Soon after the death in 1861 of Eugène Scribe, founder and master of the so-called well-made play, Victorien Sardou, Scribe's disciple in many ways, became the reigning playwright of the Parisian Boulevard stages. His knowledge of the prevailing frivolity of his time, in particular of the audiences for whom he was writing, as well as his vast erudition, his ability to detect dramatic potential (serious or comic) in whatever he read or heard, and to transform or adapt for the stage already existing materials and make them his own, are largely accountable for his enormous success. His sixty-odd plays include vaudevilles, comedies, melodramas, historical dramas, and féeries--fantastic plays requiring colossal stagings. A Sardou play as typically a tightly knit, straightforward, often melodramatic series of events leading in rapid succession to a climax followed by a happy ending. Lacking confusing subplots and psychological depth in...