Diderot, Denis

Diderot, Denis (1713–84), French man of letters. Compared with his Encyclopaedia (1751–77) and his numerous other works Diderot's dramatic writings are only a minor feature of his literary life; but they were an important expression of the Enlightenment, and had a considerable influence on Lessing and through him on the European drama of the 19th century. Diderot was an exponent of drame bourgeois, as can be gauged by the titles of some of his plays—Le Fils naturel, Le Père de famille. Some of them were published long before they were acted, others were seen only in private theatres. Yet such was Diderot's reputation that during his lifetime they were translated into German, English, Dutch, and Italian. The best of Diderot's work for the theatre is to be found in his Observations sur Garrick, Essai sur la poésie dramatique, Entretien avec Dorval, and especially Paradoxe sur le comédien, published posthumously in 1830, a dialogue on the art of acting dealing notably with the relative merits of spontaneous sensibility and intellectual control. One of Diderot's stories in dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau, written 1761–74, was staged in Paris in the 1960s with Pierre Fresnay in the title-role.