3 results
1 - Diderot and the ancients
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- By Russell Goulbourne, University of Leeds
- Edited by James Fowler, University of Kent, Canterbury
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- Book:
- New Essays on Diderot
- Published online:
- 11 April 2011
- Print publication:
- 24 March 2011, pp 13-30
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Summary
Diderot seems in many ways to be the most forward-looking, the most ‘modern’, of the eighteenth-century French philosophes. Even his attitude to his works, just as much as the content and form of them, suggests this: although he composed many of what we now regard as his most important works without thought of conventional publication in his lifetime, he nevertheless did so with a keen eye on posterity. He fervently hoped that the future would be as interested in him as he was in it, as he suggests in a letter to the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet in December 1765: ‘En vérité, cette postérité serait une ingrate si elle m'oubliait tout à fait, moi qui me suis tant souvenu d'elle.’ (‘Indeed, posterity would truly be ungrateful if it forgot me completely, given that I have been thinking about it so much.’) But this is only part of the story. For Diderot was just as concerned with the past as he was with the future. Pursuing his epistolary debate with Falconet about posterity, he notes in a letter of February 1766: ‘Plus l'homme remonte en arrière, plus il s'élance en avant, plus il est grand.’ (‘The further a man turns back, the more he launches forward, the greater he is.’) Diderot looks back in order to move forward. In particular he looks back to antiquity and finds in it the springboard for his daring intellectual adventure.
42 - Eighteenth-century comic theatre
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- By Russell Goulbourne, University of Leeds
- Edited by William Burgwinkle, University of Cambridge, Nicholas Hammond, University of Cambridge, Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of French Literature
- Published online:
- 28 May 2011
- Print publication:
- 24 February 2011, pp 378-384
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Summary
Two received ideas beset our vision of eighteenth-century French comedy. The first is that the comic stage was so haunted by the ghost of Molière that dramatists had little or no room for creative manoeuvre. Frequently performed and constantly cited, Molière's plays put eighteenth-century comic dramatists in an impossible situation, as the poet figure suggests in the prologue to Dufresny's three-act prose comedy Le Négligent, first performed at the Comédie-Française in February 1692, less than twenty years after Molière's death: ‘Molière a bien gâté le théâtre. Si l'on donne dans son goût: Bon, dit aussitôt le critique, cela est pillé, c'est Molière tout pur; s'en écarte-t-on un peu: Oh! ce n'est pas là Molière’ (‘Molière has really spoilt the theatre. If you write like him: Right, says the critic straightaway, that's borrowed, it's pure Molière; and if you try to be a little different: Oh! that's not Molière’) (Scene 3). And the second received idea – the first notwithstanding – is that the only comic dramatists of any lasting interest and significance in eighteenth-century France, and therefore the only worthy successors to Molière, were Marivaux and Beaumarchais. However, neither of these received ideas, on closer inspection, holds good, since eighteenth-century French comedy, encompassing plays performed at public theatres in Paris (the Comédie-Française, the Théâtre Italien, the fairground theatres) and in the provinces, as well as on innumerable private stages, or théâtres de société, across the country, was a site of enormous creativity and experimentation as well as a space of significant contestation in the context of the Enlightenment.
6 - Voltaire’s masks: theatre and theatricality
- Edited by Nicholas Cronk, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire
- Published online:
- 28 May 2009
- Print publication:
- 19 February 2009, pp 93-108
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Summary
In 1944, on the 250th anniversary of Voltaire's birth, the poet Paul Valéry praised him as 'a man who tried his hand at every literary genre, who had a go at everything, tragedy, epigrams, history, epic, short fiction, essays, and that vast correspondence' ('un homme qui s'est essaye dans tous les genres, qui a touché à tout, tragédie, épigramme, histoire, épopée, contes, essais, et cette correspondance innombrable'). Valéry's account recalls that of the eighteenth-century actor-cum-historian Claude Villaret, who as early as 1759 sought to explain the success of 'this ingenious and sublime author' ('cet auteur ingénieux et sublime'): 'Superior in almost every literary genre, it is above all through the beauty in the detail that he is able to captivate his readers and enchant his audiences' ('Supérieur presqu'en tout genre de littérature, c'est surtout par les beautés de détail qu'il sait trouver l'art d'attacher ses lecteurs et de charmer les spectateurs').
Perhaps the most surprising, and certainly the most telling, feature of both of these appreciations of Voltaire the polymath is the specific mention of his work as a dramatist. Surprising, because today perhaps the most common image of Voltaire is that of the satirical story-teller. We have forgotten that his fame in his lifetime, both in France and abroad, was largely based on his reputation as a dramatist, and that the theatre occupies a substantial place in his vast output. Whereas in the story Le Taureau blanc (1772) the character Mambrés, usually seen as an image of Voltaire, claims that 'telling stories is the only way to get on in the world' ('ce n'est que par des contes qu'on réussit dans le monde'), Voltaire himself, if the word of one of his secretaries is to be believed, thought that science, history, theology and the writing of fiction were whimsical pastimes compared with the serious work of writing plays.