Voltaire understood the limits of neoclassicism, yet
still had difficulty surmounting them. Beginning with a French version of
Oedipus in 1718, Voltaire wrote a number of tragedies, including Zaire,
which dealt with Christian-Muslim relations. Voltaire acted in that play
himself, and according to one account, forgot his lines and made up half a
dozen new verses on the spot.
His play Mahomet, first performed in 1741, actually
portrays the Muslim prophet onstage, a big no-no in Islam, so for that reason
alone, I imagine the play is un-performable today. It’s not particularly kind to
the prophet, but Voltaire seems to have intended the play as an attack on the
Catholic Church, using Islam as a cover to shield himself from local authorities.
Voltaire’s play The Orphan of China reworks Ji Junxiang’s classic Yuan-era play The
Orphan of Zhao. Though it wasn’t the first French adaptation of the Chinese
play, the fact that this version was by Voltaire no doubt brought special
attention to the piece, and the Comedie Francais premiered it in 1755.
Unfortunately, many people attacked it for not maintaining unity of time,
place, and action.
However,
Voltaire himself campaigned against critics who felt rules were more important
than drama. In his “Discourse on Tragedy” he wrote:
I know very
well that the Greek tragedies, besides the superior ones in English, have erred
in often taking up horror for terror, and the disgusting and the unbelievable
for the tragic and the marvelous. The art was in its infancy in the time of
Aeschylus, as in London in the time of Shakespeare; but despite the great
faults of Greek poets, and even of ours, one finds a real pathos of singular
beauty; and if some French who do not know the tragedies of different standards
but in some translations and by hearsay, condemn them without any restriction,
they are, it seems to me, like some blind men who affirmed that a rose could
not have vibrant colors, because they in considering it had felt the thorns.
Voltaire went
on to say that the Greeks, and especially the English, were inclined to surpass
the boundaries of decorum, but that French writers often failed to achieve the
truly tragic because they were too afraid of being indecorous.
While Voltaire’s
dramas were progressive for the eighteenth century, he was still too stuck in
the conventions of his own time to appeal to later generations of Frenchmen.
Writing in the nineteenth century, Emile Deschamps concluded that while
Voltaire was inventive in his plots and original in his thinking, he was still
inferior to dramatists of the Golden Age such as Racine and Corneille. As Deschamps
put it:
His Turks,
Chinese, Arabs, and Americans are much more French than the Greeks and Romans
of Racine and Corneille, and since they are Frenchmen of the age of Louis XV,
rather than of Louis XIV, their language is less grand, less pure, and less
idealized. They are addressing Madame de Pompadour rather than Madame de
Valliere.
Nevertheless, Voltaire’s tragedies, more than fifty in
all, continued to have an impact on the French theatre well into the nineteenth
century. Once Deschamps’ friend Victor Hugo had his play Hernani
performed in 1830, however, Voltaire’s neoclassical plays looked quite
old-fashioned, and today they are largely forgotten.