The Battle of Hernani

Today, February 25th, is the anniversary of the so-called "Battle of Hernani" when partisans for and against Victor Hugo fought in the auditorium of the Comédie-Française.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Metropolitan Opera streamed this evening (available until Friday night) Giuseppe Verdi's operatic version of the play, Ernani. Like the original play, the opera is not terribly realistic, but it wasn't meant to be. It was the plot's over-the-top Romanticism that provoked audience members to resort to fisticuffs back in 1830.

The title character of the play is a bandit who gets into an unlikely love triangle with the beautiful Doña Sol, the King of Spain, and Doña Sol's elderly guardian Don Ruy Gomez de Silva. During the pivotal third act, the guardian has arranged to marry Doña Sol against her will, but Hernani shows up in disguise. Ruy Gomez offers hospitality to Hernani, not aware of who he is, and then the king shows up and carries off the would-be bride.

Sound crazy? It gets even crazier. Ruy Gomez refuses to give up his guest in spite of the fact that he really wants him dead, so duty-bound he is to the laws of hospitality. Hernani needs to go and rescue Doña Sol, but Ruy Gomez won't let him leave until he makes a promise. In order to escape and save his love, Hernani gives a horn to Ruy Gomez, promising to die when his enemy sounds the horn, if he will only give him a chance to rescue Doña Sol.

The fourth act takes place in a chapel that holds the tomb of Charlemagne. The king is awaiting his election as Holy Roman Emperor, but conspirators, including both Ruy Gomez and Hernani, are planning to assassinate him. The king (naturally) hides inside the tomb and surprises the conspirators. It turns out that Hernani is actually the exiled John of Aragon, the king is elected Emperor Charles V, everyone gets pardoned, and Doña Sol finally becomes engaged to her one true love. (That would be John/Hernani.)

You know what the problem is with giving your sworn enemy a horn and promising to kill yourself as soon as he sounds it and calls for your death? Well, sometimes he waits until the fifth act, shows up at your wedding, and then sounds the horn so you have to die. Then you and your bride both end up taking poison, your rival kills himself, and the whole stage gets littered with bodies.

Verdi's opera ends a bit differently, with Hernani (called Ernani) and his love (called Elvira in the opera) stabbing themselves instead. Also, old Gomez de Silva also doesn't off himself at the end (at least not in the Met's production). The lovers get to die to beautiful music, though, and that makes all the difference.

The Battle of Hernani in 1830 fell short of an all-out riot. A few people were arrested, but the play was allowed to finish, and it went on to run for a total of 39 performances. The Met's production won't be available for nearly that long. It disappears at 6:30 pm on Friday, so catch it while you can!

The Drama of Celebrity

 I recently finished Sharon Marcus's delightful book The Drama of Celebrity. Focusing on the career of legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, the book examines the interplay of celebrities, the media, and the various publics they both serve.

In her first chapter, "Defiance," Marcus discusses how the open defiance of convention practiced by celebrities like Bernhardt can actually enhance their fame. Celebrities create social exceptions in which they win the approval of society precisely by going against that society's demands. These celebrities shamelessly display their abnormalities rather than hiding them, as Bernhardt did with her unfashionably slender physique, large nose, and frizzy hair. "Defiant celebrities appeal not only to the marginal and to the outcast, but to anyone who has ever wanted to bypass conventions," Marcus writes.

Her next chapter, "Sensation," looks at the desire of audiences and critics alike to willingly submit to a star's overpowering performance. As an example, Marcus cites Bernhardt's exit at the end of Act Four of Victorien Sardou's La Tosca. After killing the villain Scarpia, Bernhardt's character (according to Sardou's stage directions) "takes a carafe of water, wets a napkin, cleans the blood from her hands, and removes a small spot from her dress." Marcus notes, however, that the Chicago drama critic Sheppard Butler was fascinated by how Bernhardt "finger by finger, scrubbed the blood from her hand." By isolating each finger individually, Bernhardt slowed the action down just when the audience wants the heroine to get away as quickly as possible. At the same time, the stage business delayed the exit of the star everyone had come to see, prolonging the audience's enjoyment.

Chapter Three is entitled "Savagery" and deals with depictions of fans as being true fanatics who are capable of violent disorder. "Celebrities by definition attract large followings, but their very popularity usually inspires a vocal minority to resist the general euphoria," Marcus writes. Critics thus tend to characterize fans as "gullible, ignorant, and unruly." Depictions of Bernhardt's fans show them as anarchic, and after her first American tour, French caricaturists felt free to indulge in ridiculous stereotypes of Americans, frequently portraying Native Americans, African Americans, and Mormons in blatantly offensive ways to "other" her fan base in a drastic manner. At the same time, depictions of Bernhardt herself often exaggerated her large nose and unruly hair, sometimes adding Stars of David into pictures, just to make sure their anti-Semitism came across loud and clear.

In "Intimacy" Marcus delves into attempts by fans and stars to form an important bond (or at least the illusion of a bond) between the two. While previous critics have discussed the "remediation" of a piece of art in one format into a new format, Marcus argues that fans clipping images and pasting them into a new context are not so much engaging in remediation as "resituation." Fans collecting photos, programs, articles, and ticket stubs in scrapbooks nevertheless engage with the material they resituate in a new location. In an era long before Pinterest or Tumblr, theatre fans could resituate images next to one another, and thus close "the gap between the players themselves and between celebrities and fan." According to Marcus, such resituation "registers work that hovers between production and consumption, looking and making, and speaks above all to a desire to bask in celebrities' presence by collecting, handling, and holding their representations."

Marcus's next chapter, "Multiplication," points out that while received wisdom tells us "multiplying the star's image dilutes celebrity and undermines the star's uniqueness" in reality "the more copies, the more celebrity." She interrogates the writings of Walter Benjamin, who postulated that the age of mechanical reproduction destroyed the aura of a unique object. Reproducibility, Marcus argues, replaced the aura with a "halo of the multiple" in which "apparent singularity is intensified by copying." Bernhardt, rather than diminishing hunger for her bodily presence with duplication, ensured that she would always have a live audience by posing for countless photographs, then by recording her voice, and later by starring in more than a hundred motion pictures. Though most of Bernhardt's films are now lost, they contributed to the demand to see her on stage, rather than decreasing it.

Chapter Six on "Imitation" might seem closely related to the multiplication discussed earlier, but Marcus instead focuses on failures of imitation. Her central thesis of the chapter is that celebrity imitation is "a privilege that members of dominant groups often seek to deny those in subordinate ones." She bypasses José Esteban Muñoz's theory of disidentification to focus instead on depictions of ethnic and racial minorities failing in their attempts at mimicking white celebrities. While Marcus comes up with some compelling examples for her arguments, I found it strange that she seems to ignore so much theory from the past 20 years. For instance, in discussing a story about Henry James failing to impersonate Bernhardt, she notes that there is "more than a hint of gay shaming" in the account. Shouldn't that remind us of J. Halberstam's notion of "queer failure"? Like Muñoz, Halberstam is oddly absent from the book.

The following chapter on "Judgment" examines how not just critics but also ordinary fans engage in the process of evaluating performers. Throughout the nineteenth century, audiences became less rambunctious, more likely to sit quietly and listen rather than shout their approval or boo to show disdain. Fan letters and scrapbooks display the judgments of audience members, though, and Marcus provides plenty of amusing examples. A correspondent wrote to the actor Edwin Booth stating, "Your constant contortions render your part monotonous." Another theatre-goer, on seeing James O'Neill in The Count of Monte Cristo, wrote in a scrapbook that the performance had "sunk lower than any play which might have been acted and dramatized by a child of six years old."

Marcus's final chapter on "Merit" looks not just at how fans have judged individual performers, but how they have compared those performers to one another. Originally, fans and critics alike relied on historical competition, for instance comparing Bernhardt to the earlier star Rachel Felix, or to Mademoiselle Mars, who originated the part of Doña Sol in Victor Hugo's Hernani. People could also compare stars to other living performers, especially when actors developed what Marcus calls shadow repertories. This is when actors deliberately pursue roles already made famous by their peers. Bernhardt did this when she played the lead in Sardou's La Sorcière, which had previously been played by Pat Campbell. In some cases, stars have even developed mirror repertories, in which two actors perform the same role in rapid succession.

Ultimately, the book argues that celebrity culture is a lot more complicated than many of its critics are willing to admit. Some celebrities like Bernhardt can deftly handle their fans and the press, but they are still reliant upon both. Media moguls play a big role, but they have failed again and again when they have tried to foist an unpopular celebrity on an unwilling public. Ordinary individuals have some agency, but our access to celebrities is always mediated through something else, whether it's a producer, a journalist, or an Internet platform. As Marcus concludes, "no single person or force can ever be assured of permanent victory."

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.

Playwriting in Post-Revolutionary France

What was it like for playwrights during the French Revolution? Though he wasn't born until 1801, the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve gave this account of Revolutionary writers:

When the Revolution came and disturbed these minor literary lives, instead of readings in the salons, one had "Sunday luncheons." For at least fifteen years, at these luncheons, the literary guests exchanged confidences... one told one's friends the subject and plan of one's work before a single line of it was written. No sooner had the first acts been scribbled down than a reading was given.

This rosy depiction of the Revolutionary era appears to be more or less accurate. The Chapelier Law of 1791 had struck down the censorship practices of the old regime, and over the next year the number of theatres in Paris more than doubled. Working-class people flocked to the theatre, and there was a tremendous demand for new work. Sainte-Beuve claimed that the old forms simply did not speak to a public that was living in a new world:

...if we were still living under a monarchy like that of Louis XIV or Louis XV, what more would we require, I ask you, than the admirable emotional analyses of Racine, or the philosophic dramas of Voltaire? Even after the Revolution, during the ten years of the Empire, wasn't the absence of freedom enough to revive, in the context of Austerlitz and Jena, the classical tragedy of the monarchy which, excepting Corneille, was so foreign and incongruous?

Writing in 1828, after France had embraced a constitutional monarchy, Sainte-Beuve saw the present as being closer politically and socially to those heady Revolutionary days. Still, he lamented the fact that the theatre was not as vibrant as it once had been. Politics, he said, had curbed art, since now audiences went to the theatre to escape rather than to debate important political questions. Still, he was optimistic about the future:

Free from the vortex, art, still youthful, yet ripe with experience, will pursue her peaceful work in solitude. This work will be animated with all life's colors and all mankind's passions. This product of leisure and meditation will doubtless encompass and intermingle in thousands of charming and sublime effects the true and the ideal, reason and fantasy, the observation of men and the poet's dreams.

Victor Hugo's breakthrough Romantic drama Hernani was still two years off, but Eugene Scribe had begun writing plays. Sainte-Beuve believed that Scribe's vogue was a good reason for optimism.

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.