Excerpt from Dramatic Theory and Practice in France 1690-1808 This book, begun in 1914 as a series of lectures, was put aside owing to the pressure of other work till the present year. It attempts to trace the development of comedie, tragedie, and drame in France in the eighteenth century, and thus to define the relation between the dramatic art of the seventeenth and that of the nineteenth century. It will be seen that during the period from 1690 onwards drame gradually superseded classical comedy and tragedy, and that when these two genres revived toward the end of the century, they were both tinctured with the manner of the drame serieux. During the years of Revolution, serious drama took on a political colour, while the Napoleonic wars were fatal for the time to any new inspiration. The drama of the Romantic movement, together with the theories that accompanied that movement, will be seen to have had their roots in the dramatic experiments of the eighteenth century. A detailed study of certain plays of the Revolution period will be found in the Appendix. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."