On the example of Corneille’s tragedy ‟Horace” the article deals with the problem of the dramatic author, who is understood as the subject of writing, manifesting himself through the discourse of personages and the rhetorical structure of the piece as a whole. In order to detect the Author’s position in the activity, we trace his attitude to the authority sanctioned by the poetics of classicism functioning within the boundaries of the analysed text as dominating and striving to absolute expansion and absorption of the entire sign-semantic system (political power). Contrary to the traditional interpretation of the tragedy ‟Horace” we installed that the towering figure of Horace, obscuring all the other characters, with all his key position, does not absorb the entire semiotic space of the tragedy; moreover, the Author is located in relation to it at a noticeable distance. The need is proved to study the tragedy of Corneille as a complex rhetorical construction, established through the interaction-rapprochement and repulsion – of its constituent figurative and semantic links, which is revealed by the example of the discursive relationship of different characters. Analysis of the nature of the discourse of each of the characters in their verbal interaction allowed to reveal the principle that guides and activates the unfolding of the tragic conflict, also to find the most mobile and superior to all others field of semantic tension contained in the image of Sabine as the ‟author’s” character. The observations made in the article allow us to raise the question of the revision of approaches to the definition of classicism as an internally mobile and uneven sign-semantic system.