Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée

Who was Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée?

Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée was a French dramatist who blurred the lines between comedy and tragedy with his comédie larmoyante.

In 1731 he published an Epître a Clio, a didactic poem in defense of Leriget de la Faye in his dispute with Antoine Houdar de la Motte, who had maintained that verse was useless in tragedy. La Chaussée was forty years old before he produced his first play, La Fausse Antipathic. His second play, Le Prejugée à la mode turns on the fear of incurring ridicule felt by a man in love with his own wife, a prejudice dispelled in France, according to La Harpe, by La Chaussée's comedy. L'Ecole des amis followed, and, after an unsuccessful attempt at tragedy in Maximinien, he returned to comedy in Mélanide.

Mélanide fully develops the type known as comédie larmoyante. Comedy was no longer to provoke laughter, but tears. The innovation consisted in destroying the sharp distinction then existing between tragedy and comedy in French literature. Indications of this change had been already offered in the work of Marivaux, and La Chaussée's plays led naturally to the domestic drama of Diderot and of Sedaine. The new method found bitter enemies. Alexis Piron nicknames the author "le Reverend Père Chaussee," and ridiculed him in one of his most famous epigrams.