Strongly marked with echoes of the Wars of Religion, these works exerted a great influence in their time, particularly in the English Renaissance theatre.

After some legal practice at the Parisian bar, he became conseiller du roi au siège présidial and sénéchaussée of Le Maine, his native district, and later lieutenant-général criminel.

He was a distinguished magistrate, of considerable weight in his native province, who gave his leisure to literature, and whose merits as a poet were fully recognized by his own generation.

His next group of tragedies Marc-Antoine (1578), La Troade (1579), Antigone ou la Piété (acted and printed 1580) shows an advance on the theatre of Étienne Jodelle and Jacques Grévin, and on his own early plays, in so much that the rhetorical element is accompanied by abundance of action, though this is accomplished by the plan of joining together two virtually independent pieces in the same way.

The Jewish women lamenting the fate of their children take a principal part in this tragedy, which, although almost entirely elegiac in conception, is singularly well designed, and gains unity by the personality of the prophet.