Reading Order
Lorenzaccio Reading Order
Lorenzaccio (1834) by Alfred de Musset is the supreme achievement of French Romantic drama and one of the most important plays never performed in its own time — written as a 'closet drama' (a play for reading, not staging) because its length, its sixty-odd characters, and its ambitious structure made it unstageble by nineteenth-century theatrical means. The subject is the assassination of Alessandro de' Medici, the tyrannical Duke of Florence, in 1537, by his cousin Lorenzino de' Medici (called Lorenzaccio, 'bad Lorenzo'): a man who spent years corrupting himself in Alessandro's service, becoming his companion in vice and his pander, in order to gain the access needed to kill him. Musset's version is a study in the corruption of idealism — Lorenzo began with a pure intention (to liberate Florence) and is destroyed by the means he chose to achieve it. By the time the assassination actually happens, Lorenzo has lost the ability to tell whether his virtue was real or a self-deception, whether his vice was performance or genuine, whether the act of tyrannicide will mean anything in a Florence too corrupt to use its freedom. The play was finally staged for the first time in 1896, at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris, by which point its analysis of political disillusionment seemed prophetic rather than Romantic.
Where to start
Lorenzaccio (1834) — the play is long (five acts, about 200 pages) and dense with historical reference; the Éditions Garnier-Flammarion edition with notes is the best French text, and the English translations by Donald Roy (Oxford) and by Martin Sorrell are both reliable. Read alongside or after Musset's short autobiographical novel The Confession of a Child of the Century to understand the political and personal disillusionment that Lorenzaccio dramatizes.
Complete Lorenzaccio Book List
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Lorenzaccio
Alfred de Musset·1834·Published in Musset's Spectacle dans un fauteuil (Theater in an Armchair, 1834). The title character was played by Sarah Bernhardt in the play's celebrated 1896 production — a woman playing a man who plays a woman playing a man, which seemed to Bernhardt exactly right.
Lorenzaccio — Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Musset write Lorenzaccio as a closet drama?
Musset published Lorenzaccio in 1834 as part of a collection called Spectacle dans un fauteuil (Theater in an Armchair) — the title is an ironic acknowledgment that these plays were written to be read in an armchair, not performed on a stage. The practical reason was that Lorenzaccio's sixty-odd characters, its five-act structure, its multiple simultaneous plots, and its requirement for historical Renaissance Florence staging made it impossible for the theaters of the 1830s to produce. The Comédie-Française had elaborate machinery but was constrained by the acting conventions and the limited stage technology of the period; the Boulevard theaters had neither the resources nor the prestige. Musset had also had an unhappy experience with the productions of his earlier plays and had withdrawn from the theater in 1832 after an unsuccessful premiere. But the closet drama form also suited the material: Lorenzaccio's ambiguity — its refusal to tell the reader whether Lorenzo's virtue was real or performance — is easier to sustain in prose read slowly than in theatrical performance, where actors must make definite choices about motivation. The play was first staged in 1896 at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre by the director Aurélien Lugné-Poe, in a version cut to performable length, with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role.
How does Lorenzaccio relate to Shakespeare?
Lorenzaccio is frequently described as the French Romantic Hamlet, and the comparison is exact: both plays center on an intellectual hero who knows what he must do (avenge a corrupted state by killing a tyrant/king) and cannot be certain whether his inability to act cleanly is a function of excessive thought or genuine moral uncertainty. Like Hamlet, Lorenzo asks whether the act will mean anything in a corrupt world; like Hamlet, he puts on a performance of vice (madness/debauchery) in order to gain access to the target; like Hamlet, he kills the tyrant when the act no longer has the meaning he originally assigned it. Musset knew Shakespeare intensively — he translated several plays and wrote extensively about the impossibility of translating Shakespeare's mixture of prose and poetry, comedy and tragedy, into French theatrical conventions. Lorenzaccio is partly a demonstration that the Shakespearean mixing of registers and the Shakespearean scale of historical drama were possible in French — that Musset could do what Hugo had claimed the French Romantic drama should do, by making the example rather than writing the manifesto.
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