Career
Thomas Corneille tried his hand at all the theatrical genres--comedy, tragedy, romantic tragedy, and the spectacular musical play--and in his later years wrote libretti for Jean Baptiste Lully. He also imitated not merely his brother, but Racine, Molière,Moliere, and his minor contemporaries. He had none of the gift for characterization, the psychological insight, or the poetic genius of the masters, but in spite of unduly complicated plots he was a competent craftsman with a considerable sense of the theater and an unfailing flow of rhetoric. Timocrate (1656) was his first resounding success and one of the greatest theatrical successes of the century, but Ariane (1672) and Le Comte d'Essex (1678) are both better plays. In his old age he devoted himself to works of scholarship, among which was a supplement on arts and sciences to the dictionary of the French Academy (1694), and the Dictionnaire universel, géographiquegeographique et historique (3 vols., 1708).