ABSTRACT
The stage is an optical point…. Art leafs through the centuries, leafs through nature, questions chronicles, strives to reproduce actual facts, … restores what chroniclers have lopped off, rearranges what they have scattered about, detects and supplies their omissions, fills their gaps with imaginary scenes that have the colour of the time … Thus the aim of art is almost divine: to resuscitate, if it is writing history; to create, if it is writing poetry.
—Victor Hugo, Preface to Cromwell