Recommendations
Books Like Lorenzaccio
Best books to read after Lorenzaccio by Alfred de Musset
Readers drawn to Lorenzaccio's meditation on the corruption of idealism, its Shakespearean ambition, and Musset's political disillusionment will find the tradition of French Romantic drama, the Shakespeare he was responding to, and the novels that share his analysis of how political action destroys the soul.
- 1Buy
Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
The direct precursor that Lorenzaccio was written in dialogue with — both plays center on an intellectual hero who knows what he must do (kill a tyrant/uncle) and cannot be certain whether his inability to act cleanly is a function of excessive thought or genuine moral corruption; Musset's Lorenzo, like Hamlet, puts on a performance to gain access to the target and questions whether the performance has replaced the real self.
- 2Buy
Hernani
by Victor Hugo
The companion French Romantic drama that dominated the stage while Lorenzaccio was written to be read — Hugo's 1830 theatrical manifesto established the conventions of Romantic drama that Lorenzaccio exceeds; comparing the two plays shows how Musset pushed the genre's intellectual ambition beyond what the stage could accommodate, producing the supreme Romantic drama precisely by refusing to write for performance.
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The Confession of a Child of the Century
by Alfred de Musset
Musset's autobiographical novel and the companion text that shares Lorenzaccio's central theme — the corruption of idealism by the means of its own achievement; where Lorenzo is destroyed by the political performance he sustains in order to kill the tyrant, Octave de Malivert is destroyed by the romantic performance he sustains in order to survive heartbreak; both are studies in how the soul is shaped by what it does in order to survive.
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Richard III
by William Shakespeare
The Shakespeare play most directly relevant to Lorenzaccio's form — Richard III is the great monologue of self-analysis and political performance, the play in which the protagonist explicitly narrates his own villainy and asks the audience to hold both the performance and the performer in view simultaneously; Musset's Lorenzo inherits this device and turns it into a tragedy of self-loss rather than a tragedy of ambition.
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The Prince
by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Florentine political text that Lorenzaccio engages directly — Machiavelli's analysis of the prince who must use fraud and force to maintain power is the background against which Lorenzo's method of tyrannicide is implicitly measured; Lorenzo is a Machiavellian actor who discovers that Machiavellian means corrupt the ends they serve, which is Musset's Romantic critique of political realism.
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Ruy Blas
by Victor Hugo
The companion French Romantic play that explores a parallel political theme — where Lorenzaccio is the tragedy of the man who corrupts himself to destroy a tyrant, Ruy Blas is the tragedy of the man who rises to honest power from a position of social degradation and is destroyed by the same machinery that elevated him; together they define the range of Romantic political drama's analysis of power.
- 7Buy
The Betrothed
by Alessandro Manzoni
The Italian companion in the tradition of Renaissance Italian political fiction — Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi creates the seventeenth-century Lombardy that is the historical continuation of Lorenzaccio's sixteenth-century Florence; both are analyses of tyranny, popular helplessness, and the question of whether political virtue is possible in a world where power belongs to the corrupt.
- 8Buy
Brecht on Theatre
by Bertolt Brecht
The twentieth-century theatrical theorist whose analysis of political drama illuminates Lorenzaccio's structure retrospectively — Brecht's concept of 'historification' (the use of historical distance to produce political analysis rather than emotional identification) and his interest in the actor who both plays and comments on a role both find their Romantic precursor in Musset's Lorenzo, who is simultaneously the actor, the character, and the critic of his own performance.
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