Find all episodes of the “Theatre Battles” series here.
Victor Hugo spares no effort or pain to make his HernaniA gripping drama created on February 25, 1830 at the Comédie-Française, it was accompanied by a monstrous fuss to ensure its launch with fanfare. “I put my piece in your hands, only in your handshe wrote to his romantic comrades. The battle that will begin in Hernani is that of ideas, of progress. It is a common struggle. We are going to fight against this old, besieged and blocked literature. Let us take hold of this worn-out flag that is hoisted on these worm-eaten walls and let us throw away this tinsel. This headquarters is the struggle of the old world and the new world, we are all from the new world.” (Victor Hugo told by Adèle Hugo1863).
What are these ancient worlds from which the poet and playwright seeks to emancipate himself? And to which new world does he claim to belong? Leader of French Romanticism, whose genre he theorized in 1827 in his Cromwell’s PrefaceHugo campaigns for a style stripped of its embellishments. He is 27 years old and yearns for vibrant, grotesque, pathetic, lyrical, trivial, inappropriate, excessive theatre. In a word: alive. With HernaniA drama in five acts and more than 2,000 verses, it torpedoes classicism and destroys the rules of place and time that still governed the 19th century.my century the march of tragedies.
There is nothing revolutionary in the story of the play. In 1519, Hernani won the love of Doña Sol, who was given to him by his rival, the King of Spain, but he was murdered on his wedding night and his fiancée followed him in death. The form, on the other hand, is impressive. Hugo already sweeps away the unity of place and time. The scenes take place in Spain and Germany, the heroes run from one city to another, which implies a multiplicity of settings. And then the language passes from the prosaic to the poetic, the verses come off their hinges. “I dislocated that big idiot Alexandrine.”The poet laughs. Hugo finally feels comfortable with the political stature of a king dominated by his rival, who treats him as ” little » either “ insignificant ».
The eminent specialist writer Anne Ubersfeld (1918-2010) writes in her theatre dictionary (Albin Michel, 1998): “ The provocative vigor of the style, the boldness of the situations, the paradoxical greatness of the characters, the impossible love, the permanent presence of death delighted a young man who saw in the work (…) the standard of freedom finally set out in art. » Hernani It is a manifesto for a total theatre aimed at a popular and modern audience.
You have 76.07% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
