Cornelian tragedy emerges during the 1630s and 1640s and radically alters the course of French and European theater. More important still, this new tragedy, standing apart from those inchoate forms of representation that we have come to identify with the term ‘baroque’, imposes Classicism's Law upon chaos, its concept of ideality on materiality, and elaborates a radically different model of human subjectivity.

The period that forms the contextual framework inside which Cornelian tragedy evolves has been diversely studied as a period of transition – of transitions in esthetics (from baroque to Classical), in the political and social structures governing French life, and, finally in the ideological parameters informing discursive reasoning itself. Among recent critics who have attempted to theorize this transition, M. Foucault's concept of ‘epistemic’ change, precisely because it embraces the internal contradictions of this epoch while proposing a general method for its comprehension, remains a forceful argument for grasping the interrelation of social, esthetic and discursive practices that constitute what we have come to identify as the Classical epiphany of Cornelian dramaturgy.

Corneille's dramatic breakthrough occurs during that era Foucault has called ‘la période du grand renfermement’, whose defining trait would be its compulsion to enclose and exclude. The world is separated into distinct and identifiable areas of social, psychological, linguistic and sexual differences. At first glance, the universe Corneille created in his great tragedies seems both to corroborate and to celebrate this brave new world of difference.