The Battle of Hernani

On this date in 1830, theatre patrons at the Comedie-Francaise in Paris fought the famed Battle of Hernani.

While there were no swords, muskets, or canons at this battle, the theatre did see some fisticuffs, and lots of shouting.

Here's what happened: Victor Hugo had created quite a stir with the preface to his play Cromwell. The preface argued for a new type of modern literature, which he explicitly labeled as Romantic. This literature found its ideal form in the drama, Hugo said, and it is characterized by a grotesque combination of the sublime with the ugly and demonic.

Wait, so the grotesque is a good thing? According to Hugo, the answer is yes. Cromwell was too large in scope to be practically performed even by a theatre with the resources of the Comedie-Francaise, though. (The play is more than 400 pages long, and at one point calls for the entire British Parliament to come on stage.) To put his theories to the test, Hugo needed to write another play.

The author had difficulty getting his next play, Marion de Lorme, performed. (The fact that it's about a famous French courtesan who intrigued with powerful men probably didn't help.) Hugo then had a try with a new play, Hernani, about a Spanish bandit and revolutionary in love with the same woman as the king. Censors decided the play was too ridiculous to ban, and it was approved for performance. Since it had already been published, everyone knew the play's plot and its most dramatic lines even before it debuted.

On February 25th, supporters and critics of the play crammed into the Comedie-Francaise, all with their own pre-formed opinions of the piece. Supporters (some of whom were paid by Hugo, in spite of claims to the contrary) agreed to cheer at key moments, while detractors were determined to boo the play regardless of how well or poorly the actors performed. In the end, few people were able to hear the actors anyway, such was the drama in the audience. Police made a few arrests, but the play went on, and after that chaotic first night, it continued to run for a total of 39 performances, making it a commercial success in spite of dividing the critics.

Hernani was a theatrical revolution, and it prefigured a political revolution only a few months later. In July, many of the theatre fans who participated in the Battle of Hernani took part in a real battle to oust the king, Charles X, and replace him with the "Citizen King" Louis-Philippe, who promised to rule as a constitutional monarch. Romanticism had triumphed on the stage, and now democracy was ascendant in the halls of government.

Today, Hugo is more famous for his novels than for his plays, but it's fitting that we remember his dramatic achievements, as well.

Romanticism (It's All in the Name...)

Three books, all with the same title, Romanticism, deal with the same topic. Indeed, all employ the same key word in discussing the art and philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet each of the books' three authors, Aiden Day, David Blayney Brown, and Michael Ferber, understand the term "Romanticism" in slightly different ways.

Day's work, published as a part of the New Critical Idiom series by Routledge, begins its introduction by quoting heavily from M.H. Abrams, whose book The Mirror and the Lamp helped to illuminate Romanticism for the 20th century. In his first chapter, "Enlightenment or Romantic?", Day then sets up the dichotomy between Enlightenment thinking and Romanticism that is often rehearsed by scholars. On the Enlightenment side are figures like William Godwin, who "argued that human beings act in line with reason and that it is impossible for them to be rationally persuaded by an argument without their conduct being regulated accordingly." Romanticism, by contrast, in the works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a "celebration of subjectivity."

The second chapter looks at constructions of the term "Romantic" which first appeared in the 17th century. Thomas Shadwell wrote disapprovingly of all things "Romantick" in the preface to his 1668 play The Sullen Lovers. By 1820, debates over Romantic literature raged on the European Continent, but Lord Byron declared he saw no conflict between the "Classical" and the "Romantic" among English writers. Later critics latched on to the term "Romantic" to describe a variety of authors in Britain, but Day warns against dubbing movements in retrospect. "Literature is not" he contends "something which can be regarded as occupying a 'trans-historical' space, but something which must be read as subject to the discourses and ideologies of a particular time and place."

Day's project is best summed up by the title of his third chapter: "Enlightenment AND Romantic." For Day, these two movements are inextricably linked. On the one hand, writers of the Romantic era continued to work towards the progressive social justice championed by Enlightenment figures like Godwin, while at the same time their focus did shift to that of the interior rather than the external world. A key figure here is Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose commitment to social change informed his "study of solitary imagination." Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein can even be read as a defense of Day's "and" proposition, since the broodingly interior Frankenstein must ultimately face the consequences of the creature he has unleashed onto the world. As Day puts it, "the writings of those who have formerly been defined as Romantic are not necessarily anti-Enlightenment in any simple sense."

Though that might seem a fitting conclusion, Day includes a final chapter on "Gender and the Sublime" analyzing some of the consequences of Romantic theory first postulated in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke. Certainly, Burke genders the sublime as masculine and its companion "beautiful" as feminine. Day's point, however, is that this gendering continued to influence Romantic poets. For instance, Wordsworth gendered Nature as feminine, but the female Nature only aided him in apprehending a higher "invisible world." This higher world, Day argues, is associated with the interior mind of the poet, and is thus gendered as masculine. Such arguments break down when the author is a woman, but Day contends that female writers of the period were skeptical of feelings of the sublime and instead focused on nature herself.

David Blayney Brown takes a different approach to Romanticism. While Day focuses on poets and novelists, Brown is interested in painters. He begins his introduction with an examination of Eugène Delacroix's painting The Death of Sardanapalus. He claims the "moral vacuum" at the heart of the piece is "all the more shocking for ignoring the message of the play by the English poet Lord Byron from which he had taken his subject." Notice that Day, discussing literature, ignores drama, while Brown, examining the visual arts, pays close attention to the theatre.

Brown finds a literary parallel for Delacroix's Romanticism in Victor Hugo, whose 1827 preface to his play Cromwell "advocated a rich variety of expression and experience to reflect the complexity of the world and the self, rather than the cold formalism of classical drama, and recognized the value of the ugly or grotesque in engaging the senses, rather than beauty in winning only admiration." For Brown, The Death of Sardanapalus is a "pictorial equivalent" to Hugo's theoretical preface.

Day emphasizes the continuity between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but Brown stresses how revolutionary the new movement was. He claims: "Not since the Renaissance had such a profound change come over the Western consciousness." Instead of incorporating a collective ideal, the Romantic artists "emphasized individual experience, feeling, and expression." This, of course, came from the French Revolution, which Day emphasizes, but also from the rise and fall of Napoleon. As Brown puts it: "Romanticism was born in opposition and sorrow, in social or national crisis and in individual trauma."

Brown traces the term "Romantic" to Friedrich Schlegel, who in the first issue of the journal Athenaeum in 1798, identified the Romantic with "progressive universal poetry" not based on "inherited and culturally specific forms." Schlegel was writing in the German university town of Jena, which became a hotbed of Romanticism. Though not in Jena, the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe contributed greatly to the movement as well, and Brown cites Goethe's 1789 play Torquato Tasso as an inspiration for Delacroix's Tasso in the Madhouse, painted fifty years later.

Tasso was a Renaissance poet and playwright, but more modern poets also provided inspiration to Romantic artists. Brown cites Thomas Chatterton, a poet whose suicide in 1770 inspired Henry Wallis (painting in the 1850s) to create the magnificent Death of Chatterton, now hanging in the Tate Gallery in London. The cult of Chatterton was not confined to England, either, as Brown observes that the French writer Alfred de Vigny turned the poet's story into the play Chatterton, which "was a hit in Paris in 1835."

So while Day is interested in Romanticism as a philosophical movement in dialogue with the Enlightenment, Brown sees it as an artistic movement born of political turmoil. Michael Ferber wrestles with both of these concepts in his Romanticism, which bears the subtitle A Very Short Introduction. For him, Romanticism is both an intellectual movement and an artistic movement, and while he sees both sides as distinct, he does not seem to emphasize one over the other. Both of these elements, the philosophical and the aesthetic, are present in the pre-Romantic movement Ferber identifies as Sensibility.

Sensibility is a term that was much more in use in the eighteenth century than "Romantic" or "Romantick." It was associated with such works of "storm and stress" as Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and with Gothic writers, including Horace Walpole and Matthew G. Lewis. Ferber also connects it to poets like Mary Robinson, as well as the hugely influential critic and novelist Madame de Staël.

While Ferber successfully traces elements of Sensibility into Romanticism, he definitely seems to be coming at Romanticism from a position of greatly misunderstanding the period's drama. I can overlook his calling Shelley's Prometheus Unbound the poet's "greatest work" as that is a matter of taste. Downright strange, however, is Ferber's comment that Byron's Manfred is "unperformable." Is Ferber really unaware of the many, many successful performances there have been of Manfred? Samuel Phelps was probably the most famous actor to produce the play, but Manfred became so popular that toy theatre versions were made.

For all its faults, though, Ferber's book does give a decent introduction to Romanticism. It attempts to be more balanced than either Day or Brown, gazing into the philosophical and the aesthetic alike. In the end, as Ferber suggests, neither side can be fully understood without the other.

The Haunted Stage

I've been reading Marvin Carlson's book The Haunted Stage. His central thesis is that while all literary texts bring up recollections of works from the past, performance is inherently even more about memory, since every element of a performance brings up recollections of past performances.

A play like Hamlet relies on the fact that audiences have seen other plays before and are familiar with the basic concept of a revenge tragedy, and probably with the story of Hamlet as well. The actor who is playing Hamlet has played other roles before this one, and audiences have likely seen, or at least heard about, other actors playing Hamlet. The costumes, scenery, lighting design, even the blocking probably resemble elements from other plays. Finally, the physical theatre where the play is performed likely conjures up memories of other performances. Even if an audience member has never been in that particular theatre before, he or she probably has seen other theatres to compare with it.

Carlson is aware of how all texts are "haunted" by the past, but he notes that the theatre is a special place due to its physicality. There is a phenomenological element to performance that necessarily complicates and enriches it to a level far beyond that of a simple text. He calls this "ghosting" and describes it this way:

Unlike the reception operations of genre (also, of course, of major importance in theatre), in which audience members encounter a new but distinctly different example of a type of artistic product they have encountered before, ghosting presents the identical thing they have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context. Thus, a recognition not of similarity, as in genre, but of identity becomes a part of the reception process, with results that can complicate this process considerably.

The key point here is that it is "the identical thing" itself that is recycled, whether it be the script, the actors, the sets and costumes, or the theatre building. Of course, today we frequently expect sets and costumes to be used for one production and then only brought out for a new play if they have been considerably modified. Carlson points out that this is not always the case in non-Western theatre, and it did not used to be the case in the West, either.

He cites the Romantic era as the locus of this shift in the West. Specifically, he mentions Victor Hugo's preface to his play Cromwell, in which the French author rails against the neoclassical tradition of setting every play in the same neutral antechamber. For Hugo, the historical spot where an incident occurred was important, and the passionate feelings of Romantic artists, Hugo included, led to a demand that each new production make efforts to be historically and geographically accurate.

While we no longer expect every production of Julius Caesar to be set in ancient Rome or each new production of Macbeth to be costumed like medieval Scotland, we do expect new set and costume designs for a new production. Still, they will likely remind us of other designs we have seen in the past, and we cannot help but compare them to the elements used in these past productions.

Going back to the Greeks, playwrights have been concerned not simply with telling stories, but with retelling them. Here again, Romanticism changes things, placing a new emphasis on "innovation, individuality, and uniqueness," as Carlson puts it.

But what is the great Romantic text if not Goethe's Faust? And was not Faust inspired in part by the puppet plays that were performed throughout Germany in Goethe's day? And were not these plays in turn inspired by earlier plays, including perhaps productions of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus that likely toured Germany during the 16th and 17th centuries? Carlson points out that Paul Valery wrote a version of the story titled My Faust, though in a way each new telling is an author's own version of a common tale, My Oedipus, My Hamlet.

In the third chapter, Carlson remarks on an audience's ability to see not just an actor on stage, but the ghosts of all of the previous roles inhabited by that performer. He also notes the rather obvious fact that writers "ghost" actors into the texts that they write:

Goethe and Schiller conceived their productions with the specialties of Weimar actors in mind, Voltaire for the actors of the Comedie Francaise, Moliere for the company in which he was the leading player. Even a playwright like Ibsen, with very tenuous ties to his major producing organization, is revealed through his letters to be quite concerned with the specific actors that would perform his roles and with what associations and physical and emotional characteristics they would bring to the roles, certainly predictable concerns in any dramatist who writes with an eye toward stage realization.

This of course leads to the idea of the "vehicle play," which Carlson defines as a work constructed precisely to feature the already familiar aspects of a particular actor's performance." As examples, he cites Sardou's plays for Sarah Bernhardt and Rostand's plays for Benoit-Constant Coquein.

Notes on Victor Hugo

Although most people think of Victor Hugo primarily as a novelist, he had a tremendous impact on the Romantic stage, both as a theorist and as a playwright. By the time he wrote the verse drama Cromwell in 1827, Hugo had already established himself as a prolific poet. He wanted the play (which runs more than 400 pages) to be performed, but when that proved impossible for political reasons as well as the obvious practical ones, he had it published. First, though, he penned a lengthy preface that was destined to have a greater impact on theatre than the play itself.

The ideas Hugo celebrates in the preface, the breaking down of civilization into successive stages, the glorification of Shakespeare, the embracing of the comic and grotesque, were not unique to him. Scholars have noted predecessors in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Horace Walpole, and the Italian writer Count Girolamo Gratiani, who wrote his own play based on the life of Oliver Cromwell more than a century earlier. The fact that Hugo borrowed ideas from other theorists, however, should not take away from his achievement in penning a vital manifesto of Romanticism.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the popular theatres of Paris were experimenting with innovative melodramas that appealed to sentiment and utilized sophisticated and exciting staging. The old guard, however, as typified by the Comedie-Francaise, subsisted almost entirely on a diet of Racine and his pale imitators. With Cromwell, Hugo declared the theatre's independence from Neo-classical rules. From now on, he argued, plays should be judged on how well they work, not on how well they mirror the ideals of some theorist.

The preface divides history into three epochs: primitive times, represented by the ode, for which the great literary work was the book of Genesis; ancient times, represented by the epoch, for which the great writer was Homer; and modern times, for which the ideal literary form is the drama. Instead of revering Racine, the preface holds up Shakespeare as the ideal writer. The Bard, like all great dramatists, "unites the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the ridiculous, the tragic and the comic," Hugo said.

Cromwell, for all its faults, strives to live up to these ideals. In the fourth act, for instance, a group of Cromwell's fools hide and watch a sequence of extraordinarily dramatic events. When the action is over, they emerge from their hiding places and laugh at it all. The play is both tragic and comic at the same time. Most of the characters, including Cromwell himself, are not simply heroes or villains, but rather quite a bit of both.

Hugo's lengthy preface might be a bit excessive. However, excess is part of the point. Hugo was trying to shake off the Neo-classical restrictions that were masquerading as good taste. He wanted dramatists to think big, and his writing style showed them precisely how they could do that. The old guard and their moderate, measured dramas were to be swept away by a new world of passion and feeling.

The old guard, however, was not about to go quietly. In the past, Hugo had been a staunch defender of the Bourbon monarchy that was restored after the fall of Napoleon. (His politics would change drastically, and he later became an equally staunch republican.) He enjoyed a royal pension and the support of King Charles X. Still, royal censors banned Hugo's play Marion de Lorme for allegedly anti-monarchal passages in its fourth act, even after the author personally presented a copy of the offending act to the king himself.  As recompense, the government increased Hugo's pension by 4,000 francs, but the attempt to co-opt the writer backfired. In a public letter, Hugo spurned the money, writing, "I had asked for my play to be performed, and I ask for nothing else."

Hugo became the darling of the left, and his next play, Hernani, seemed so over-the-top that censors decided to let it be performed, figuring no one could take the ridiculous drama seriously. Hernani explores the simple (perhaps simplistic) theme of the importance of honor, as opposed to Cromwell, which contains a cynical analysis of power politics. The hero is a disinherited nobleman living the life of a bandit. Like Hugo, he rejects compromise and lives by his own code. Ultimately, the noble bandit accepts death rather than going back on a promise in which he has pledged his honor.

On February 25, 1830, a few months before revolution would rock the streets of Paris, Hernani opened at the Comedie-Francaise. The play is only about 20 percent as long as Cromwell and has a fraction of the earlier play's gargantuan cast. (At one point, Cromwell infamously calls for the entire parliament of Great Britain to walk on stage.) In spite of some accounts to the contrary, Hugo apparently hired a claque to cheer at the right places. He then reinforced the claque with an army of young volunteers eager to thumb their noses at the establishment. Traditionalists were there in force, as well, and the stage was set for the so-called "Battle of Hernani."

To the disappointment of conservatives, there was no actual riot, which would have allowed the authorities to move against the young Romantic theatre fans. However, rival cheers and boos made the play difficult to hear, and fistfights broke out leading to a few arrests. The play ran a total of 39 performances, a considerable run for the time, and ended with a victory for the Romantic cause. That July, many of those who took part in the Battle of Hernani took part in very real battles in the streets as Charles X was overthrown and replaced by the liberal "citizen king" Louis-Philippe. Many contemporaries saw Hernani as an attack on the Bourbon monarchy, and now that monarchy was no more. A left-leaning king styled himself "King of the French" rather than "King of France" to emphasize his power came from the people.

It was a new era for the country, and a new era for Hugo as well. The following year, he published The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The book would give him a new reputation not as a poet or playwright, but as a novelist. The year after The Hunchback of Notre Dame was published, Hugo wrote the play The King Amuses Himself, which was banned after a single performance. The play portrays the historical King Francis I as a womanizer, and censors felt this could be seen as a reflection on the current King Louis-Philippe. The incident won Hugo even more fame as a champion of liberalism. Giuseppe Verdi (who had already made an operatic version of Hernani) later turned the play into the opera Rigoletto, but the librettist had to change the character of the king into a fictional Duke of Mantua in order to please censors.

In 1838, Hugo wrote what many people consider his greatest play, Ruy Blas. The tragedy tells the story of a servant who gets dressed as a nobleman as part of a practical joke, but who then rises to become the lover and chief advisor of the queen. It opened not at the Comedie-Francaise but at the more populist Theatre de la Renaissance. After running for 50 performances it was taken off the boards to please one of the theatre's business partners. The fashion for Romantic dramas on sweeping historical themes was beginning to fade, and Hugo's next play, Les Burgraves, failed spectacularly.

The failure of Les Burgraves in 1843 came during a particularly hard year for Hugo. His eldest daughter, Leopoldine, drowned together with her new husband when the boat they were in capsized. Five years later, revolution swept France again, ousting King Louis-Philippe and establishing the Second Republic. In the presidential election that followed, Hugo supported Louis Napoleon-Bonaparte, nephew of the famous emperor. Hugo became increasingly suspicious of the politician, however, and his worst fears were confirmed in 1851 when the president initiated a coup d'etat. The president now held supreme power, and the following year he staged a sham election that proclaimed a new empire.

Hugo had made himself an enemy of Louis, who now styled himself Napoleon III in deference to a cousin who never actually reigned. In order to avoid arrest, Hugo fled to Brussels and then took up residence in the Channel Islands, first in Jersey and later in Guernsey. It was while in exile that he wrote Les Miserables, as well as a book on Shakespeare. Though originally intended as a preface for a translation of Shakespeare's plays into French, William Shakespeare grew to become another major theoretical work by Hugo. In addition to discussing the work of the great English playwright, it also delves into the literature of Homer, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, and others. As in the preface to Cromwell, Hugo argued for the importance of individual genius. His own genius, however, had led him to become an exile. The man hailed as France's greatest writer could not live in France.

That changed in 1870 when Napoleon III fell from power during the chaos of the Franco-Prussian War. Hugo returned to Paris, weathering the siege of the city. He gave moral support to the revolutionary Paris Commune, though he did not actually take part in it, and he fiercely condemned some of its methods. After the Commune was suppressed and a devastated, war-torn France hobbled back toward normalcy, Hugo could finally take his place as the nation's preeminent man of letters. The anti-establishment Hugo was now a part of the establishment.

It was a changed France, though. Gone were the crooked streets of Paris that Hugo had once made famous. During the Second Empire, the government had replaced the maze of strange, irregular roads and alleyways with broad, planned boulevards. (These straightened streets were what allowed the government to put down the Commune with such ruthless efficiency.) A new order, not Neo-classical, but modern, had taken root. Gone were the revolutionary ideas of Romanticism. Even revolutionaries these days were turning to stern, rationalistic theoreticians like Karl Marx.

Still, there were perks to being Victor Hugo. In 1877, Hernani was revived with Sarah Bernhardt playing the heroine, and the production ran 300 performances. In honor of Hugo entering his eighth decade, France held nation-wide celebrations. The government even changed the name of the street where he lived to Avenue Victor Hugo. The author of Cromwell could no longer claim his genius was unrecognized. When Hugo died in 1885 at the age of 83, he was given a state funeral, with his coffin placed under the Arc de Triomphe and then brought to the Pantheon where his remains were laid to rest.

In death, Hugo had one last swipe at the establishment. While he professed to be a devout believer in God, Hugo was also a harsh critic of organized religion. In his will, he forbade church services for his funeral, asking instead for each soul to pray for him. In true Romantic fashion, he remained faithful to his passion for the individual spirit. One last time, he rejected established institutions and took his exit in his own fashion.