Antoine-Marin Lemierre

Antoine-Marin Lemierre (12 January 1733 – 4 July 1793) was a French dramatist and poet.

Life

He was born in Paris, into a poor family, but found a patron in the collector-general of taxes, Dupin, whose secretary he became. Lemierre gained his first success on the stage with Hypermnestre (1758); Titre (1761) and Idomne (1764) failed on account of the subjects. Artaxerce, modelled on Metastasio, and Guillaume Tell were produced in 1766; other successful tragedies were La Veuve de Malabar (1770) and Barnavelt (1784). He was admitted to the Académie française in 1780.^[1]

Lemierre revived Guillaume Tell in 1786 with enormous success. After the French Revolution he professed great remorse for the production of a play inculcating revolutionary principles, and there is no doubt that the horror of the excesses he witnessed hastened his death. Lemierre published La Peinture (1769), based on a Latin poem by the abbé de Marsy, and a poem in six cantos. Les Fastes, ou les usages de lannie (1779), an unsatisfactory imitation of Ovid's Fasti.^[1]

His Œuvres (1810) contain a notice of Lemierre by R. Perrin. and his Œuvres choisies (1811) contain one by F. Fayolle. ^[1]

References

Attribution:

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Lemierre, Antoine Marin". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 411.