Much work has been done in recent years on Quinault's librettos but no major study of his
spoken plays has appeared since the monumental thesis by Etienne Gros published in 1926.
Moreover he has never been the subject of a monograph in English. There is a need to re-assess
the influence of his life on his plays and to re-evaluate Gros's findings in the light of
eighty years' research into seventeenth-century French theatre in general. This book rejects
the deterministic approach that sees his plays as apprentice pieces for the greater achievement
that is his corpus of librettos as well as the implicit comparative approach that pigeon-holes
his work in passing by borrowing from the pithy judgements of Boileau. To what extent does
Quinault's steady move away from comedy and light tragi-comedy to tragedies that combine love
and menace go hand in hand with his search for greater integrity better characterisation and
ever more credible plotting? How did he come to create and retain a tremendously faithful
audience that even the withering mockery of Boileau failed to discourage? And is there any
purpose in retaining the time-worn comparison between the author of Andromaque and the author
of Astrate?
