ABSTRACT
The rapid re-discovery of antiquity and its riches went parallel with the fight against scholasticism; neo-Platonism was in full swing; Petrarch was exerting an undue influence over the French sonneteers. Three powerful magnets attracted the thinkers: traditional Catholicism, Calvinism and, more vaguely, neo-paganism, with its science, its scepticism a la Montaigne, its mythology. Renaissance in France is characterized by imitation and invention, by its lyrical achievement rather than by its theatre, which was only a sequence of tableaux with long tirades, and by the luxuriance of its often artificially inflated vocabulary. The classical period more than any other must be understood in terms of conventions, most of them relating either to economy of means or to decorum. Despite its rhetorical approach to language, its rationality and its conventions, the best classical theatre is in no way desiccated.
