Prosper Mérimée is little known as a playwright and is chiefly remembered for his novella Carmen (1846), which provided the basis for Georges Bizet's celebrated 1875 opera. Yet Mérimée began his literary career in 1825, when he was twenty-one, with a collection of plays that pioneered Romantic drama in France several years before Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas père. Rarely performed in the nineteenth century, Mérimée's plays had to wait nearly a hundred years until changes in sensibility after 1917 gave them a second life in France and Russia. Jacques Copeau and his disciples Louis Jouvet and Charles Dullin revealed the theatricality of Mérimée's dramas to French audiences, while in the Soviet Union the plays were promoted by Communist repertory committees and performed by avant-garde companies. Marginal to the mainstream of nineteenth-century French drama...