This exciting new book tells the remarkable story of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his life in the theatre. Based primarily on his Letter to d'Alembert, a devastating critique of the French stage, he is often considered anti-theatrical. But far from an enemy of the stage, Rousseau was in fact a passionate lover of all forms of theatre. Unlike Diderot and other theatre reformers of his time, Rousseau's aims were far more radical. He not only argued, as did Diderot, against theatrical conventions but-as this book shows and few are aware-Rousseau created a new kind of theatre for the Parisians. Although his theatrical works appear on the surface to be conventional-a common rebuke by his critics-they are not. In all of Rousseau's theatre one finds-not flawed and peculiar divergences from the accepted forms-but works Rousseau deliberately created for the morally jaded Parisians. For example, his one-act opera THE VILLAGE SOOTHSAYER (Le Devin du village) was meant not only as court entertainment but as a model for French opera composed in the Italian style. Moreover, what is often missed is that, imbedded in the work, is the more subversive aim of reforming the world-weary audience witnessing the opera at Fontainebleau by inspiring in them, through its story and music, a yearning for the simple and virtuous life of the countryside. As this book argues, Rousseau's aim to reform the theatre was also part of his much wider program to reform society as a whole. To further his career Rousseau forced himself to attend the famous salons of Paris frequented by eminent men of letters and music, such as the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, the playwright Pierre de Marivaux, the philosopher Denis Diderot, and even Voltaire. Also in attendance were powerful men such as the Duke de Richelieu. Many were charmed, intrigued and eager to assist the ambitious young man from Geneva. These intellectual gatherings hosted by formidable salonnières offered their guests a lavish spread and complex rules of discourse meant to smooth ruffled feathers and sooth immense egos. If Rousseau felt alienated and tongue-tied in them, nevertheless, all of the above notables-some skeptical, some captivated-aided him in his quest for fame. Play by play and opera by opera, the Parisians absorbed, often without being fully aware of it, Rousseau's subtle theatrics. Covertly breaking the rules of bienséance, his theatrical works mostly employ the ruse of placing the author inside his story disguised as its troubled hero. In so doing, Rousseau revealed his private and imperfect soul. Beginning in 1743 with his opera The Amorous Muses (Les Muses galantes) and ending in 1762 with his Pygmalion, theatregoers with finely tuned ears heard sub-rosa the author's confessional voice-a voice that would be sacred to the Romantics.

Rousseau is often called the Father of the Romantic Movement. Here, in one volume, are his four completed plays in lively, sparkling new English translations created for stage performance as well as reading pleasure and study. NARCISSUS (One-act comedy): A young man obsessed with his good looks is tricked into falling in love with a most unlikely subject. PRISONERS OF WAR (One-act comedy): A French soldier held prisoner in Hungary is torn between duty to his country and his love for the daughter of an enemy. THE RECKLESS WAGER (Three-act comedy): A young widow, determined never to marry again, plays a dangerous game of love and jealousy with her would-be suitor. PYGMALION (One-act lyric romance): A great sculptor, in the throes of despair, comes to realize that only by pouring his very soul into his art can it truly come to life. Introductions to the volume and to each individual play trace Rousseau's personal and professional life, and the various ways in which it was reflected in his plays.

Publisher Description

Smoothly blending performance theory, literary analysis, and historical insights, Cecilia Feilla explores the mutually dependent discourses of feeling and politics and their impact on the theatre and theatre audiences during the French Revolution. Remarkably, the most frequently performed and popular plays from 1789 to 1799 were not the political action pieces that have been the subject of much literary and historical criticism, but rather sentimental dramas and comedies, many of which originated on the stages of the Old Regime. Feilla suggests that theatre provided an important bridge from affective communities of sentimentality to active political communities of the nation, arguing that the performance of virtue on stage served to foster the passage from private emotion to public virtue and allowed groups such as women, children, and the poor who were excluded from direct political participation to imagine a new and inclusive social and political structure. Providing close readings of texts by, among others, Denis Diderot, Collot d'Herbois, and Voltaire, Feilla maps the ways in which continuities and innovations in the theatre from 1760 to 1800 set the stage for the nineteenth century. Her book revitalizes and enriches our understanding of the significance of sentimental drama, showing that it was central to the way that drama both shaped and was shaped by political culture.