Abstract: Rostand is not included among the key figures of the revolution in theater that took place in the late nineteenth century. Too verbal, romantic, and heroic, his theater is considered part of the past. Yet his material imagination and taste for scenic exactitude bring him closer to the putative father of modern staging. Nonetheless, this desire for the concrete makes use of a mode of writing that does not reduce stage directions to a mere stenography of the performance. Scenic poetry passes through a poetry of stage direction, “limiting wishes but not the dream” (Chantecler).
