Le Cid

Le Cid is a five-act French tragicomedy in verse by the playwright Pierre Corneille, first performed in December 1636 at the Theatre du Marais in Paris and published the same year. Drawing on the Spanish playwright Guillen de Castro's earlier play Las Mocedades del Cid, which was itself based on the medieval legend of the Castilian warrior El Cid, Corneille's play follows the young nobleman Rodrigue, forced to choose between his love for Chimene and his duty to avenge his father's honor by killing her father, a conflict that continues to threaten the couple even after Rodrigue's subsequent military triumphs against the Moors. The play was an immediate popular sensation and provoked a prolonged critical controversy, the so-called Quarrel of Le Cid, over its departures from the classical dramatic unities that French critical orthodoxy of the period expected a tragedy to observe. It is now considered Corneille's finest work and one of the greatest plays of seventeenth-century French theatre.