‘Before attending the performance of Tragedy, it is easy to know what the Characters in it will be. If one expects to see appear a Tyrant, a Usurper, an unhappy Prince, a Princess who loves and hates; one will not be much mistaken. One does not at all fear being placed in the ranks of the plagiarists, when one gives to the Hero of a new Play, the same passions which have already served as subject for a hundred Tragedies …’ (Nougaret, 1979, I, p. 169). So wrote Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret in Paris, and indeed a feature of central importance in eighteenth-century tragedies is their use of idealized characters. The range of types from which the tragedian selected his cast was small and specialized – hero, heroine and villain or villainess with their confidants, noble elders who were often parents of the hero or heroine, forthright soldiers – and equally restricted was the range of passions proper to each role, in accordance with its bienséances. The choice of plot for the writer was similarly specialized. A well-known eighteenth-century writer on rhetoric remarked that ‘in tragedy it is necessary to be especially careful that the action of the hero who usually gives his name to the tragedy is not unfamiliar and drawn from the obscurity of an unknown tale’ (Jouvency, 1725, p. 75). Thus the eighteenth-century classical tragedian worked within strict bounds of form and content in accordance with the conventions of his time, in which the artistic proprieties were closely linked with those of everyday life and its rigid code of social deportment. Mercier, a well-known writer and dramatist, even went so far as to say: ‘…we have only one single Tragedy, that is to say, one same mould, one same tone, one same progress.’ (Mercier, 1778, p. 119)