ABSTRACT
If the popularity of a genre is to be measured by the number of plays written and performed, the vaudeville is without question the most popular genre of the nineteenth century. Literally thousands were written, though most of them had only an ephemeral existence. Licences for the secondary theatres in the nineteenth century generally specified the vaudeville as one of the genres they might perform. Where theatre programmes were long, particularly in the first half of the century, it was usual to combine one or more vaudevilles with the melodrama of the evening, but the vaudevilles, requiring less ambitious staging, changed more frequently than the main play. As melodramas began to extend themselves to three, four or even five hours and to fill the entire bill, the vaudeville was gradually squeezed out. Some theatre licences were tied to the vaudeville-such was the case of the Variétés, the Vaudeville (named after the plays that made up its repertoire), the Palais-Royal and later the Gymnase. For the theatres classified as ‘forains’ or ‘curiosités’, as the Funambules or Luxembourg (Bobino), the vaudeville often constituted a step towards legitimacy. Initially perceived as a minor genre deriving from fairground antecedents, the vaudeville evolved in various
ways over the course of the nineteenth century. Eugène Scribe, writing for the more middle-class Gymnase, endowed it with a form of respectability and, in many cases, blurred the distinction between comedy (which remained within the preserves of the Comédie-Française) and vaudeville. Théâtre reviewers began to take account of the vaudeville as a slight form, but not necessarily beneath their notice. A marked feature of the main vaudeville houses was the way in which they progressively became smarter and more elegant, especially during the Second Empire, changing the very value of the term ‘boulevard theatre’ from something popular to almost the exact opposite.
