Camille and Other Plays

In this classic anthology—a standard in the literature of French drama for almost four decades—Stephen S. Stanton has assembled the nineteenth century's finest "well-made plays." The works of the master craftsman Eugène Scribe—including the farce A Peculiar Position and the political-historical comedy The Glass of Water—codified the structure for the pièce bien faite (well-made-play). His formula for skillfully manipulated intrigue was mastered by Alexander Dumas fils, Emile Augier, and Victorien Sardou; studied and adapted by Henry James and Henrik Ibsen; and famously derided by George Bernard Shaw. In an incisive introduction, Stanton fully diagrams these works and their seminal influence on modern theater. Whether Dumas's risqué study of the courtesan love in Camille, or Augier's counterattack on the dangers of sentimentalizing such passion in Olympe's Marriage, these plays not only brilliantly evoke Second Empire and Third Republic French culture but also introduce domestic themes and theatrical devices that have influenced Western drama for the last 150 years.