Theatre
Chatterton
Alfred de Vigny · 1835
Opening lines
Kitty Bell
Il me semble que j’entends parler monsieur ; ne faites pas de bruit, enfants.
I think I hear the master talking; don't make any noise, children.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from fr.wikisource.org
Synopsis
London, in the eighteenth century. Chatterton, a poor young poet, rents a modest room from John Bell, a wealthy industrialist, and silently loves his host's wife, Kitty Bell. A Quaker, a friend of the household, tries to advise him. Driven by poverty, the poet has written that morning to the lord mayor, Beckford, to obtain a post, and he awaits the reply. The play sets his sensibility against the materialistic, calculating world around him.
Context
The play was first performed at the Comédie-Française on 12 February 1835 and published the same year. The author had drawn it from an episode of his book Stello, published in 1832. It is inspired by the life of the English poet Thomas Chatterton, born in Bristol in 1752, who had passed off his own verses as those of an imaginary fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley. Marie Dorval, then involved with the author, played the role of Kitty Bell. The tight construction borrows its unities from classical theatre.
Who it is for
A brief drama, which can be read in one sitting; it sheds light on the material condition of writers in the Romantic era.
Prizes and reception
Received with enthusiasm by the public, the play fixed the Romantic figure of the poet misunderstood by a mercantile society.
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