SOURCE: "Edmond Rostand," in The Contemporary French Theatre: The Flight from Naturalism, Rockliff, 1958, pp. 32-46.

In the essay below, Chiari examines the elements of Romanticism in Rostand's plays.

Edmond Rostand is not a major writer, yet somehow he is an important one. His importance lies in the fact that he is not only a kind of reaction to symbolist poetry, but a combination of the two strains—idealism and realism—which at the end of the nineteenth century were contending for pre-eminence, and also the representative of a great tradition in French poetry, the tradition of rhetorical poetry. Rostand's romanticism is counteracted by his rationalism and trust in reality, and these two contending tendencies assume, in turn, the mastery of his creative mind, or blend harmoniously in order to produce his best writings.

Rhetoric, which is found in the best poets, from Shakespeare to Racine, has now become...