Death and violence are everywhere in the writings of Pierre Corneille (1606–84). Best known nowadays for a small handful of early tragedies, Corneille in fact wrote in a range of genres, from comedies to religious poetry, from dramatic theory to quasi-operatic 'machine-plays' —and throughout all of these works, death and violence remain concerns as ambiguous and problematic as they are persistent. Yet death has no single meaning for Corneille: it proves to be a highly complex phenomenon which can produce quite contradictory responses. Indeed, while Corneille's engagement with death reveals his own idiosyncratic attitude towards dramatic convention—and towards Aristotle's Poetics in particular—it also exposes further contradictions and tensions between Corneille the practising playwright and Corneille the dramatic theorist. Rather than using death as a means to bring about aesthetic and ethical closure, for example, many of Corneille's most famous plays treat death as a dramatic problem that itself requires resolution. Elsewhere, deaths by chance or misadventure, of illness or natural causes, in combat or childbirth, flout the period's dominant ideals about tight-knit narrative causality.This study uses the twin themes of death and violence as an introduction to Corneille's poetics and dramatic practice more generally. It exposes Corneille as a restlessly experimental playwright, whose complex and evolving engagement with death reveals his readiness to defy theatrical convention and to set himself dramatic challenges. Reading Corneille alongside both his classical sources and his own contemporary rivals, collaborators, and critics, this study situates both his works and his dramatic theories within the theatrical landscape of his age. It shows death's implication in a wide range of topics: from emotion (fear and despair; grief and mourning) to politics (judicial punishment and bio-power; regicide and dynastic succession), from religion (martyrdom; the Christian and pagan afterlife) to aesthetics (dramatic spectacle; plot construction and tragic theory). While focusing on a single writer, this study raises questions that challenge and reshape the theoretical terrain of tragic theatre more generally.