Perhaps no other of Corneille's major tragedies was greeted with such unanimous praise as Cinna. In his famous letter to Corneille, Guez de Balzac expressed what was surely the general admiration of his contemporaries: ‘Votre Cinna guérit les malades, il fait que les paralytiques battent des mains, il rend la parole à un muet … La belle chose.’ Corneille, in his ‘Examen’ of the play, accepts this praise and admits that Cinna is the most universally admired of his works: ‘Ce poème a tant d'illustres suffrages qui lui donnent le premier rang parmi les miens’ (p. 152). He offers, as a possible reason for the play's popularity, a technical explanation. Cinna is successful principally because the laws of verisimilitude are made to function so well that form and content are intimately fused, creating a gleaming, shining mirage of theatrical splendor:

The play's perfection mirrors, as it manifests, Classicism's precepts. Paradoxically, it is because of its shining surface that Cinna has, of all Corneille's plays, been used as a mirror reflecting its own contradictory readings.