Le Cid is a five-act French tragicomedy written by Pierre Corneille, first performed in December 1636 at the Théâtre du Marais in Paris and published the same year. It is based on Guillén de Castro's play Las Mocedades del Cid. Castro's play in turn is based on the legend of El Cid. An enormous popular success, Corneille's Le Cid was the subject of a heated polemic over the norms of dramatic practice known as the Querelle du Cid (Quarrel of The Cid). Cardinal Richelieu's Académie française acknowledged the play's success, but determined that it was defective, in part because it did not respect the classical unities. Today, Le Cid is widely regarded as Corneille's finest work, and is considered one of the greatest plays of the seventeenth century. Background The stories of the Cid are based on the life of the Spanish warrior Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, who lived approximately from 1043 until 1099. The real "Cid" seems to have fought for both Muslims and Christians at different times and appears to have been a sellsword figure. In the play, however, he is lauded solely as a Christian soldier. The name "El Cid" was derived from the Arabic word for lord ("sayyid") and made Spanish, and further given a French article for Corneille's version. To this day, the Cid remains a popular Spanish folklore character, who has inspired many stories and works of art. The play is derived from Guillén de Castro's play Les Mocedades del Cid, published in 1618 and written somewhere between 1612 and 1615. Because of the pieces' similarities, Jean Mairet accused Corneille of plagiarism in March 1637. Performance history and "La Querelle" Le Cid was originally staged at the Théâtre du Marais in December 1636. The play was a success, although it was quite controversial due to its divergence from the standard playwriting guidelines of the time. The piece was groundbreaking for a few reasons. It had a happy ending, which was rare for "tragedies" of the time, and allowed later tragicomic playwrights to end their plays in a variety of ways. Critics tried to hold the play up to Aristotle's Poetics and its prescriptions, but Corneille argued that great tragic characters are inherently implausible. He took a difficult topic and showed, rather realistically, how it might occur. This disagreement and the discussions following it are known as "La Querelle du Cid," or The Quarrel of