Eugène Scribe

• Born: December 24, 1791
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: February 20, 1861
• Place of death: Paris, France

Other Literary Forms

Eugène Scribe is remembered primarily for his dramas.

Achievements

One of the most prolific playwrights of all time, the author of more than three hundred dramatic works, Eugène Scribe is best remembered as the originator of the well-made play. His insistence on expert dramatic craftsmanship and his remarkable success in pleasing the public brought him power, prestige, and wealth. While he was always sensitive to popular taste and could give his audience what it wanted, he elevated the middlebrow comedy-vaudeville both in form and in content, and he renovated serious comedy. He is also considered to be the principal inventor of grand opera. In his day, Scribe virtually controlled all the theaters in Paris and exerted a powerful influence on the next several generations of dramatists.

Perhaps his most enduring legacy to his colleagues was the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques , which he helped to establish in 1827 to protect authors’ rights and grant them a fair share of the profits. As for his dramatic technique, it has been said that for the remainder of the nineteenth century, all French drama was either a continuation of Scribe or a reaction against him. The influence took many forms, from the madcap farces of Eugène Labiche and Georges Feydeau to the problem plays of Alexandre Dumas, fils, and Émile Augier to the thrillers of Victorien Sardou, and that influence was by no means limited to France. Scribe’s drama was translated and performed with great success throughout Europe and the New World. Henrik Ibsen, who in the 1850’s directed more than twenty plays of Scribe, was the most brilliant of the many playwrights who learned their technique from the French master.

Critical reception of Scribe’s work was mixed even in his lifetime. Although elected to the Académie Français in 1836, he provoked the wrath of the Romantics, of whose moral and aesthetic ideas he disapproved, and of elitist critics who objected both to Scribe’s willingness to cater to the masses and to the financial rewards he reaped in the process. His supporters noted with approbation the lively situations and interesting characters, the logical and carefully constructed plots, the attempt to address serious issues and vices of the age, and the uncanny ability to select and represent the manners of middle-class Parisian society. In fact, Scribe’s vivid rendering of that society, while not as thorough and ambitious as that of his younger contemporary Honoré de Balzac, remains one of his claims to the attention of modern readers.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Scribe fell into critical disrepute, a result both of increasing opposition to the well-made play and of the harsh judgment of eminent historians of literature, such as Gustave Lanson, who objected to Scribe’s mediocre style, superficiality, and lack of idealism. None of these accusations can be denied. In particular, Scribe’s undistinguished style has never had any defenders, and it continues to deter some readers. It is also true, however, that he composed his plays to be performed rather than read and did not hesitate to sacrifice purity of style for the dramatic situation. A number of studies have helped to rehabilitate Scribe by shedding new light on his extraordinary variety and originality, his technical wizardry, and even his role as moralist and social critic. The real proof of Scribe’s continued vitality lies in live performance, and continuing revivals of some of his best plays demonstrate that audiences can still derive pleasure from his work.

Biography

Augustin-Eugène Scribe, son of a Parisian silk merchant, was born during the early years of the French Revolution. His father having died while he was an infant, he was brought up by his industrious and loving mother. He distinguished himself in his studies at the Collège de Sainte-Barbe and proceeded to begin the study of law, in deference to his mother’s wishes, but he could muster no enthusiasm for it. The death of his mother in 1807 gave him enough financial independence to pursue his first love, the theater, and by 1810 he had had his first one-act comedy-vaudeville accepted at the Variétés theater. Following a string of dismal failures punctuated with a few moderate successes, Scribe achieved an overwhelming triumph in 1815 with Une Nuite de la garde nationale. Here for the first time he employed the two elements that were to guarantee his fame in the theater: realistic (in this case, topical) situations and ingeniously complicated plots.

In 1820, Scribe, together with two friends and former collaborators, opened a new theater called the Gymnase. As principal playwright, Scribe had to sign a contract pledging not to write for any theater in direct competition. In the 1820’s alone, he furnished more than one hundred plays, many of them highly successful, to the Gymnase and made occasional forays into the Comédie-Française, the Opéra-Comique, the Opéra, and various lesser theaters. For the vast majority of his plays, he used collaborators, but with few exceptions he wrote the full text himself. Scribe generously gave credit (and a share of the royalties) to anyone who provided him with a subject or even the idea for a single scene. In certain cases he took a play that another author had submitted to him and revised it so radically that the collaborator did not even recognize the work in its performed version. By the end of the 1820’s, Scribe was a millionaire, had acquired an elegant mansion in Paris and a country house, and was respected as the arbiter of Parisian theatrical taste. His success, far from turning his head, brought out his generous instincts, for he gave assistance to numerous needy individuals and charities, as well as fighting to protect the rights of fellow authors.

With the July Revolution of 1830, Scribe temporarily lost public favor. As a result, he produced a smaller percentage of his plays at the Gymnase while increasing his contributions to the Comédie-Française, including some of his most ambitious historical and social dramas, and to the lyric theaters. During the next few decades, Scribe collaborated with practically every major opera composer working in or passing through Paris. The list includes Daniel Auber, Adrien Boïeldieu, Jacques Halévy, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Jacques Offenbach, Ambroise Thomas, Luigi Cherubini, Gaetano Donizetti, Gioacchino Rossini, and Giusseppi Verdi.

In his later years, Scribe devoted more of his energies to his family (he had married in 1839) and reduced the volume of his dramatic output. In collaboration with Ernest Legouvé, he wrote several of his most celebrated plays, including his closest attempt at a tragedy, Adrienne Lecouvreur, designed as a vehicle for the brilliant actress Rachel. Active and loved by the public until the end, Scribe died suddenly at the age of sixty-nine, on the way home from a meeting at a colleague’s house. In all, he left 374 dramatic works, a handful of novels and short stories, and a voluminous correspondence.

Analysis

Eugène Scribe left two brief theoretical documents summing up his ideas about his art. In his inaugural speech at the Académie Français in 1836, he combines respect for France’s classical tradition with an appreciation of popular culture, especially the satiric songs (ancestors of his own vaudevilles) that reflected their time more accurately than did the theater. The preface composed for an edition of the plays of his friend Jean-François-Alfred Bayard in 1855 goes further in proclaiming Scribe’s affiliation with classicism, declaring that the artist cannot dispense with order, rules, and hard work, and that comedy, based on mirth and truth, is harder to write than serious drama. It also provides an early definition of the well-made play: the skillful presentation of a subject, rapid action, sudden reversals, obstacles created and overcome, and unexpected but carefully prepared denouement.

Love and marriage have always been a principal theme of comedy, but Scribe placed more emphasis on the pragmatic than on the romantic side. In contrast to Romantic drama, Scribe never condones the excesses of violent passion, and in particular, he condemns marital infidelity on the part of husband and wife alike. As a champion of middle-class values, he chooses for the sympathetic characters of his comedies honest, caring, simple, hardworking people. In such a milieu, love, although sincere and abiding, is not an explosive or antisocial force. Instead, it is a gentle and respectful emotion that needs to be grounded in mutual esteem, together with compatibility of personality, education and, usually, social rank. Despite the charges of Scribe’s detractors, it is simply not true that he viewed money as the main consideration in marriage: Le Mariage d’argent, his first experiment in the five-act form, is a clear condemnation of those who betray love and principles for the sake of ambition and greed. Even in Malvina: Ou, Un Mariage d’inclination (1828), in which he takes the side of the parents over the young lovers, he gives his blessing to love, provided that the young people are mature enough to know what they are doing and that they act in accord with their parents. It is also true that bourgeois parents in Scribe’s plays are normally idealized figures, extremely caring and indulgent and situated at the furthest extreme from the tyrannical fathers that one associates with the comedies of Molière.

La Demoiselle à marier

La Demoiselle à marier is a one-act vaudeville. This genre, in which Scribe honed his dramatic skills and acquired his early successes, may be defined as a little operetta, usually in one act but sometimes expanded to two or three, in which new words are set to well-known tunes, ranging from popular songs to operatic selections. The use of unoriginal music provides a kind of complicity between the spectators and the characters. The mood may range from farce to sentimentality, but the appeal is always to a respectable, middle-class, family audience. Scribe elevated this form of frivolous entertainment to real drama by introducing exciting, complicated plots and more realistic characters and situations. His favorite device was to spend the first half of the play presenting the characters and involving them in an awkward predicament, and the second half in extricating them in a plausible, yet unexpected manner.

La Demoiselle à marier is a charming story of ordinary, middle-class people, temporarily harmed by a moment of vanity and pretension but saved by their basic simplicity and honesty. When the wealthy young Alphonse buys an estate in the country and finds that his new neighbors have a daughter of suitable age, he arranges to pay them a visit with the possible intention of matrimony, but he specifically requests that they abstain from formality and not inform the girl in advance of his visit. Camille, however, learns the truth, the parents yield to an impulse of vanity and put on great airs for Alphonse, and the arrival of an old family friend (who is in the process of arranging another match for the girl and is irked to find that he has not been consulted about this one) completes the complications. At first meeting, Alphonse and the family make a dreadful impression on one another, and the match is broken off at once. Now that they need treat him only as a neighbor and friend, the Dumesnils quickly revert to their normal selves, relations immediately become cordial, Alphonse discovers that his late uncle was the family friend’s old schoolmate and chum, and the young people, alone for the second time but now chatting informally, find much in common and finally fall in love. Unfortunately, the change seems to have come too late, for the father has already sent a letter to the other suitor making the engagement official. The day is saved by a seemingly trivial remark made near the start of the play by the good-hearted servant Baptiste: A man of sober habits, he has vowed to get drunk on the day of his young mistress’ wedding. In the process, he has fallen asleep and failed to deliver the letter, which is retrieved and torn up. Alphonse can marry Camille after all, and they join in the obligatory final chorus in which the characters sing of their happiness.

The play is in part an ingenious reversal of the timeworn convention of love at first sight and in part a satire of petty human vanity. Most of all, however, it is a celebration of ordinary life and bourgeois values. The dying words of Alphonse’s uncle may be seen as a summation of Scribe’s own code of conduct and one that he assumed his audience to share: Wealth is honorable when acquired honestly, and money is not to be worshiped for its own sake but is to be valued as a means to procure independence. In addition, one must not sell one’s liberty by seeking positions of influence or contracting an opulent marriage, but should live within one’s means, choose a good wife, and rear one’s own children.

The Glass of Water

Scribe’s masterpiece in the field of full-length comedy is usually considered to be The Glass of Water. Never overly concerned with factual accuracy, Scribe concentrated in his historical plays on intricate plots mixing real and fictional characters. As critics have noted, Scribe had no passion for history and, unlike the Romantics, felt no urge to reconstruct the manners and attitudes of past eras. Yet Scribe’s motivation in writing historical drama was not limited to catering to popular taste. Political upheavals provided a suitable backdrop for a five-act drama of constant reversals and intrigues and allowed Scribe to depict the past as a metaphor for the present.

Set in England in 1712, during the final months of the War of the Spanish Succession, The Glass of Water exemplifies Scribe’s theory that history consists of great effects arising from small causes. Rather than presenting likenesses of heroes of epic or tragedy, Scribe depicts political leaders as basically ordinary people, ambitious and selfish, sometimes petty or inept. The major antagonists of The Glass of Water, the Duchess of Marlborough and Henri de Saint-Jean, later Lord Bolingbroke, are of a higher caliber—geniuses at calculation and manipulation, who fascinate with their quick wits and vitality while failing to demonstrate genuine loyalty to any moral or political ideas beyond their own self-interest.

What makes The Glass of Water a marvelous theatrical experience is the complexity and dizzying pace of the action. The opening act sets forth the obstacles confronting the hero: Saint-Jean is penniless and heavily in debt, and the family fortune is in the hands of an obnoxious and stupid cousin with whom he is on bad terms. His enemy, the duchess, has bought up his debts and threatens to send him to prison. There is no immediate prospect of his party’s regaining power and his returning to the post of prime minister, and the duchess will not let any of his letters reach the queen. Although England’s finances have been seriously depleted by the protracted war, and the French are anxious to negotiate peace, the duchess, whose husband commands the English forces and who stands to gain handsomely from continued hostilities, will not let the French envoy approach the queen. As if this were not enough, the hero’s friends also face serious hurdles. The shopgirl Abigail, whom Saint-Jean has befriended, finds the duchess opposed to her taking a position in the palace that the queen (who owes the girl a sum of money) has promised. The young and handsome officer Masham, another protégé of Saint-Jean, is penniless and loves Abigail but cannot marry her until he has made his fortune. In addition, he has been warned by a secret protector never to marry and has been repeatedly insulted by an arrogant but unknown nobleman. The denouement is easy enough to predict: Masham marries Abigail, who becomes the queen’s new favorite; the duchess and her faction are disgraced; and Saint-Jean, having inherited his cousin’s title and fortune, regains the post of prime minister and persuades the queen to sign a peace treaty with France. As in a mystery novel, it is not the ending but the means of achieving it that create interest and suspense.

To effect the proper resolution as speedily and efficiently as possible, for the action takes only a few days, Scribe employs several basic techniques: decisive confrontations of adversaries, revelation of secrets at unexpected moments, and the main characters’ talent (or lack thereof) for improvisation and for a quick response to new developments. The “duels” of Saint-Jean and the duchess, who confront each other once each act, are the most exciting, but there are others with equally important results, such as the offstage duel of Masham and his mysterious foe (who turns out to be Saint-Jean’s cousin) and the spectacular climax in act 4 when the queen and the duchess discover that they are rivals for the love of Masham. Their jealousy erupts into a serious rift when the angry duchess accidentally spills a glass of water over the queen. In the heated exchange that follows, she offers her resignation, and the queen accepts it.

It is hard to derive much of a moral or philosophical lesson from this play. Voltaire, referring to this very episode in his Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), cited it as an example of trivial causes giving rise to great historical events, though he was careful not to attribute the downfall of Marlborough and the peace of Utrecht solely to this one incident. One has the impression at the end of the play that England will be better off with Lord Bolingbroke’s return to power, but this is merely a result of the hero’s jovial personality, his gift for bouncing back after each reversal, and his enthusiastic acceptance of the comic view of history and politics. Hardly a visionary, he at least favors peace and shows genuine concern for other people. The duchess, who represents repression and tyranny, must be disgraced primarily because she demonstrates rigidity and joylessness—the characteristics of the blocking figure in comedy. The denouement is essentially the triumph of youth and the affirmation of life, as in all comedy. One might say that the political and historical dimensions of Scribe’s play furnish an unusually elaborate network of complications that delay the happy ending and temporarily distract the audience from noticing the author’s optimistic view of life.

La Camaraderie

Scribe was also preoccupied with social issues in his full-length comedies, and he did not hesitate to attack such vices as hypocrisy, imposture, calumny, ambition, and social climbing. Among the finest of these plays is La Camaraderie. A group of mediocre men in a variety of professions have formed an alliance to promote the career of each member. Dominating the group and heading its major publicity weapon, a newspaper, is a leading senator’s crafty and domineering young wife, appropriately named Césarine. The supposed friendship of the men is soon revealed as hypocritical, for they know that their allies are far from being the geniuses that they have all proclaimed themselves. When Edmond, a talented, idealistic, and unswervingly honest young lawyer, is introduced to the group, he is appalled by their methods and refuses to join, despite his great need for assistance. Fortunately, his shrewd friend Zoé, working without his knowledge, succeeds in manipulating Césarine, and through her the whole alliance, into supporting Edmond in a parliamentary election. For the first time, the alliance achieves recognition for a truly deserving individual, but by unleashing the selfishness and mutual scorn of its members it destroys itself in the process.

Although Théophile Gautier, one of the play’s most vehement critics, perceived it as a direct attack on the Romantic movement, Scribe’s satire is more far-reaching. To be sure, certain gibes at the poets of the “camaraderie,” who are shown as hack writers who cultivate exotic themes and genres to avoid competing with poets of real talent, seem aimed at the Romantics, though other associations, literary or otherwise, operating their own journals and lauding their members in hyperbolic terms, existed in Scribe’s day. The most devastating ridicule is reserved for the political establishment, portrayed as bungling, corrupt, and easily influenced by anyone with a gift for manipulation. The Count de Miremont, the revered elder statesman, is incapable of serious thought, lets his wife make his decisions for him, and conveniently becomes bedridden before each major crisis or vote. Elections to academies and parliamentary seats are rigged with extraordinary facility, and Edmond finds himself the elected deputy only a few hours after Césarine decides to announce his candidacy.

Although Scribe lived through a number of major political upheavals, he never used the stage to discuss politics except, in his role as moralist, to castigate dishonesty and mediocrity, as in this comedy. His own political sympathies apparently lay with the republicans rather than the monarchists, but he was never doctrinaire and sometimes preferred to side with whichever party was out of power.

Critics have sometimes compared La Camaraderie unfavorably to Scribe’s delightful one-act comedy-vaudeville Le Charlatanisme, ignoring the fundamental differences between them. Although the plots are quite similar, the conspirators in Le Charlatanisme are exuberant and gifted young people, overjoyed at the prospect of helping a man with real ability. The allies of the later play are models of stodgy respectability and are conceited, untalented, and somewhat sinister. Furthermore, Scribe used the five-act format of La Camaraderie to expand the moral framework of his subject. Thus, the denouement is most explicit in allotting rewards and punishments and in suggesting that both are inevitable, at least in the long run. The “good” characters are well developed, and they frequently argue with members of the “camaraderie” on such basic issues as the nature of genius and true friendship. Although most of the comrades are little more than idiots, Scribe does try to provide motivation for the villainess, Césarine. Unrequited affection for Edmond and the frustration of a loveless marriage help to explain the ruthlessness of her character, but any sympathy she might inspire is far outweighed by her constant exploitation or persecution of others and by the overconfidence and lack of self-knowledge that cause her to fall into Zoé’s trap. Césarine, like the vast majority of Scribe’s characters, is not shown as having internal conflicts. Even in soliloquies there is hardly time for introspection; moving from one crisis to the next usually suffices to absorb all the character’s attention.

The White Lady

As Scribe’s earliest contact with the theater was the comedy-vaudeville, it is hardly surprising that he was drawn almost at once to the related genre of comic opera (alternating spoken dialogue with original and more complex music, performed by professional singers and full orchestra). In 1825, he produced a work which virtually revolutionized the genre, The White Lady. Scribe provided an engrossing, well-constructed plot, combining the mystery of a ghost story with a perfectly logical explanation; he also showed great skill in arranging the musical numbers to coincide with the high points of the action, rather than interrupting its progress.

Masaniello

Scribe was no less innovative in the field of opera (sung throughout and including a mandatory full-length ballet). His verse, while quite singable, is uninspired and at times inferior, but as usual his main contribution is excellence of plot selection and construction. Beginning with the epoch-making Masaniello, in which the title role was performed by a dancer, Scribe broke definitively with the static and slow-paced settings of mythological stories that characterized most of earlier French opera to compose sweeping historical epics that he often set in the Middle Ages or in the Renaissance. As in the historical plays, the adventures of invented characters are intertwined with those of historical figures, allowing for constant excitement and suspense. In comparison to the plays, however, the librettos generally feature less-complicated plots, for Scribe knew that singing is harder to understand than speech; instead, there is far more pageantry and local color, which is splendidly integrated with the new prominence of the chorus (especially in mob scenes) and with the required ballet. In many cases, Scribe provides an unhappy ending in which innocent characters become the victims of a larger tragedy, such as civil war or religious persecution. In contrast to Italian librettos of the same period, those of Scribe contain few arias, concentrating far more on duets, trios, choruses, and large ensembles. The arias, however, are dramatically effective, for here characters often undergo agonizing internal conflicts and are torn between incompatible emotions and obligations.

The Huguenots

The Huguenots, one of Scribe’s most powerful grand operas, has seen occasional revivals in the twentieth century, but because of the extreme difficulty of Meyerbeer’s score, as well as the huge expense required for the elaborate costumes, scenery, and special effects, the work has little chance of becoming part of the standard repertory. Set in Paris in 1572, The Huguenots dramatizes one of the blackest chapters in French history, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in which Catholics murdered nearly all the Protestants in Paris during a truce declared in honor of a royal wedding celebration. As in the story of Romeo and Juliet, a Protestant knight and a Catholic noblewoman fall in love and are destroyed by the religious strife. To emphasize his own abhorrence of religious persecution, Scribe made four of the main characters advocates of toleration, flanked by fanatics of both camps. Marguerite of Valois, sister of King Charles IX, is to be married to the Protestant Henri of Navarre (later Henri IV). Learning that her favorite lady-in-waiting, Valentine, loves the Huguenot Raoul, Marguerite decides to unite them, in conjunction with her own wedding, as a gesture designed to discourage further bloodshed. Because of a misunderstanding, Raoul publicly refuses the match, and Valentine is forced to wed another man. Although the plan of the Catholic fanatics, headed by the heroine’s father, to assassinate Raoul in retaliation for this insult is foiled, their general massacre of the Huguenot community shortly thereafter succeeds all too well.

The pageantry and special effects that distinguish grand opera are lavishly displayed in The Huguenots. There are three indoor settings and three outdoor settings (not counting the brief final scenes) of great complexity. Act 1 shows a dinner party in the home of Count de Nevers, with a full view of the gardens. Although largely concerned with exposition, the act does surround Raoul with an aura of mystery, for he tells how he has fallen in love with a beautiful woman whom he has rescued from a mob but whose identity he does not know, and soon thereafter he receives an invitation to be taken blindfolded to a meeting with another unknown lady (Marguerite). Act 2, set in gardens of the Château de Chenonceaux, includes a dance for female bathers and ends with the ceremony in which Marguerite’s attempt to reconcile the factions ends in failure. Act 3 is the most spectacular of all, requiring a complex set portraying the banks of the Seine with two cabarets, a chapel, and a view of Paris in the rear, as well as an illuminated barge that sails into view at the end of the act, carrying musicians, servants, and wedding guests. Choruses of Huguenot soldiers, Parisian students, workers, townsmen, and police are active, engaging at one point in a street brawl that manages to save Raoul’s life. For good measure, Scribe adds a ballet for a troupe of gypsies. Act 4, set in the home of de Nevers, now the husband of Valentine, features the chilling scene in which the Catholic leaders, soon joined by an armed crowd, give the orders for the massacre of the Huguenots and have the swords blessed by a trio of monks. Raoul, having sneaked into the house and overheard the plot, jumps off a balcony to warn his friends. Act 5 opens in the ballroom of the Hôtel de Sens, where a bloodstained Raoul interrupts the royal festivities to announce that the massacre has already begun. The scene then shifts to a cloister where women and children have come to take refuge. As Valentine, now a widow, is married to Raoul, Catholics break into the church and murder those within. This grisly scene is followed by another in which the lovers, having managed to escape, are slain in a dark street by Valentine’s father, as the horrified Marguerite tries to restore order. The opera unquestionably captures much of the grandeur, the brutality, and the unbridled energy of sixteenth century France.

Scribe certainly did not invent grand opera by himself. Meyerbeer and Doctor Louis-Desire Véron, the director of the Paris Opera who was not afraid to take risks to make that institution profitable, deserve much of the credit, as does the Romantic movement that Scribe disdained in his spoken drama. He was among the first, however, to appreciate the suitability to musical drama of the Romantic fascination with history, the supernatural, the horrifying, and the cosmic, along with chiaroscuro effects and impetuous, antisocial heroes. Ultimately, the popularity of Scribe’s grand operas would outshine the Romantic theater of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, père. Scribe understood better than most how much of a framework the text must provide and how much could and should be left for the composer. At the same time, he always insisted on keeping opera firmly within the bounds of theater, integrating the music with well-crafted, exciting plots and an abundance of visual splendor.

Bibliography

Canby, Vincent. “Getting to Know Scribe as More than a Street.” Review of The Ladies’ Battle, by Eugène Scribe. The New York Times, December 25, 1995, p. A31. A review of the Pearl Theater Company’s performance of Scribe and Ernest Legouvé’s The Ladies’ Battle (entitled When Ladies Battle for the New York performance).

Cardwell, Douglas. “The Role of Stage Properties in the Plays of Eugène Scribe.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 16 (Spring/Summer, 1988): 290-309. An examination of the staging of the plays of Scribe.

Koon, Helene, and Richard Switzer. Eugène Scribe. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A basic biography of Scribe that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index.

Pendle, Karin. Eugène Scribe and French Opera of the Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research, 1979. A looks at Scribe’s role in developing the opera of nineteenth century France. Bibliography and index.