ABSTRACT
Historians of the theatre have long insisted that the dramatic works of the last decades of the ancien régime, and especially those commonly referred to as drames, placed a new and unusual emphasis on the visual. 1 For it is clear even to a late twentieth-century reader that the authors of these drames freely borrowed methods and conventions from other contemporary forms of visual spectacle – not only from painting and dance, but also from the various stages of Paris’s fairgrounds, where wordless communication played such an important role throughout the eighteenth century. In this regard, the plays of Michel-Jean Sedaine are no exception. Even in his most famous ‘serious’ work, his first production to be mounted at the Comédie-Française, Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765), Sedaine made use of silent tableaux, mimed actions, sudden gestures and facial expressions that were intended to reveal otherwise unarticulated emotions, together with a range of other techniques appropriated from less elevated theatrical settings, including those unofficial theatres prohibited from employing spoken words. 2 The playwright treated these visual forms of communication variously, 40as silent divertissements between moments of focused dialogue and as complements to his characters’ casual verbal exchanges and sputtering, ellipse-ridden speeches. The result, though essentially a moralising drama, has often served as a prime example of the new aesthetic hybridity of the 1760s.
