Victor Hugo (1807-85) was a formidable playwright as well as a leading French poet and celebrated novelist. His plays dispensed with the stultifying neoclassical rules and transformed French theatre history, introducing melodrama into the serious theatre. The first two plays in this volume, Marion de Lorme and Hernani, provoked storms of protest and controversy at the time: the former was banned by the censor in 1829, while productions of Hernani took place amidst pitched battles in the theatre where it premiered. It nevertheless revolutionised French drama by marking the advent of Romanticism. Two other plays, Lucretia Borgia, a tragedy in prose, and Ruy Blas, which is generally acknowledged as being his finest, complete this first volume of Hugo's plays in the English language.
Four previously untranslated plays for the World Classics series
Here are four characteristic and hugely important dramas by one of the most famous and influential European writers of the last two hundred years, translated into English for the first time, and in highly playable versions. An essential collection for students of both French and Drama
Four previously untranslated plays from a giant of French literature
Four characteristic and hugely important dramas by one of the most famous and influential European writers of the last 200 years, translated into English for the first time, and in highly playable versions.
Victor Hugo (1807–1885) was a novelist, poet and dramatist, and the most important of the French Romantic writers. He wrote over 50 novels and plays; his novel Les Miserables was famously adapted as a musical.
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An anthology of four characteristic dramas by one of the most famous and influential European writers of the last 200, translated into English and in highly playable versions.
Hernani; Marion De Lorme; Lucrece Borgia; Ruy Blas
Victor Hugo (1802-85) was a French dramatist, novelist, and poet who in 1830 was called "the most powerful mind of the Romantic movement". His early success came in drama, and he used the stage as a platform for his social and political ideas. Hugo published his forceful verse drama Cromwell in 1824. Three years later, he added a provocative preface supporting the claims of Romantic drama as against the French classical tradition and calling for works that combined tragedy and comedy in the free style of Shakespeare. The controversial Hernani, presented at the Comédie-Française in 1830, marked the beginning of a prolific period of playwriting, which was partly inspired by his love for the actress Juliette Drouet. Their affair began in 1833; she eventually left the stage and became his companion until her death in 1883. Hugo's other works included the verse-drama Le Roi s'amuse (1832), which was banned from the French stage but subsequently used by Verdi as the libretto for Rigoletto, and the prose plays Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor (both 1833). The failure of Les Burgraves (1843), together with the advent of realism in the mid 19th century, brought the Romantic experiment to an end. Owing to his opposition to the government, Hugo spent the years from 1851 to 1870 in exile, first in Brussels and then on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. During his exile he wrote a few plays and the epic novel Les Misérables (1862), which returned to the stage as a vastly successful musical more than a century later. He returned to Paris after the proclamation of the Third Republic and died in 1885. He was buried in the Panthéon after being driven there, at his own request, in a poor man's hearse. Richard J. Hand is Professor of Theatre and Media Drama in the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Glamorgan, UK.
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