Master Plots: An Alternate Typology for French Historical Dramas of the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy (1961) betray, by their very titles, that preoccupation with organicism which has been the hallmark of much of theatre history at least since the late nineteenth century. Yet when one looks back on the diverse dramatic compositions and creations produced in France in the early nineteenth century, one cannot help but wonder about the adequacy of a linear evolutionary model. Does such a model truly describe the complex history of French drama between 1800 and 1830, or does it present an over-simplified picture of the past? To ask the question is, perhaps, in itself a sign of discontent. If so, it will not be enough merely to demonstrate the weaknesses of a diachronic view of theatre history. (This can easily be done by pointing to the persistence, both in print and on stage, of what were said to be dead theatrical forms and by focusing on the resultant coexistence of several dramatic genres.) What is needed is an alternate model which, by virtue of its superior fit with the facts, implicitly reveals the flaws inherent in the standard biological description of early nineteenth-century French drama.