ABSTRACT
The remarks of André Antoine that preface this selection, dating from 1890, signal the effective initiation of modern theatre; and propose lines of development for it which his own work in Paris with the Théâtre Libre did much to establish. They follow up Zola’s advocacy of a stage reformed on naturalistic principles, vigorously elaborated ten years before. Antoine’s aim was to realise such ideas in practice, and so enable theatre, in effect, to catch up with literature, where realism and its offspring naturalism were deeply established. Indeed, readers of Balzac and Flaubert might have said that the achievement of Antoine and his few fellow-spirits elsewhere was at last to drag theatre into the nineteenth century, some ten years before it ended.
