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The Significance of Diderot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Graham Ley
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Abstract

Best known in his own times as an encyclopedist, the eighteenth-century French writer, philosopher, dramatist, and critic Denis Diderot (1713–84) was to emerge a century later, though his Paradoxe sur le comédien, as a posthumous protagonist in the debate launched in Britain in William Archer's Masks or Faces? (1888). That debate – on the role of feeling and instinct versus craft and technique in acting – has been taken up and sustained by many theorists and practitioners in the succeeding century. In the following article, however, Graham Ley is more concerned with Diderot's wider role as theatrical theorist, suggesting that he offers – as also in his defence of pantomime, his proposal for the ‘serious genre’ which anticipated realism, and his advocacy of scenographic reform – not a unified vision of the nature of theatre but an enduring sense, precisely, of its paradoxical and ironic qualities. Graham Ley has just joined the Department of Drama at the University of Exeter, having previously taught in London and New Zealand. He is currently completing a book on theatrical theory, on which he has previously also published in NTQ, most recently on ‘The Role of Metaphor in Brook's The Empty Space’ (NTQ35, 1993). Among his numerous publications on ancient performance, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 1991.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 11 , Issue 44 , November 1995 , pp. 342 - 354
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

Notes and References

1. For a short introduction to Diderot's life and work, see France, P., Diderot (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar, a volume in the ‘Past Masters’ series. Far greater biographical detail is available in Furbank, P. N., Diderot: a Critical Biography (London, 1992)Google Scholar. Roach, J. R., The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark, 1985)Google Scholar, is an outstanding scholarly and contextual study of Diderot's theoretical position, but Roach quotes very little from Diderot's work.

2. A significant collection of reactions from French practitioners was made by Blanquet, M., in an edition of the Paradoxe (Paris, 1949, reprinted 1958)Google Scholar. The Paradox was also the subject of some controversy in England in the late nineteenth century: it was translated into English by W. Herries (London, 1883), and five years later the critic and editor of Ibsen, William Archer, published an essay on the dispute between ‘emotionalists’ and ‘anti-emotionalists’ with the title Masks or Faces? Archer included his own version of Herries's translation with the essay, and both essay and translation were republished in the USA (New York, 1957).

3. References are to the French text in Diderot, , Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. X, ‘Le Drame bourgeois’, ed. , J. and Chouillet, A.-M. (Paris, 1980)Google Scholar, abbreviated hereafter as ‘Chouillet, X’, followed by the page number. This volume also contains texts of the plays The Natural Son and The Father of the Family. Selections from the theatrical writings of Diderot, are translated in the second volume of Sources of Dramatic Theory, ed. Sidnell, M. (Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. The translations here are my own.

4. Chouillet, X, p. 348.

5. I quote from the collected translations in Russell, D. A. and Winterbottom, M., eds., Ancient Literary Criticism: the Principal Texts in New Translations (Oxford, 1972), p. 74Google Scholar.

6. Chouillet, X, p. 348.

7. Russell and Winterbottom, p. 114; the translation is by M. Hubbard.

8. Chouillet, X, p. 389; Russell and Winterbottom, p. 113.

9. Chouillet, X, p. 390.

10. Chouillet, X, p. 409–10.

11. Chouillet, X, p. 410–11.

12. For the impact of the Salon exhibitions on critical judgement, see Crow, T. E., Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, 1985)Google Scholar. There is a stimulating discussion of Greuze and Diderot in Bryson, N., Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar.

13. Chouillet, X, p. 416.

14. Horace, , Art of Poetry, 361 (Russell and Winterbottom, p. 289)Google Scholar; Plutarch, , Moralia, 346 (Russell and Winterbottom, p. 5)Google Scholar.

15. Chouillet, X, p. 411.

16. Chouillet, X, p. 409.

17. References are to the French text in Diderot, , Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. VII, ed. Assézat, J. (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar, abbreviated hereafter as ‘Assézat, VII’, followed by the page number.

18. Assézat, VII, p. 135.

19. Assézat, VII, p. 137.

20. Ibid.

21. Assézat, VII, p. 138.

22. Assézat, VII, p. 146.

23. Assézat, VII, p. 150.

24. Assézat, VII, p. 151.

25. Assézat, VII, p. 161.

26. Assézat, VII, p. 115.

27. Assézat, VII, p. 121–2.

28. References are to the French text in Diderot, , Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. VIII, ed. by Assézat, J. (Paris, 1875)Google Scholar, abbreviated hereafter as ‘Assézat, VIII’, followed by the page number.

29. The relationship between Mendelssohn and Lessing is examined in Burwick, F., Illusion and the Drama: Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and the Romantic Era (Pennsylvania, 1991), p. 81–126Google Scholar.

30. Assézat, VIII, p. 365.

31. Ibid.

32. Assézat, VIII, p. 365–6.

33. Assézat, VIII, p. 368.

34. Assézat, VIII, p. 371.

35. Assézat, VIII, p. 372.

36. Assézat, VIII, p. 374.

37. Osborne, J., The Meiningen Court Theatre 1866–1890 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 108Google Scholar. The role of imitation, and of observation, is fundamental to the ‘basic model’ of ‘The Street Scene’, in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. Willett, J. (New York, 1964), p. 121–8Google Scholar.

38. Assézat, VIII, p. 378–80.

39. Assézat, VIII, p. 398.

40. Assézat, VIII, p. 401–2.

41. Barish, J., The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley; Los Angeles, 1981), p. 192, and Ch. 9 on RousseauGoogle Scholar.

42. Assézat, VIII, p. 398.

43. Assézat, VIII, p. 415–6.

44. For the influence of Diderot on Stanislavski (and Brecht), see J. R. Roach The Player's Passion, op. cit., Ch. 6, ‘The Structure of a Russian Revolution’, p. 195–217.

45. Assézat, VIII, p. 373.