Hugo, Victor-Marie

Hugo, Victor-Marie (1802–85), one of France's greatest poets, and the leader of the French Romantic movement. He was also a dramatist, whose plays mark the entry of melodrama into the serious theatre. All alike suffer from overwhelming rhetoric, too much erudition, and not enough emotion, yet by their vigour and their disregard of outworn conventions they operated a revolution in French theatre history. The best is Ruy Blas (1838), which has two excellent acts, the second and the fourth, and a superb ending. Of Hugo's other plays, Cromwell (published in 1827) was not intended for the stage and would take six hours to act. It was a battle-cry, and its preface became the manifesto of the new Romantic movement. Marion Delorme was banned on political grounds and not acted until 1831, a year after Hernani, whose first night led to a riot at the Comédie-Française. Lucrèce Borgia, Marie Tudor (both 1833), and Angelo, tyran de Padoue (1835) are prose melodramas. Le Roi s'amuse (1832), banned after one performance, was used for the libretto of Verdi's opera Rigoletto (1851). The vogue for Romantic theatre was bound to be short-lived. The failure of Hugo's last play, Les Burgraves, in 1843 showed that the tide had turned in favour of prose and common sense, and he withdrew from the stage, but not before he had brought back to it dramatic verse of a quality unknown since Racine, and of a totally different inspiration—lyrical, elegiac, colourful, and moving, conveying tragic and comic effects with equal skill.