Recommendations
Books Like Lorenzaccio by Alfred de Musset
Works where political action and personal identity are shown to be constitutively linked
Musset's Lorenzo assassinates a tyrant and discovers that the mask he wore for three years has become his face — the deception necessary for political action has corrupted the political actor. These works share that same question: what does acting in the political world do to the self that acts?
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Buy on AmazonHamlet
by William Shakespeare
The explicit model — Musset is writing a Hamlet for 1534 Florence and 1834 France: the intellectual who cannot act, who destroys himself in the act of acting; Lorenzo is Hamlet if Hamlet had actually killed Claudius and discovered it made no difference
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Buy on AmazonLa Confession d'un enfant du siècle
by Alfred de Musset
The prose account of the same condition — Musset's autobiographical novel describes the mal du siècle generation's political despair in personal terms; reading both gives the full picture of Musset's Romantic diagnosis of his generation
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Buy on AmazonHernani
by Victor Hugo
The theatrical predecessor — Hugo's Hernani (1830) shattered the conventions of French theatre and made the Romantic drama possible; Lorenzaccio inherits this freedom and takes it further toward Shakespeare than Hugo was willing to go
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Buy on AmazonRuy Blas
by Victor Hugo
The Hugo political drama — Hugo's 1838 play about the lackey who rises to become prime minister through love and is destroyed by political reality is the Hugo version of Lorenzaccio's question about political action and personal identity
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Buy on AmazonThe Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
The 20th-century German continuation of the mask theme — Oskar Matzerath's refusal to grow is the maintenance of a deception analogous to Lorenzo's libertine mask; both protagonists use a performed identity to survive in a world that cannot accommodate their real selves
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Buy on AmazonMacbeth
by William Shakespeare
The Shakespearean counter-example that Lorenzaccio implicitly invokes — where Macbeth becomes the tyrant through action, Lorenzo destroys the tyrant and discovers the action is meaningless; the two plays together define the range of possible relationships between political murder and personal identity
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Buy on AmazonLes Caprices de Marianne
by Alfred de Musset
The shorter Musset companion — written the same year as Lorenzaccio, the play of the love comedy that ends in death shows the other face of Musset's Romantic imagination: where Lorenzaccio is epic and political, Marianne is intimate and lyric
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Buy on AmazonLe Rouge et le Noir
by Stendhal
The Stendhalian parallel — Julien Sorel is Lorenzo's social contemporary: the young man of energy and intelligence in a society that offers no legitimate outlet, who adopts a mask (ambition, calculation) that becomes his face; both pay for the deception with their lives
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