Pixérécourt

Introduction

René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844) was the inventor of a new dramatic genre that soon established itself as the avatar of popular entertainment for the masses and the most successful playwright of the first decades of the nineteenth century with some 30,000 performances to his credit. But the public is fickle and tastes change so rapidly that by the end of his life Pixérécourt was already falling into oblivion, shunned by younger generations of theatregoers as a dusty old fossil.

Unacknowledged by Victor Hugo or any of the other the romantics (except for Charles Nodier), who appropriated his stage craft and spectacular effects but scorned his earnest moralizing, “the father of melodrama” never entered the pantheon of French writers and artists. You will find scant mention of Pixérécourt’s name in the histories of French literature published throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. No one took seriously the author of 120 plays, 59 of them melodramas, or felt called upon to discuss his influence on the evolution of the theatrical theory and practice. At best Pixérécourt was patronized as a curious subliterary phenomenon on the margins of artistic respectability.

No more. All of that has changed in the past twenty years. With the postmodern erasure of boundaries between high and low art and the wholehearted embrace of popular culture, Pixérécourt has emerged as an innovative author deserving a place in all the handbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias of both French and world drama and theatre.

Our collection is a reflection of this new perception of the creator of melodrama. Pixérécourt is a theatre artist worthy of attention on three grounds. He created a poetics of melodrama; he produced a formidable body of work in the new genre that he pioneered; and he actively engaged in the production, acting, and staging of this work serving as the first full-fledged European metteur-en-scène. He has also been called “a forerunner of the cinema.”

For a melodramatist Pixérécourt led an exemplary life, composed of perilous adventures, hair-breadth escapes, sudden changes of fortune, surprising reversals, incredible triumphs, and terrible disasters. A commanding presence on the Boulevard du Crime, the playwright declared himself to possess “a soul in flames, a tender heart, a fiery imagination, and a proud and independent temperament.” As a refined connoisseur of the arts, a bibliophile and collector, an editor and annotator of books, it seems most unlikely that Pixérécourt ever said the words often attributed to him: “I write for those who cannot read.” In fact, he tells us something quite different about his audience as readers in his essay on the new genre, “Melodrama,” published in 1832.

The texts we have chosen illustrate Pixérécourt as theorist of melodrama as well as practitioner. Since his earliest works, Victor and Coelina, which are adaptations of sentimental novels, already exist in English, we have chosen his historical melodramas—The Dog of Montargis, The Ruins of Babylon, and Christopher Columbus—as more representative of his spectacular stage craft. They also reveal the ethos of what Pixérécourt called “classic melodrama” with its Orientalism and colorful depiction of a non-European “other.” The documents that Pixérécourt appended to his historical melodramas (which he sometimes had distributed to the spectators in the theatre) reveal his promotional skills as a showman using his erudition to assure audiences that all the sensational events they will see are authentic. We also include a late collaborative work, Alice, or the Scottish Gravediggers, based on a recent sensational crime story of serial murders, revealing Pixérécourt adapting to the taste of the time for “black romanticism.” Alice bridges the centuries to the modern horror genre in film.

Pixérécourt: Four Melodramas