“Theater is a prison,” Rousseau writes in his Letter to d'Alembert on the Theater, “a dark prison indeed.” This prison Rousseau knows well, having himself been a captivated spectator and, with some degree of success, a captivating playwright. His imprisonment and subsequent escape from the shackles of theater bestowed upon him the authority and, at times, the elation of the survivor. The tone of Rousseau's Letter to d'Alembert conveys a sense of victorious conviction, not a reactionary and rancorous diatribe against theater written in the servitude of a monarchy of histrions. Instead, the Letter is composed by a free thinker in a free republic who aspires to liberate spectacles from theater.

In the Letter to d'Alembert, Rousseau offers a plethora of details on the pernicious nature of dramatic literature and theater houses. On several occasions, he describes theater with metaphors of incarceration:

For Rousseau, theater is not only a corrupted and corrupting art form, as was repeatedly and stridently declared before him, most notably by Plato, Tertullian, and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet; theater is also a space that embodies the tyrannizing nature of the art it houses.