance of chance. In the first paragraph, which begins with the aggressively polemical assertion that pleasure alone is the goal of tragedy, Corneille also makes this ringing declaration about the primacy of chance:

Corneille's purpose in paraphrasing Aristotle here is clearly to launch a sustained assault on the orthodoxy of his day that tragic stories should be essentially plausible. He seeks a foundation in the Poetics by locating one of the three passages in which Aristotle writes of chance.