Thomas Corneille

Thomas Corneille was a French jurist, lexicographer and dramatist of the seventeenth century, the younger brother of Pierre Corneille. He wrote in French, and for a long time his reputation was overshadowed by that of his famous brother, which is one reason his own work is worth reading on its own terms.

Born in Rouen in 1625, he received a solid humanist education at the Jesuit school in his native city. Like his brother, he studied law and in 1649 began practising as a lawyer, a profession his father and grandfather had also followed. Pierre, almost twenty years older, had been his guardian since their father's death in 1639, and when the elder brother's success carried him into the theatre, Thomas moved with him to Paris.

His early comedies, many drawn from Spanish sources, brought him a reputation of his own. In 1656 he staged the tragedy Timocrates, which ran for months; according to a long-standing tradition it reached eighty performances, a figure often attributed to it. In all he wrote some forty plays, alone or in collaboration, working in nearly every genre of his day, including the machine play and opera, for which he produced three librettos. In 1658 he entered the Académie française, taking the seat his brother had left vacant.

In later life he turned mainly to philology and lexicography, publishing a new edition of Vaugelas's Remarks, a dictionary of arts and sciences, and a complete translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In 1704 he lost his active place in the Academy and was made a veteran, which kept his honours but released him from duties. Blind by then, he still completed a large geographical and historical dictionary in 1708, his last major work.

His legacy is uneven. Voltaire remarked that he would have enjoyed a great reputation had he not had such a famous brother, yet his librettos and his dictionaries still interest historians of seventeenth-century theatre and learning.