François Ponsard
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François Ponsard (1 June 1814 – 7 July 1867) was a French dramatist, poet and author and was a member of the
Biography
Ponsard was born at
He followed up Lucrèce with Agnès de Méranie (1846), Charlotte Corday (1850), and others. Ponsard accepted the Second French Empire with no very great enthusiasm, and was given the post of librarian to the senate; he soon resigned, and fought a bloodless duel with a journalist on the subject. L'Honneur et l'argent, one of his most successful plays, was acted in 1853, and he became an Academician in 1855. For some years he was inactive, but in 1866 he repeated his earlier success with Le Lion amoureux, another play dealing with the revolutionary epoch.[1]
His Galilée, which "excited great opposition in the clerical camp", was produced early in 1867.[1] The play was essentially a romance drawn very loosely from the life of Galileo Galilei, the great 17th-century Italian physicist and astronomer who was forced to recant his work by the Roman Inquisition. It was a "hit with the public", but universally panned by critics as a "trite drama of human emotions".[2]
His Œuvres completes were published in Paris (3 vols., 1865–1876).
Death
Ponsard died in Paris in 1867, soon after his nomination to the commandership of the Legion of Honour.
Place in French literature
Most of Ponsard's plays hold a certain steady level of literary and dramatic ability, but his popularity is in the main because his appearance coincided with a certain public weariness of the extravagant and unequal style of 1830.[1]
Awards and honours
In 1845, Ponsard received the prize awarded by the
In 1855 Ponsard became a member of the Académie française.
References
- ^ a b c d e public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Ponsard, François". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 22 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 62. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ^ "Galilée - François Ponsard". Museo Galileo. 2010. Retrieved 2015-10-13.