Abstract

Despite the great dramatists of the preceding century—Corneille, Racine and Molière—the 18th century is often considered the great age of French theatre. Obviously “the great age” should not be understood in the usual literary history sense as the “classical age”, for the structures and the content of French dramas originating in the 18th century did not have normative effects on the dramatic production of the centuries that followed. Nevertheless, we are doubly right in using the term “the great age” for French theatre of this period. On the one hand, from the viewpoint of the history of theatre, because certain dramatic techniques originating toward the middle of the 18th century have, down to our own times, influenced theatre so decisively and have become so natural that they form true hermeneutical barriers to the interpretation of plays from earlier epochs. And secondly from the viewpoint of social history, for theatre attendance at that time was indissolubly linked to the everyday life—or at least to holidays and festive occasions—of various social levels in France. As a result we can no doubt consider the theatre as the decisive center of critical knowledge, the gradual transmission of which is at the very heart of the process of the Enlightenment.