ABSTRACT
The posterity of Augustin Eugène Scribe, playwright and librettist (1791-1861), might well be a match to the fate of many of the characters in his 425 plays and almost 140 librettos or ballet scenarios1-they endure a few hardships in order to succeed rapidly in life, only to be forgotten as soon as they leave the stage. Though his name may hardly be recognized by modern theater spectators, Eugène Scribe was the most successful and prolific play writer of the nineteenth century, a feat rewarded by his election to the Académie Française in 1834 and by an impressive number of translations and performances of his plays on most European stages during his lifetime. This enabled him to be the first fully professional French dramatist, having built a fortune on his writings and earning revenues by attracting large audiences. Thus, Scribe is considered to have been the main contributor to the emergence of the theater industry,2 making famous the Thêatre du Gymnase, founded in 1820, to the point that his comedies were labeled comédies du Gymnase by Jules Janin (1804-74) in his critical columns in the prominent Parisian Journal des Débats.3 Not surprisingly, he was also a founding member of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques in 1827, which successfully negotiated with theater managers a quota of 15 per cent of the profit of each performance, establishing a fairer practice at least for the most successful authors.
