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The study of dramaturgy has generally been the purview of literary critics and theater scholars. For those disciplines, it has meant identifying and explaining mutations in successive versions of a given text or analyzing the structural or stylistic elements of an author’s plays. In this article, playwriting for the Comédie Francaisein the eighteenth century is approached as a social practice,occurring at the conjuncture of two broad, historical trajectories: first, the bureaucratizing and modernizing tendency of the absolutist government;and second,the dissolution of a system of elite protection and patronage, which since the founding of the royal theater in 1680, had structured French literature and established the status and identities of writers. This article examines both the royal regulations and implicit “rules of the game” for those seeking to have plays performed by the royal theater and concerning compensation and literary property in the final decades of the Old Regime.As a result of reforms to the royal regulations by court aristocrats, aspiring gens de lettres found that the Comédie Française became less accessible as a venue for entry into and achievement of personal legitimacy in literary life.