How many readers of, say, a Molière play, trying to visualize its performance 300 years ago, are aware that the stage was occupied not only by actors and actresses, but by dozens and, in the next century, hundreds of spectators as well? Indeed, it would appear that not even the history-conscious Ariane Mnouchkine, auteur of the recent film Molière, was well informed about this practice. Her scene depicting Molière's legendary collapse as he played the Malade imaginaire includes not a one of the 24 spectators who, according to the Registre d'Hubert for February 17, 1673, were sitting on the stage at that performance.

To review in detail the history of scholarship on the raisonneur in Molière would be to incur the charge of tedium often levelled against the character. In general, criticism in the last thirty years has steered a middle course between Michaut and Bray, between a well-filled gallery of spokesmen and a categorical: “il n'y a pas de raisonneurs dans le Théâtre de Molière” (“there are no raisonneurs in Molière's theatre”). Most of Michaut's raisonneurs have gone the way of Saint Christopher, and few commentators still heed the authorial voice Michaut so often heard.

Although the modern reputation of Molière is based upon a group of major comedies, these were not the sole source of his popularity during his lifetime. He and his troupe performed many minor plays which are no longer prominent in the Molière repertory. Among these plays is a group which feature a comedian named Sganarelle, a role always performed by Molière himself.

On the notorious question of sensibility—whether or not an actor should really “feel” the emotion he expresses—Denis Diderot brought off the best known volte-face in the history of acting theory. An erstwhile champion of inspiration and emotionality in theatrical performance, he came to believe, by the time he wrote the Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773), that an actor should not attempt to experience inwardly the passions he enacts onstage. Considerable speculation and controversy have attended Diderot's late substitution of head for heart as the mainspring of theatrical emotion.

In 1820 Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri (1782–1868) and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) were the two most successful set designers in Paris, and for a two-year period (1820–1822) they shared the most prestigious design position in France: chief designer at the Paris Opera. During the Empire both men had worked at the Opera under the supervision of the designers Degotti and Isabey, Cicéri as a staff painter specializing in paysages and Daguerre as a day laborer specializing in the painting of architectural detail. In 1816, when Cicéri was promoted to the position of chief designer at the Opera, Daguerre worked briefly on his staff.

Like other major theatre artists at the turn of the twentieth century, André Antoine sought a new theatrical style to replace the dominant strain of realism. His development of naturalism and his championing of the cause of the school of Becque, Brieux, and Jullien are commonplaces of theatre history, but Antoine's efforts to extend his style, chiefly by applying it to a repertory of classical plays, have not received a great deal of attention. While it is easier to consign Antoine to a naturalistic pigeon hole, a consideration of the innovative course of his later career might help illuminate our similarly eclectic era.