ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which Corneille's engagements with Aristotle and with a very Longinian sublime can be seen as synchronic and as mutually defining. Corneille's mention of 'commiseration' might lead to go around the loop of seventeenth-century catharsis: an edifice of extreme and contradiction-ridden density, and one which has at its disposal numerous verbs of intellectual operation. Corneille's dramatic theory defines itself by the analytic work it performs on Aristotle. Aristotle instructs a young orator how knowingly to produce emotive effects in his audience by making them believe certain things. The causal mechanisms of necessity and probability are essential to Aristotelian tragedy. In recognition scene, conscious, covert or hidden come together, clash, in a re-cognition of the hidden. The dynamic blurs the need for the conscious and the hidden to combine in a single, ravishingly powerful recognition scene. Recognition scenes can be spun out in Corneille into a series of actions and encounters.
