Diderot hoped that theatergoers who attended these realistic and stylistically unaffected plays would “believe that they were among their family, and [would] forget that they were at the theater.”7 In describing just how such plays should be staged, Diderot is generally credited with inventing what is now commonly referred to as the theory of the fourth wall. Beseeching future actors to forget the audience and their highly codified and stylized forms of acting, he writes: “Imagine a great wall on the edge of the stage that separates you from the parterre. Act as if the curtain did not
