Brutus - Voltaire

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Résumé :
Brutus is Voltaire's Roman tragedy of liberty, duty, sacrifice, and the severe demands of republican honour. Set in the early Roman Republic, the play centres on Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of Roman liberty, as he is forced to choose between his duty to the state and his love for his son. Voltaire turns an ancient Roman subject into a sharp Enlightenment drama about tyranny, law, political principle, paternal feeling, and the terrible cost of public virtue. First produced in 1730, Brutus shows Voltaire using classical tragedy to examine the conflict between private affection and civic responsibility. The play's Roman setting gives it historical grandeur, but its real force lies in the political and moral question at its centre: what must a free republic demand from those who claim to defend it? Translated by William F. Fleming, this edition is a strong Wilder title for readers of French drama, Enlightenment literature, political tragedy, Roman republican history, classical theatre, and eighteenth-century European writing....

Sommaire:
Voltaire (1694-1778), born Fran?ois-Marie Arouet, was a French writer, philosopher, dramatist, historian, satirist, and one of the central figures of the Enlightenment. Famous for his wit, scepticism, criticism of religious intolerance, defence of civil liberty, and opposition to arbitrary power, Voltaire wrote across nearly every major literary form: plays, poems, histories, philosophical tales, essays, letters, polemics, and works of criticism. His best-known writings include Candide, Letters Concerning the English Nation, Philosophical Dictionary, Zadig, Microm?gas, and numerous tragedies and historical works.Although modern readers often know Voltaire chiefly as a philosopher and satirist, drama was central to his public reputation during his lifetime. In plays such as Brutus, Za?re, Mahomet, M?rope, and The Orphan of China, he used classical and historical subjects to explore power, fanaticism, religion, family obligation, tyranny, and political freedom. Brutus is especially important as a political tragedy, placing Roman republican virtue against private affection and giving dramatic form to the Enlightenment's continuing argument with inherited authority, civic duty, and the demands of liberty....