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Generally speaking, deaths in tragedy involve murder or suicide. This article brings together a handful of disparate cases, from within Corneille’s dramatic work, of deaths that do not fit into this typical tragic schema. Such deaths held something of a fascination for Corneille throughout his career: between his comedy L’Illusion comique (1635) and his swansong tragedy Surena (1674), four of his female characters die of a broken heart, and one man is struck down by a lethal haemorrhage. Although these ‘(un)natural deaths’ clearly compromise vraisemblance , the very backbone of seventeenth-century dramaturgy, Corneille is also keen to harness their potential benefits as a source of dramatic, ethical, or emotional effect. This article traces the various techniques that Corneille adopts in order to integrate such causally problematic deaths into his plays. As I argue, although Corneille never settles for a single strategy (sometimes refusing to re-use even techniques he deems successful), he increasingly tends to draw on his rhetorical skills to ‘prepare’ these potentially awkward deaths on a thematic or poetic level. This becomes most poignantly clear at the end of his final tragedy Surena , which reworks elements of his earlier ‘(un)natural deaths’ to unexpectedly elegiac effect.

The representation of sexual material in any period is potentially a contentious issue and this article discusses how sexual taboos can influence representation even in medical writings. Written at a liminal period before the advent of both 'modern' scientific attitudes and the fabled prudery of the 'Grand Siecle', Duval's treatise reveals a stance towards language and representation that is both playful and problematic. In a legal trial, Duval saved a young woman named Marie le Marcis who had been sentenced to death for 'sodomy' with another woman. By manually stimulating her, Duval was able to prove that she actually possessed an internal penis, and could thus not be accused of 'unnatural' acts. Although Duval feels compelled to justify both this action and his general interest in sexual matter against anticipated reproaches of indecency, he also acknowledges the reader's libidinal interest in reading about sex. By comparing the treatise with legal, pornographic and theoretical attitudes towards representing sexual matter, I explore how Duval's text is caught between portraying his own text as 'transparent' and acknowledging that, if such a language is possible, then ethical strictures and taboos placed on the empirical body must also condition the representation of this body within discourse.