Eugène Scribe

Augustin Eugene Scribe was the first-- and certainly the most prolific-- French dramatist/librettist of the European popular theatre. He was born in Paris on Christmas eve 1791 to a prosperous silk merchant, who was determined for his son to pursue a career in law. Scribe's interests were drawn to the theatre and he began writing plays in his teens. He was undaunted by his first effort, "Le Prétendu sans le savoir" failing miserably at the Paris Varieties in 1910 and was determined to find some mechanical plot formula that would appeal to the Franco middle class across all theatrical genres: comedies, dramas, operas and tragedies. He hit on the idea of having a seemingly simple misunderstanding drive tight plots, events often snowballing into near catastrophic effect with his characters (more often than not, the modern French bourgeoisie) having to run a gauntlet of obstacles in hopes of avoiding embarrassment or earning redemption. His plots often began simply enough, but quickly became a series of clever twists and turns, and his audiences loved watching those beyond their social caste brought down several pegs, with spiraling plot twists leading to an explosive climax just before the final curtain. Scribe's plot formulas worked well across all the genres and he welcomed collaboration with numerous playwrights (most notably 'Ernest Legouvé') as a means to expand his wealth and influence. He also welcomed writers capable of transforming his voluminous amount of earlier works into other forms, primarily operas. He created a think tank plot factory that employed writers assigned to various aspects of a particular play working within his mechanical plot parameters: story, dialogue, writing comic lines for individual characters, grinding out hundreds of works. Often he discovered one of his writers had inadvertently stolen jokes from others and it became something of a badge of honor for another playwright to receive compensation for a "Scribe." Most of the time these playwrights would be oblivious of the plagiarism. At his peak, Scribe was a combination Gilbert & Sullivan, Henry Ford and Milton Berle. A small number of his collaborative works were adapted to Broadway as early as 1855. Among his most successful plays, "Adrienne Lecouvreur" remains popular, both in it's original form as a tragedy and as the basis for the 1902 operatic adaption "Adriana Lecouvreur," which has been produced several times for French and Italian audiences. It was filmed by MGM in 1928 as Dream of Love (1928) as a silent starring Joan Crawford. His generosity toward collaborators seldom extended to theatrical producers (in Europe of the day, this was usually the owner of the venue itself), as he was well aware of his importance in French theatre and placed hefty financial demands on producers, whom he held in low regard throughout his lifetime. He died in Paris at age 69.