Triumvirate (Voltaire)
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| Title: | Le triumvirate |
| Genus: | tragedy |
| Original language: | French |
| Author: | Voltaire |
| Publishing year: | 1766 |
| Premiere: | July 5, 1764 |
| Place of premiere: | Paris |
| Place and time of the action: | Comédie-Française |
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The Triumvirate is a tragedy in five acts by Voltaire . The piece, written in 1763 and performed only once, appeared at the end of 1766 under the full title Octavian et le jeune Pompée ou le Triumvirate .
action
The action takes place on an island in the Lavinius River between Bononia and Mutina during the negotiations for the second triumvirate . The younger Pompée ( Sextus Pompeius ) loves Julie ( Iulia ), the daughter of the murdered Lucius César ( Julius Caesar ) and thus becomes a rival of Octave ( Augustus ). Pompée tries to kill Octave in which he sees the tyrant and rival. However, Octave turns out to be extremely generous. He gives Pompée his life and gives him Julie's hand. Pompée admires Octave for his demeanor, but still feels obliged to the republic.
Literary source and biographical references
The tragedy Le Triumvirat is one of five adaptations of a model by the writer and later censor Prosper Jolyot Crébillon, who was hated by Voltaire . As Voltaire frankly admits in the foreword, he was not concerned with the correct representation of historical references, but rather with the exemplary demonstration of Roman virtues, a practice that he called Verité thêatrale (theater truth ). Le Triumvirat was created in 1763 at the height of Voltaire's commitment to tolerance and, through the treatment of the Roman proscriptions, suggests temporal references to the practice of expelling and exiling the Reformed.
Performances and contemporary reception
Le Triumvirat was premiered once, anonymously after Friedrich Melchior Grimm, on July 5, 1764 in the Comédie-Française . Voltaire withdrew the piece for adaptation immediately after the premiere.
Going to press
Voltaire got the printing from Lacombe in Paris in the autumn of 1766 . It was published at the end of the same year with the indication 1767. Friedrich II. Received a revised copy of the manuscript in early November 1766.
Addition
In addition to a short explanatory foreword, Voltaire added two important prose texts in the appendix: Du gouvernement et de la divinité d'Auguste and Des conspirations contre les peuples ou Des proscriptions . Both texts were later included in the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie and therefore no longer added to the tragedy by the editors of the Kehl edition.
First edition
- Octave et le jeune Pompée ou le Triumvirat , Chez Lacombe, Amsterdam and Paris, 1767, 180 pp. [1]
literature
- Manuel Couvreur: Triumvirate (Le) In: Raymond Trousson, Jeroom Vercruysse, Jacques Lemaire (eds.): Dictionnaire Voltaire. Hachette Livre, Paris 1994, pp. 238f.
- Siegfried Detemple: Octavian and the young Pompeius, in: Voltaire: The works. 300th birthday catalog. Reichert, Wiesbaden 1994, pp. 171f.
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Siegfried Detemple: Octavian and the young Pompeius, in: Voltaire: The works. 300th birthday catalog. Reichert, Wiesbaden 1994, pp. 171f.
- ↑ Manuel Couvreur: Le Triumvirat In: Raymond Trousson, Jeroom Vercruysse, Jacques Lemaire (ed.): Dictionnaire Voltaire. Hachette Livre, Paris 1994, p. 238.
- ↑ Manuel Couvreur: Le Triumvirat In: Raymond Trousson, Jeroom Vercruysse, Jacques Lemaire (ed.): Dictionnaire Voltaire. Hachette Livre, Paris 1994, p. 238.
- ↑ See Siegfried Detemple: Octavian and the young Pompeius, in: Voltaire: The works. 300th birthday catalog. Reichert, Wiesbaden 1994, p. 172.
- ↑ Avertissement des Éditeurs, in: Kehler Werkausgabe: Oeuvres completes de Voltaire, Volume 5, Kehl 1784, pp. 95f.