Voltaire

Voltaire [ François-Marie Arouet] (1694–1778), French man of letters, who took as his pseudonym an anagram of ‘Arouet l(e) i(eune)’. Writer, philosopher, and historian, he is important in theatre history as a playwright and critic. He was passionately addicted to the theatre throughout his long life, befriending many actors and actresses, including Lekain and Adrienne Lecouvreur; himself a keen actor, he built several private theatres (notably at Ferney, his last home) where he could indulge his taste for private theatricals. His contemporaries considered his tragedies as good as those of Corneille and Racine, but despite certain superficial innovations his plays for the most part conformed to the models established in the previous century and hardly any of them survived in the repertory even into the 19th century. However, when he was elected to the French Academy in 1746 his tragedies constituted his most substantial qualification.

His first play was a tragedy, Œdipe (1718), written in the Bastille, where he had been imprisoned as the author of a political lampoon. Its success, and that of other writings, brought him fame, social advancement, and a Court pension; he speculated to good effect and became a very wealthy man. Exiled in 1726 after a quarrel with the Marquis de Rohan, he went to London, where he remained until 1729. This visit was of the greatest importance to Voltaire's intellectual development (its general effect can be studied in his Lettres philosophiques of 1734), and to his career as a dramatist, for he learned English, frequented the London playhouses, and read Shakespeare and the Restoration dramatists in the original. Some of the plays he wrote on his return to Paris—Eriphyle, Zaïre (both 1732, the latter, his masterpiece, being based on Othello), La Mort de César (1735)—show traces of Shakespearian influence. But the differences far outweigh any similarities of detail, and it was not long before Voltaire's appreciation of Shakespeare gave way to harsh criticism. Conditioned by an entirely rationalistic approach to dramatic language, Voltaire wrote in verse, not poetry, and his plays show little creative imagination. Among his innovations in drama—and they are not fundamental changes—are the adoption in tragedy of subjects from French national history, alongside those from mythology or ancient history, and the use of the tragic form as a vehicle for the expression of controversial ideas. This latter feature makes plays such as Alzire (1736), Mahomet; ou, Le Fanatism (1741), and L'Orphelin de la Chine (1755) still interesting to read today. They stand beside the philosophical tales and pamphlets as examples of Voltaire's unceasing attack on religious bigotry and intolerance, and on tyrannical oppression in all its forms. As a critic he left a substantial volume of writings on the theatre, the most important, apart from the prefaces to his own plays, being his Commentaire sur Corneille (1764); though he admired Corneille, his preference was for Racine. His comedy L'Écossaise (1760) was a biting personal satire on his literary enemy Fréron, and he was critical both of Marivaux's idiosyncratic comedy and of the comédie larmoyante established by La Chaussée, describing the drame bourgeois which developed from it as ‘a kind of tragedy for chambermaids’. This did not prevent him from writing a number of such drames himself—L'Enfant prodigue (1736), for instance, and Nanine (1749), based on Richardson's novel Pamela (1740).

Voltaire was not a great dramatist, but his plays show a breadth of treatment and force of description hardly surpassed in his own day. If his plays are never revived now the fault lies in his facility, which led him to write too much and too carelessly, and in the fact that he lived in an age of transition and reflected its momentary preoccupations. By slackening the rigid form of tragedy to something more acceptable to a larger but less educated audience, he drove it a step further on the road to melodrama, and to him, rather than to the Romantic dramatists, goes the honour of having first introduced local colour into the theatre. Many of his later works were marred by philosophical propaganda, as in Les Guèbres which was never acted. The only play in which he achieved the impact of true tragedy was Zaïre, and there are innumerable tributes to the genuine emotion it aroused, both when it was first performed in 1732 with Dufresne and Mlle Gaussin in the leading roles and again later in the century, when Lekain took the role of Orosmane. When put on in London, at Drury Lane, in Aaron Hill's translation as Zara (1736), it was the occasion of a memorable début by Susanna, wife of Theophilus Cibber. It was also played with great success in Milan, and there were no less than seven translations of it into Italian in Voltaire's lifetime. One reason for actors and audiences alike to revere the memory of Voltaire is that he was instrumental in doing away with the intolerable nuisance of the audience on the stage, after which dramatists were able to use the larger stage area for the introduction of more spectacle and greater freedom of action, as Voltaire himself did in Tancrède (1760).