Eugene Scribe

"...What amuses you most is not truth but fiction."

Eugene Scribe (1791-1861) & the "Well-made Play"

Eugene Scribe is generally credited with the perfection of the "well-made play." During his forty year career, he manufactured (as opposed to wrote) between 440 and 500 plays and libretti. He began as a writer of comédie-vaudevilles. [Vaudeville: from the 15th C drinking songs, popular ballads, taking the name of the town of writer Basselin, Vau de Vire. Later written as Vaudevire, corrupted to vaudeville. By the 18th C., French comedies interpolated songs and dances which were called vaudevilles. Even light comedies were called vaudevilles.] It was in these early attempts that Scribe learned how to send his audience home happy--in his phrase, bien content. The resulting formulas became le système du théâtre until well into the Twentieth Century and, truth to tell, are still with us in many successful scripts.

Scribe's earliest efforts (from about 1810) were aimed at the excesses of Romanticism and were largely unsuccessful, but in 1815, he had his first hit with Une Nuit de la Garde Nationale. From this time forward, Scribe manufactured hit after hit. This is not to say that his plays were free from controversy. The opening night of Un Verre d'eau at the Comédie-Française, saw a near riot because Mlle Mars resented the successful debut of a certain ingenue. The play itself is typical of Scribe's approach in which trivial actions or occurrences result in momentous, even catastrophic changes through a series of extremely logical plot elements. Bolingbroke, the central figure, recounts how he became Prime Minister because he could dance the Sarabande and lost his position because he took cold. Thereafter the whole of English foreign policy is reversed because a glass of water is spilled on Queen Anne's dress, which results in the disgrace of the Duchess of Marlborough, the collapse of the Whigs and the triumph of Bolingbroke.

By the early 1820's, he began to apply this audience-awareness to so-called "serious" drama. A full generation before Dumas fils, Scribe touched, albeit ever so lightly, on many of the issues that were to be the mainstay of "social drama." Surely his most famous and lasting play was Adrienne Lecouvreur (1849) written in collaboration with Legouvé. First performed by the incomparable Rachel, it became a staple in the repertoire of Sarah Bernhardt, and in translation in the repertoires of Mrs. Stirling, Mme. Ristori, Mme. Modjeska, Helen Faucit, Janet Achurch and others.

At the height of his career, Scribe was more or less a mini-corporation, employing many specialized assistants and buying ideas when his own supply was low, a practice used by all the late-night comedians even today. He developed a sort of formula for playwrighting. He even kept a card file of plot devices to which he could refer should the muse be reluctant to inspire.

By 1836, Scribe was sufficiently successful that he was admitted into the Academy. In his statement to the Academy on that occasion, Scribe set forth his Credo:

You go to the theatre not for instruction or correction, but for relaxation and amusement. Now, what amuses you most is not truth but fiction. To represent what is before your very eyes every day is not the way to please you; but what does not come to you in your usual life, the extraordinary, the romantic, that is what charms you. That is what one is eager to offer you...

And Scribe's popularity, coupled with the demand for new plays by the growing theatre audience, enabled him to change the position of the playwright in the business world. Heretofore, authors would sell their work outright, or settle for a benefit performance or two for their compensation. But Scribe's extraordinary popularity allowed him to negotiate a fixed percentage of gross receipts as a royalty for his work. This made him rich. And he subsequently founded the Society of Authors which made it possible for others to make similar negotiations

Scribe established a definite plot structure. For example, he decided on the number of "French scenes" in accordance with the principles governing the rhythm of units in pictorial design. Thus the "rhythm" of the appearance of characters, from the viewpoint of "rhythmic" composition, determined, to a great degree, the structure of the plot. The scenes themselves were composed in the same way as the whole play, each scene consisting of a status quo, at least one complication, a climax, all involving peripeties (reversals), and a conclusion--a virtually complete unit within the superstructure of the entire plot. It is now possible to see the abstract formalism in a play by Scribe in the same way that we can see abstract formalism in a painting by Ingres or David.

In a more or less conscious bow to Corneille, Scribe established his formal five-act structure:

Act I: Mainly expository and lighthearted. Toward the end of the act, the antagonists are engaged and the conflict is initiated.
Acts II & III: The action oscillates in an atmosphere of mounting tension from good fortune to bad, etc.
Act IV: The Act of the Ball. The stage is generally filled with people and there is an outburst of some kind--a scandal, a quarrel, a challenge. At this point, things usually look pretty bad for the hero. The climax is in this act.
Act V: Everything is worked out logically so that in the final scene, the cast assembles and reconciliations take place, and there is an equitable distribution of prizes in accordance with poetic justice and reinforcing the morals of the day. Everyone leaves the theatre bien content.

He applied his techniques to all sorts of plays: comedies, tragedies, fantasies, historical plays, even operas, but mostly to plays of contemporary life in order that the plays be topical, or at least seem to be topical. Even when the setting was remote in time and space, analysis reveals that time and place have little to do with the essence of the story and the characterizations. (As often as not today, we like to watch plays set in exotic locales and eras that show us not how unique or instructive that time and place may have been, but how very like our own they are.) But mostly, the plays were taken from the days headlines. They were aimed (as their modern counterparts are today) at the tastes of the newly semi-educated middle class who were the products of the national school university systems set up by Napoleon. These plays, by their very nature, became dated very rapidly, though their structures remain durable enough to warrant imitation.

Formal Characteristics of the Well-made Play

1] The play follows a strict logic of cause and effect.
2] The plot is based on a secret known to the audience and withheld from the major characters so as to be revealed to them in a climactic scene.
3] The plot usually describes the culmination of a long story, most of which has happened before the start of the play. This late point of attack requires that the audience be informed of the antecedent material in exposition in the form of dialogue or monologue. Scribe frequently used soliloquies and asides.
4] Action and suspense grow more intense as the play proceeds. This rise in intensity is arranged in a pattern achieved by the contrivance of entrances, exits, letters, revelations of identity, and other such devices.
5] The protagonist [hero] in conflict with an adversary, experiences alternately good and bad turns of fortune. This creates the emotional rhythm of the play.
6] The lowest point in the hero's fortune occurs just before the highest. The latter occurs in a scene a faire or obligatory scene, that characteristically hinges on the disclosure of secrets.
7] The plot, or part of it, is frequently knotted by a misunderstanding, a quid pro quo, in which a word or situation is understood in opposite ways by two or more characters.
8] The denouement--literally, the "untying"--(the resolution) is logical and, hence, clear. It is not supposed to have any "remainder" or unsolved quotient to puzzle the audience.
9] The over-all action pattern of the play is reproduced on a small scale in each act. It is, in fact, the principle according to which each minor climax and scene is constructed.

These elements are by no means unique to a well-made play, nor were they invented by Scribe. We can recognize some of them in Aeschylus. But the important thing here is the "recipe" invented by Scribe. And the fact that this recipe can be taught. Indeed, Scribe's most obvious successor, Victorien Sardou (the target of Shaw's withering epithet "sardoodleism"), is said to have learned his craft by reading Scribe's first acts and then plotting out the rest of the play to see how close he might come to the original.

Thematic Characteristics of the Well-made Play

1] The well-made play is almost always topical or seems to be. (See above)
2] The well-made play scrupulously avoids metaphysical concerns and all suggestion of radical, as opposed to merely incidental, evil in society. ( A villain may be radically, unchangeable evil, however.) The reason for these omissions is obvious: metaphysics (in the realm of epistemology) and evil (in the realm of social morality) are imponderables, at least within the two hours' traffic of the stage. Neither can be reduced to logic, and when they are explored, they lead to fundamental questions of the nature of reality. Such things would obviously play havoc with the structure of a well-made play. Ergo, in substance, at least, the well-made play is anti-romantic.
3] Avoidance of metaphysical and radical social evil does not mean the well-made play must avoid religion or conventional morality--quite the opposite. As long as the religious or moralistic opinions and sentiments do not raise fundamental questions about the given order of things, they may be usefully employed (whether sincerely or not is beside the point) to put a gloss on the situation and lend it a guise of profundity. The plays themselves must be a catalogue of middle class values centering on the family.
4} The well-made play almost invariably includes a difficulty between the sexes. The reason is obvious. In the 19th Century, this usually meant a matter of social or class incompatibility between married or engaged persons, money, differing moral standards, the presence of a "third party," or a "fallen woman," etc. In more recent time, these have taken on a Freudian tint. It is, of course, de rigeur that the difficulty or misunderstanding between the sexes is capable of a logical solution. (When Strindberg wrote The Father, he struck at one of the foundations of the well-made play.)

The "well-made play" depends on a conscious theatricalism, which is to say, a deliberate exploitation of the conventions of the theatre. Don Blakely posited that the well-made play was more "unabashedly theatrical than in any earlier period, save Euripidean Greece and that of the Jacobeans." Ostensibly holding the mirror up to reality, as does so much topical theatre even today, Scribean drama actually fled from it into a world of pure fabrication. In no sense did Scribe ever rise to challenge the presuppositions of his age, but in almost every true sense the spirit of his plays was directed away from the actual world. It was a bastard Romanticism, and its natural child, Hollywood. Its immediate, legitimate offspring (perversely unacknowledged) is the theatricalism of playwrights as different as Dumas fils, Shaw and even Ionesco. It is Scribe's emphasis on form--theatrical form--that made possible the thesis play and the problem play both of which figured prominently in the rise of Theatrical Realism.

The Well-made Play as a form of Rhetoric

We define Rhetoric as "the art of speaking well in prose, as distinguished from versification and elocution." A second meaning is: "artificial elegance of language." What Scribe did was to elaborate a rhetoric of drama that had not so much to do with construction of prose as it did with the construction of plots and scenes. Its theory was enunciated by Gustave Freytag in The Technique of the Drama (1863). he believed at the time that he was describing the laws of the drama for all time.

And like traditional rhetoric, this theatre rhetoric was a method for stirring hearers. Scribe systematized the method. Dumas fils, impressed with Scribean logic, wrote his plays backward, writing the denouement first, then constructing the rest of the play to led up to it, and the result was abstract characters and artificial seeming situations. Nothing could be further from the romantic ideal of "organic form."

Still, with minor modifications of form, and major alteration of substance, Shaw and Ibsen were writing things that structurally--rhetorically--fit the mold of the well-made play. And the particularly alert will see the progenitors of modern propagandists and today's ubiquitous social issue plays dealing with the disease or crisis du jour.

Scribe's emphasis on form has left an indelible imprint.