Recommendations
Books Like Hernani
Best books to read after Hernani by Victor Hugo
Readers drawn to Hugo's battle for Romantic drama, the sublime-grotesque hero, and the revolutionary 1830 premiere that defined French Romanticism will find Hugo's other plays, the Romantic drama tradition he challenged, and the literature that grew from his theatrical revolution.
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Ruy Blas
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's greatest theatrical achievement after Hernani — a lackey who rises to become the queen of Spain's chief minister and secret lover; Ruy Blas develops Hernani's themes of the noble soul in the ignoble social position into Hugo's most complete dramatic statement, and its famous third act is considered the peak of French Romantic drama.
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Marion de Lorme
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's companion play written in 1829, the year before Hernani — a courtesan reformed by love, whose petition to the king for her lover's life is refused; banned by the censors before Hernani was staged, it shares Hernani's themes of social outcast, royal power, and romantic sacrifice, and was Hugo's first fully Romantic drama.
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Lorenzaccio
by Alfred de Musset
The companion Romantic drama by the other great French Romantic playwright — Musset's 1834 play about Lorenzo de' Medici's assassination of the tyrant Alessandro is the supreme achievement of French Romantic drama in the closet play form; more psychologically complex than Hernani, it defines the anti-hero whose idealism is corrupted by the means of his own liberation.
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Don Carlos
by Friedrich Schiller
The German Romantic drama that Hugo read before writing Hernani — Schiller's 1787 tragedy about the Spanish Infante's love for his stepmother, set at the same Spanish court as Hernani, is the direct precursor; Hugo's verse drama borrowed Schiller's Spanish setting and his interest in the romantic hero destroyed by the collision of love and political power.
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Cromwell
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's 1827 preface to this unperformable closet play is the manifesto of French Romanticism — the document that defined the sublime-grotesque contrast and argued for the mixture of tragedy and comedy that Hernani performed; reading the preface is essential to understanding what Hugo thought he was doing with Hernani and why the audience was so inflamed.
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Antony
by Alexandre Dumas père
The companion Romantic drama staged the year after Hernani's triumph — Dumas's 1831 play about a bastard hero whose illegitimacy makes him an outsider in bourgeois society brought the Romantic drama controversy to its social conclusion; while Hugo was fighting classicists, Dumas was fighting the censors of adultery, and together the two plays defined what Romantic theatre was for.
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The Cid
by Pierre Corneille
The seventeenth-century French masterpiece that Hernani was attacking — Corneille's 1636 tragicomedy about honor, duty, and love in medieval Spain is exactly the kind of noble dramatic hero and classical verse form that Hugo's Hernani was designed to overthrow; the play's place in the French canon explains why the premiere of Hernani was so politically charged.
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The Romantic Agony
by Mario Praz
The canonical scholarly study of the Romantic hero as erotic and fatal type — Praz's 1930 analysis of the femme fatale, the Byronic hero, and the aesthetics of pain and death in European Romantic literature is the essential companion for understanding Hernani's place in the broader European movement; the chapter on the Romantic hero applies directly to Don Hernani himself.
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