Horace marks an epiphanous moment in the history of the theater. In this, Corneille's first ‘tragédie régulière’, Classicism, full blown and triumphant, emerges as the paragon of a new esthetic. Suddenly, a work captures and perfects those laws of harmony, symmetry and ‘bienséances’ that up to this point the theater had only stumbled towards blindly. The term ‘tragédie régulière’ that Corneille's contemporaries used to describe this new mode of representation refers both to an ethos and to an esthetic. In a first sense ‘réguli`re’ designates a work which follows the rules: those rules of unity, of imitation and verisimilitude that were first articulated (or so it was thought) by Aristotle. A regular tragedy obeys the Law. This obedience, reproduced as spectacle, continually serves as a new production of the Law's origin, the founding act of society. Secondly, ‘régulière’ defines the esthetic parameters of such a representation. By following the rules Classicism achieves a wholeness, an integrity of being in which the various parts of the work are subsumed in a unified, total structure. This unity stands as a condemnation of excess; it allows no overflow.

The obedience to the Law would seem, therefore, to be the structuring principle around which Corneille's Classicism elaborates the symmetry so necessary for its success. Curiously it is this ‘symmetry’ that Corneille in his critique of Horace (written twenty years later) claims is missing.