Blackwell Reference Online

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Contrary to a long-held view, French Romantic drama did not spring fully formed onto the Parisian stage with the premiere of Victor Hugo's Hernani in 1830. Perhaps because the controversy surrounding the performance of Hugo's play at the prestigious Comédie-Française was widely reported in the nineteenth-century press, recorded in the memoirs of Hugo's contemporaries, and enshrined in the pages of literary histories and schoolbooks from those times to ours, the work's debut was seen as marking a crucial aesthetic turning point. Modern scholarship has, however, put that contentious event into perspective and has made it clear that the battle generated by the production of Hernani was part of an artistic shift that had already begun earlier in the century.In fact, some of the first signs of the movement away from the formal conventions and traditional subjects of French neoclassical drama were already discernible in Louis-Jean-Népomucéne Lemercier's Pinto, ou La Journée d'une conspiration (Pinto, or The Day of a Conspiracy; 1800). The piece, which Lemercier saw as exemplifying a new dramatic genre – historical comedy – was written in prose instead of the alexandrine (i.e., 12 syllable) verse French playwrights typically employed in works of serious drama. Also unusual, though not entirely without precedent, was the fact that Lemercier's piece was set in “modern” Portugal (modern designating ... log in or subscribe to read full text