Hernani

HERNANI, Victor Hugo's third play, written when he was 28, was not so much a piece of theater as a bombshell dropped directly into the laps of les classiques, the conservative defenders of French drama and its perfect garden of rules, regulations and Aristotelian commandments of How Things Must Always And Forever Be. Deviation was considered heretical; innovation unnecessary, and to some minds, criminal. Into this boutique of delicate porcelain sensibilities strode Victor Hugo, club in hand. Hugo found it convenient to his mission essentially to become the world s greatest living author (he ultimately succeeded) to use Hernani to free French theater from the forces of darkness that held it prisoner. At the same time, he would launch the Romantic Movement in France, thereby liberating French poetry, French literature, French society, and a whole generation of bored young intelligentsia. He would get to the working poor and the rest of Europe later. Jean Cocteau had it right when he famously observed that Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo. Ah, but what a brilliant madman he was!from the Introduction by John Strand