Recommendations
Books Like Ruy Blas
Best books to read after Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo
Readers captivated by Ruy Blas's combination of romantic passion and political diagnosis, the grotesque-sublime contrast, and Hugo's theatrical ambition will find his other plays, the French Romantic drama tradition, and the European precursors that shaped his theatrical revolution.
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Hernani
by Victor Hugo
The companion Hugo play and the one to read first — Hernani is the more radical and confrontational theatrical declaration of French Romanticism, the play whose 1830 premiere was a cultural war; Ruy Blas is its fullest realization; reading both together shows the evolution of Hugo's dramatic project from manifesto to masterpiece.
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Marion de Lorme
by Victor Hugo
The Hugo play written immediately before Hernani and banned by the Restoration censors — a courtesan reformed by love whose petition for her lover's life is refused; shares Ruy Blas's themes of the social outcast, royal power, and romantic sacrifice, and was Hugo's first fully Romantic dramatic statement before the stage gave him the Battle of Hernani.
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Lorenzaccio
by Alfred de Musset
The companion French Romantic drama by the other great practitioner — Musset's 1834 play about Lorenzo de' Medici's assassination of the Florentine tyrant is the supreme achievement of French Romantic drama and the most psychologically complex work in the tradition; where Ruy Blas is theatrical and operatic, Lorenzaccio is a closet drama of political disillusionment; together they define the range of French Romantic drama's ambition.
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Don Carlos
by Friedrich Schiller
The German Romantic drama that Hugo read before writing Hernani and that provides the Spanish court setting and the romantic triangle of Don Carlos, the Queen, and Philip II that Hugo would adapt; Ruy Blas's Spanish setting and its themes of love at the royal court forbidden by social position descend directly from Schiller's dramatic world.
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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 outcast in bourgeois society is the social complement to Ruy Blas's political analysis; where Ruy Blas exposes the corruption of the Spanish state, Antony exposes the hypocrisy of French bourgeois marriage.
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Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
The Hugo novel in which the political diagnosis of Ruy Blas reaches its fullest development — Jean Valjean is the ultimate version of the exceptional man condemned by social origin, and the novel's analysis of how French society crushes the poor while congratulating itself on liberty is the prose realization of the political argument that Ruy Blas makes in the 'Bon appétit, messieurs!' speech.
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The Marriage of Figaro
by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
The eighteenth-century comedy that Ruy Blas directly inherits — Figaro, a servant who is cleverer than his noble master, is the comic predecessor of Ruy Blas, the lackey who is morally superior to the aristocrats who employ him; the political charge of Beaumarchais's comedy (which Louis XVI said predicted the Revolution) is what Hugo transformed into Romantic tragedy.
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The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas père
The companion popular novel in the tradition of the social outcast who rises to power through exceptional qualities — Edmond Dantès, like Ruy Blas, begins from a position of social humiliation and achieves extraordinary power, but where Ruy Blas's rise is destroyed by the political machinery that created him, Monte Cristo's is destroyed by the moral cost of revenge; both explore what happens when a man of exceptional quality operates outside his assigned social station.
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