Isaac de Benserade

Isaac de Benserade , born the October 15th 1612 with Lyons-the-Forest in Normandy and dead the October 19th 1691 with Gentilly, was a writer and Dramaturge French.

Biography

Poet, courtier and beautiful spirit, Isaac de Benserade were protected from the cardinal of Richelieu, from the duke of Brézé, Mazarin and Louis XIV and were adulated by the society men middle of his time. Pensioner with the height of six hundred books per annum by Richelieu, one owes him a humorous epitaph with died of this last: “Cy-gist, yes, gist, by death-blue! The cardinal of Richelieu; And what causes my trouble, My avecque pension him”.

Isaac was, with its principal rival Vincent Voiture, one of the invaluable writers, also extremely sails about it at the time, one of the most typical incarnations of the Préciosité. It was pensioned by the queen and the abbot of Olivet says that “it was helped besides by some rich and liberal ladies”. the Heather will say that it was “the whooping-cough or the stubbornness of certain women who swore only by and on word”. He studied the Théologie with the Sorbonne but was interested very early in the Théâtre.

Isaac de Benserade drew part of its incomes from the load of main of National Forestry Commission of Lyons-the-Forest, of which he had inherited his father. This last was in the Protestant beginning, but had converted with Catholicism. In spite of the pressures repeated during its youth it never gave up its biblical first name, which marked the origins huguenotes its family.

It composed at the age of twenty-three years its first tragedy, Cléopâtre , for the actress Miss Bellerose, which will definitively make him give up its destination with the priesthood. It made represent in 1634, with the Hôtel of Burgundy, its first comedy Iphis and Iante which was one of very first in France to evoke the female homosexuality openly and this, in an extremely modern way.

However it is not the dramatic kind which made it reach success. It was rather that of the entertainments of court of which, in collaboration with his friend musician Michel Lambert, he was the director during twenty-five years. Between 1651 and 1681, it composed a score of Ballet S, whose it made a true literary kind. He collaborated with Lully and was, in this field, in competition with Molière. According to its card with the French Academy it had, to the height of its life, twelve thousand books of income and rolled in fits with body.

It was also a poet fertile and gifted, in the invaluable kind, and it is this production which attracted to him the favor of the living rooms. Teller of witty remarks, at the same time familiar and arrogant, it was famous for his impertinences and his epigrams, which were worth much success to him, but also some drubbings. Costar said of him “Its worms are not well turned, but they are so full with spirit and have an air so gallant that they carry it above all the others. ”

Attending the Hotel of Rambouillet, it started famous the Querelle of the jobelins and uranist the, at the origin of famous the Querelle of Old and Modern the, by sending in 1653 its paraphrase of Job to a lady by accompanying it by a sonnet which was put in parallel at that of Voiture At Uranie . The court was divided then into Uraniens , in favor of the sonnet of Car, carried out by Anne de Longueville in which one found also Racine, Boileau, Julie de Montausier and Guez de Balzac and Jobelins in favor of Benserade, led by his/her brother the prince de Conti, among which one found the Fountain and Madeleine de Scudéry.

In 1674, it was elected with the French Academy and took part in the development of the Dictionnaire.

He knew his first literary failures, whereas he had withdrawn himself from the Court, with the the Metamorphoses of Ovide, that Louis XIV had required of him to put in Rondeau X. He tried to make forget his failure by adapting in quatrains the Fable S of Ésope, but its time was from now on completed. It remained then in its property of Gentilly, which it did not leave any more.

In connection with its death, Antoine de Léris specifies in its historical portable Dictionnaire and arts person of the theaters (Paris, Jombert, 1763): “ Benserade died the October 19th 1691, old of seventy-eight years, having had the artery cut in a bleeding of precaution to prepare to be made cut ”. Voltaire, in his Catalog of the majority of the French writers who appeared in the century of Louis XIV, to be used for the literary history of this time , also specifies: “Its small house of Gentilly, where it was withdrawn on the end of its life, was filled with inscriptions in worms, which were worth its other works well; it is damage which one did not collect them”.

Works

Cléopâtre (1636)
the Death of Achilles and the Argument of his weapons (1637)
Gustaphe or the Happy Ambition (1637)
Iphis and Iante (1637), edition established and presented by Anne Verdier (Vijon, Lampsaque, 2000
Méléagre (1640)
Ballet of Cassandre (1647)
the Sonnet of Job (1648)
Ballet of the Festivals of Bacchus (1651)
Ballet of the Night (1653)
Ballet of the Proverbs (1654)
Ballet of the Weddings of Shovelful and Thétis (1654)
Ballet of Time (1654)
Ballet of the Pleasures (1655)
Great Ballet of Welcome (1655)
Ballet of Psyché (1656)
Ballet of the sick Love (1657

royal Ballet of Alcidiane (1658)

Ballet of the Mocking remark (1659)

royal Ballet of Impatience (1661)

Ballet of the Seasons (1661)

Ballet of Arts (1663)

Ballet of the Loves disguised (1664)

Pleasures of the magic island (1664)

royal Ballet of the Venus Birth (1665)

Ballet of the Muses (1666)

royal Ballet of Flora (1669)

Metamorphoses ofOvide in rondos (1676, in-4)

Fables of Ésope in quatrains (1678)

Ballet of the Triumph of the Love (1681)

Stanzas

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Isaac de Benserade

Biography

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