Jodelle is of importance rather because of his date, and on the ground that he indicated the road which French literary drama was to follow, than for his intrinsic merits. His tragedies are little more than school exercises. His model was the Latin tragedy of Seneca, which in itself is a thin dry copy of the mere machinery of the Greeks. The popularity of these very tiresome pieces during the Renaissance can be partly accounted for by the fact that Greek was far less familiar than Latin. But it is easy to make too much of this. Sophocles and Euripides were not unknown. Buchanan caused Greek plays to be performed by his pupils at Bordeaux; while, if Jodelle could not read Greek himself, he might have had the help of Daurat, and he had the translations of Sophocles by Lazare de Baïf and others to guide him to a better model than Seneca. They would have been quite enough for a writer who had any dramatic instinct. But Seneca was easy to imitate. A well-known story, told mostly in long speeches, by a messenger or other “utility,” no play of character, and a chorus which chants commonplaces, having only a very general relation to the story these are the notes of the Senecan tragedy. It is obvious that they are easy to reproduce. The opening they afforded for serious moral reflection must have had an attraction for the poets of the Pléiade, who had a very definite purpose to expel “frivolity” from poetry. A tragedy which began in such conditions as those described here could hardly hope to become a national drama. It is certainly the fact that very little which was written before the seventeenth century has much interest except as a curiosity. Jodelle and his immediate successors can hardly be said even to have written for the stage in the proper sense of the word. When they were acted at all, it was at the Court or in colleges. They had so far an influence that they succeeded in establishing the chorus as a necessity. It was introduced even into the wild anti-Royalist pieces of the League; but these writers understood the classic model so little that they treated the chorus as a mere means of filling in the intervals between the acts, and not as an integral part of the play. They in fact exaggerated one of the defects of Seneca, as is the way with the mere imitator. We have to wait for the generation of Rotrou and Corneille before seeing how an intelligent attempt could be made to give a new form to the principles of the classic drama. As for the earlier poets, as they chose to allow themselves to be bound by the pedantic rules laid down by Joseph Scaliger in his _De Tragediis et Comediis_ (1560), which said that this and the other must be done by every right-minded man because Seneca had done them, their plays were doomed to want life.