Known to posterity as the third king of the French melodrama, Victor Ducange was a playwright of striking originality who brought important innovations to the French stage. Between 1813, the year he began to write, and 1833, the year he died, Ducange wrote more than forty plays. Thirteen were written in collaboration with other playwrights, a common practice at the time, and all were produced in Paris on the so-called minor stages--les petits théâtres.

Ducange wrote many comedies, but the genre in which he excelled, and to which he devoted more than two-thirds of his writings for the stage, was the melodrama. Often disparaged for stereotypical characters, lack of realism, and grandiloquent rhetoric, the melodrama prolongs the tradition of revolutionary oratory, but does so only formally. In the plays of the first two kings of melodrama, Louis-Charles Caignez and René-Charles Guilbert de Pixeré...