Voltaire’s masks: Theatre and theatricality

Abstract

In 1944, on the 250th anniversary of Voltaire’s birth, the poet Paul Valéry praised him as a man who tried his hand at every literary genre, who had a go at everything, tragedy, epigrams, history, epic, short fiction, essays, and that vast correspondence (un homme qui sest essaye dans tous les genres, qui a touché à tout, tragédie, épigramme, histoire, épopée, contes, essais, et cette correspondance innombrable). Valéry’s account recalls that of the eighteenth-century actor-cum-historian Claude Villaret, who as early as 1759 sought to explain the success of this ingenious and sublime author (cet auteur ingénieux et sublime): ’Superior in almost every literary genre, it is above all through t..