Most great dramatists who have played a major role in the development of their national dramatic traditions--William Shakespeare and Molière spring immediately to mind--were actively involved in the theater of their times, but Alfred de Musset is an exception to the rule. His influence on French playwriting and stagecraft in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been, in retrospect, enormous; yet his career as a dramatist was marked at an early period by his complete withdrawal from the Parisian stage, during which time his best dramatic works were written. The main reason for Musset's absence was the noisy "fiasco" of his play La Nuit vénitienne, ou les noces de Laurette (The Venetian Night, or Lauretta's Wedding; translated as A Venetian Night, 1907) at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in 1830. When, following a successful production in 1847 of his one-act play, Un...