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]