ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an extreme form of fatherhood depicted in heroic and bourgeois tragedies of the long eighteenth century – that of the filicide, or father who kills his offspring. I use the term filicide instead of infanticide or child murder because the deaths depicted in the plays under consideration here primarily involve adolescent and adult offspring rather than infants or children.1 Although tragic plots involving filicide appeared throughout the eighteenth century – from Roman plays such as John Dennis’s Appius and Virginia (1709) and bourgeois tragedies such as George Lillo’s The Fatal Curiosity (1736) to sentimental dramas such as Charles Kemble’s The Point of Honour (1800) – reactions to this dramatic subject were complex and varied, and provide evidence of a significant shift over the course of the century in both the representation and the reception of filicide on stage. In the preface to his tragedy The Patriot, or the Italian Conspiracy (1703), for example, Charles Gildon explains that his aim to move audiences to “the strongest Compassion” with his play about a first consul who condemns his sons to death for treason “has raised the most ridiculous Objection, tho at the same time the most agreeable to me in the World, which is, that it moves too much” (A3v). An imitation of Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus (1681), The Patriot presented one of the executed sons as “too perfect and Virtuous,” Gildon says, making the filicide at the play’s center too agonizing to view with pleasure.2 When
Voltaire chose the same story for his tragedy Brutus (1730), it provoked similar objections. The journalist and critic Abbé Desfontaines, for example, described Brutus’ actions as “barbarous” and “unnatural” and claimed that the “fierce virtue” and “extreme severity” he showed in choosing the state over his children “caused me much pain” (quoted in Renwick 5: 113).3 Desfontaines further maintained that, although the play was “worthy of esteem,” its “tragic subject will never be treated successfully and in a manner that pleases by anyone, no matter who it is” (quoted in Renwick 5: 113).4 Critics and audiences tended to agree. The playwright and theorist Louis-Sébastien Mercier, for example, deemed Brutus a “monster” in his treatise Du théâtre (1773) and denounced the play’s tragic subject as revolting (“What use is the example if it revolts [my soul]?” [38]).5 Brutus meanwhile remained one of the very least performed of Voltaire’s plays between 1730 and 1780 (Lüsebrink 1873).
