Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 The royal theatres of the ancien régime
- 2 The rise of the commercial theatre
- 3 Dramatic censorship down to its abolition
- 4 The liberation of the theatres
- 5 The royal theatres under the Revolution
- 6 The theatre in the service of the Republic
- 7 Re-establishment of the state theatres
- 8 Curbs on the commercial sector
- 9 Politics and the pit
- 10 The theatre in the provinces
- 11 The licensing system, 1814–1864
- 12 The state-supported theatres in the nineteenth century
- 13 The theatre in crisis: competition from the café-concert
- 14 Dramatic censorship in the nineteenth century
- 15 The private sector
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Guide to further reading
- Index
1 - The royal theatres of the ancien régime
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 The royal theatres of the ancien régime
- 2 The rise of the commercial theatre
- 3 Dramatic censorship down to its abolition
- 4 The liberation of the theatres
- 5 The royal theatres under the Revolution
- 6 The theatre in the service of the Republic
- 7 Re-establishment of the state theatres
- 8 Curbs on the commercial sector
- 9 Politics and the pit
- 10 The theatre in the provinces
- 11 The licensing system, 1814–1864
- 12 The state-supported theatres in the nineteenth century
- 13 The theatre in crisis: competition from the café-concert
- 14 Dramatic censorship in the nineteenth century
- 15 The private sector
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
In the course of his extensive peregrinations around France over the years between 1787 and 1790, Arthur Young found little to delight him and much to dismay him. Agriculture – his principal concern – was in a piteous state, and the constitution-mongering during the early years of the Revolution boded ill; nevertheless, he never had anything but good to say about the Comédie-Française and the new theatre into which the company had moved a few years before, which occupied the site of the present-day Odéon theatre. The circular shape of the auditorium struck him as ideal, both as regarded ability to see and to hear; after so splendid a building, he asked, ‘how can anyone relish our ill-contrived oblong holes of London?’ On 18 October 1787, having witnessed a performance of Piron's Métromanie, he declared:
the more I see it, the more I like the French theatre; and have no doubt in preferring it to our own. Writers, actors, buildings, scenes, decorations, music, dancing, take the whole in the mass, and it is unrivalled by London. We certainly have a few brilliants of the first water; but throw all in the scales, and that of England kicks the beam.
True, great actors and actresses, ‘brilliants of the first water’, could be seen in London at the time Young was writing: notably of course Sarah Siddons and her brother John Philip Kemble; but the point Young is making here is that the Comédie-Française was much more than a chance grouping of talented players.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Theatre and State in France, 1760-1905 , pp. 6 - 24Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994