Alfred de Musset established his reputation as a poet and was, in fact, best known as a poet throughout the greater part of an artistic career of almost thirty years. It was not until 1847, with the successful productions of A Caprice (a comedy published ten years earlier) in St. Petersburg and at the Comédie-Française, that Musset began to enjoy comparable distinction as a dramatist. Additionally, Musset published an extensive amount of fiction, most of it in the form of contes, or tales, which are often full of wit and spirit but have fallen, perhaps undeservedly, into almost total neglect. In 1836, Musset’s one major novel was published, the semiautobiographical La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, 1892). This work is most notable for its vivid evocation of an era and its philosophical climate; the novel is a striking, extended depiction of nineteenth century mal de siècle. Musset’s nondramatic canon is rounded out by a number of often perceptive and forward-thinking critical reviews in the fields of literature, music, and the visual arts.

The early nineteenth century in France was an age of tremendous theatrical activity. Indeed, the theater was regarded by all literary factions—romantics, neoclassicists, philosophes—as the proving ground for the determination of true literary worth. The era was, nevertheless, more notable for its pronouncements about the nature of drama than for the viability of the theater that it produced. In this light, it is remarkable that Alfred de Musset’s “armchair theater” (as he referred to his style of dramatic writing), a theater designed to be read, not produced, should have not only survived its time but also increased in stature, while the works of most of his contemporaries have faltered. Musset’s comédies and proverbes, moreover, seem to be anachronisms in a period remarkable for its general lack of literary and dramatic humor. Their deft touch and light, ironic style, which owe much to the critical spirit of the eighteenth century, must have struck his fellow romantics as an outright challenge. This aspect of Musset’s drama was nurtured not only by his early exposure to Enlightenment literature and philosophy but also by his wide reading in several languages and his familiarity and respect for the ironic comic tradition of such earlier masters as Molière and Marivaux. Even in the arena of that pet genre of the romantics, the historical drama, it was Musset, not Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, père, or Alfred de Vigny, who, in Lorenzaccio, created the finest example of the genre in French theatrical literature.

Despite their being intended for a reading public, Musset’s best plays have been discovered as eminently suited for the stage, thanks to their author’s seemingly innate sense of the dramatic situation. During Musset’s lifetime, no one, least of all Musset, could have foretold that several of the plays would become staples of the classic repertory, nor could anyone possibly appreciate the foreshadowing of cinematic technique in the fluid, dramatic movement of Musset’s theater. Filmmaker Jean Renoir, for example, in La Règle du jeu (1939; The Rules of the Game, 1950) owes much to this latter aspect of Musset’s art (Renoir’s original concept of the film was, in fact, a retelling of The Follies of Marianne). In the twentieth century, Eric Rohmer embarked on a series of films whose collective generic heading, “Comédies et proverbes,” refers directly to Musset’s dramatic conception and subject matter.

It is clear, in France at any rate, that Musset’s stature as a dramatist is well established. It can only be hoped that...