Musset, (Louis-Charles) Alfred de

Musset, (Louis-Charles) Alfred de (1810–57), French poet and playwright of the Romantic era, and the one man who might have been able to fuse the new Romantic drama with the best of the classical tradition in the French theatre. Unfortunately the failure of his first play La Nuit vénitienne (1830) turned him against the stage, and for many years he wrote only plays to be read. It was not until 1847 that the Comédie-Française put on Un caprice, an immediate success which was followed in 1848 by Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée (A Door Should be Either Open or Shut) and Il ne faut jurer de rien (One Can Never be Sure of Anything). Although this encouraged Musset to write further plays for performance, and to revise some of his earlier ones for the same purpose, his real importance as a dramatist was realized only after his death. His plays show a delicacy and restraint quite unlike the work of his contemporaries Victor Hugo and Dumas père, suggesting rather the influence of Marivaux. They are either bitter-sweet comedies mingled with fantasy, such as Les Caprices de Marianne (perf. 1851) and On ne badine pas avec l'amour (There's no Trifling with Love) (perf. 1861), or scenes of social life usually illustrating some well-known saying, such as On ne saurait penser à tout (One Cannot Think of Everything, 1849). Musset's most important dramatic work, however, is the historical drama Lorenzaccio, written in 1834 after his tragic liaison with George Sand, about the assassination of Alexander de' Medici by his young cousin Lorenzo. In a drastically cut and rearranged version it was first staged in 1896 with Bernhardt in the leading role, a part often compared to Hamlet. There have been some important 20th-century productions of this play, notably in 1952 at the Avignon Festival, when Gérard Philipe both directed the play and appeared as Lorenzo, thus breaking the tradition which assigned the part to a woman. In 1933 an English version was produced in London as Night's Candles. Generally speaking, however, Musset's plays remain little known in England, probably because, like Marivaux, he does not translate easily.