Henry-François Becque

born April
18, 1837, Neuilly, Fr.
died May 12, 1899, Paris
dramatist and critic whose loosely
structured plays, based on character and
motivation rather than on closely knit
plots, provided a healthy challenge to the
“well-made plays” that held the stage in his
day. Although Becque disliked literary
theory and refused identification with any
school, he has been remembered as a
forerunner of the Naturalist movement, whose
chief exponent was the novelist Émile Zola.
From 1867
Becque tried his hand at various types of
drama, including vaudeville and a play on a
socialist theme. Les Corbeaux (1882; The
Vultures, 1913), his masterpiece, describes
a bitter struggle for an inheritance. The
unvaried egotism of the characters and the
realistic dialogue were unfavourably
received, except by the Naturalist critics,
and the play had only three performances. La
Parisienne (1885; Parisienne, 1943)
scandalized the public by its treatment of
the story of a married woman and her two
lovers. Its importance, like that of Les
Corbeaux, was not recognized until a decade
after its appearance. In his last years, a
withdrawn and somewhat misanthropic figure,
Becque devoted himself to journalism and to
a drama of the financial world that he never
completed.