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Books Like Lorenzaccio
Best books to read after Lorenzaccio by Alfred de Musset
Musset's 1834 play — the greatest French Romantic drama — about Lorenzo de' Medici who spends years corrupting himself to assassinate Duke Alessandro and free Florence, only to discover the corruption is real and the assassination changes nothing. Unperformed in the nineteenth century; first staged 1896 by Sarah Bernhardt.
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Buy on AmazonLa Confession d'un enfant du siècle
by Alfred de Musset
The prose companion — the same diagnosis of the post-Napoleonic generation's self-destructive idealism, in the context of Musset's personal life rather than Renaissance Florence.
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Buy on AmazonHamlet
by William Shakespeare
The great predecessor that Lorenzaccio both inherits and revises — Hamlet also delays action, also questions whether the great individual deed can change political reality, also destroys himself in the process.
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Buy on AmazonRuy Blas
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's 1838 Romantic play — the closest French contemporary: a lackey who rises to minister of Spain through love, and is destroyed when the queen cannot acknowledge him publicly.
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Buy on AmazonHernani
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's founding Romantic drama (1830) — the Battle of Hernani that made Romantic theater possible, four years before Lorenzaccio took that theater further than it had planned to go.
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Buy on AmazonRichard III
by William Shakespeare
The Richard III model of the villain-hero who corrupts himself so completely that the mask becomes the face — the closest Shakespearean parallel to Lorenzo's self-transformation.
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Buy on AmazonThe Cenci
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley's verse drama of political murder and moral corruption in Renaissance Italy — the English Romantic approach to the same material that Musset treats in Lorenzaccio.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Lorenzino de Medici
by Alfred de Reumont
The historical account of the real Lorenzo de' Medici that Musset drew on — reading the history alongside the play reveals how completely Musset transformed and radicalized his source.
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Buy on AmazonThe Robbers
by Friedrich Schiller
Schiller's founding Romantic drama of the noble outlaw — the German ancestor to the Romantic hero whose idealism corrupts itself through contact with the real world that refuses his idealism.
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