ABSTRACT
Voltaire’s dramatic productions number about fifty, mostly tragedies ; but though the author have held enthusiastic converse about plays with many persons, he have very seldom found anyone who had read Voltaire’s and never anyone who liked them. During his life-time no one but his enemies and Englishmen would have even suggested that Shakespeare was Voltaire’s equal, far less his superior. At the pompous burial of Voltaire in the Pantheon in 1791 the facade of the Comedie Francaise bore this inscription in vast letters. The ingredients of Voltairean tragedy are always skilfully varied in different proportions; if Racine predominates, there are nevertheless artful thefts from Corneille and Shakespeare, Quinault and Sophocles. Voltaire was extremely attentive to popular taste, watching the effect of his lines on the audience, cutting, altering, re-writing, to comply with their whims.
