Reading Order
Ruy Blas Reading Order
Ruy Blas (1838) by Victor Hugo is the play that Hugo himself considered his greatest theatrical achievement and the one that consolidated his position as the master of French Romantic drama after the famous Battle of Hernani eight years earlier. The plot turns on a baroque reversal: Ruy Blas, a lackey, is placed in the queen of Spain's household by his master Don Salluste, who wishes to use him as a tool of revenge against the queen. The plan goes wrong when Ruy Blas rises, under a false aristocratic name, to become the queen's chief minister — and falls genuinely in love with her. Hugo's thesis is explicit in his preface: the drama has three publics, and the three acts correspond to them — the queen loves a lackey (for women, the romantic dimension), a lackey governs Spain (for thinkers, the political dimension), and a lackey's ambition is destroyed by a lackey's fate (for the crowd, the theatrical dimension). What makes Ruy Blas exceptional is that Hugo refuses to let any of these three registers cancel the others: the play is simultaneously a great love story, a diagnosis of the decline of seventeenth-century Spanish monarchy, and a demonstration that the grotesque-sublime contrast announced in the Cromwell preface is a political as well as an aesthetic principle.
Where to start
Ruy Blas (1838) — the play was written in three weeks for the opening of the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris. Hugo considered it his masterpiece after Les Misérables. The third act ('Bon appétit, messieurs!') is one of the great set-pieces of French Romantic drama and is frequently anthologized separately; but the full emotional payoff of that act depends on the social comedy of Act One and the love scenes of Act Two. Read the preface first.
Complete Ruy Blas Book List
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Ruy Blas
Victor Hugo·1838·Written in three weeks for the opening of the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris on November 8, 1838. The preface Hugo published with the play is a condensed account of his theory of drama and its three publics — essential reading.
Ruy Blas — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the famous speech in Ruy Blas?
The famous speech in Ruy Blas is the 'Bon appétit, messieurs!' monologue in Act Three, in which Ruy Blas — having risen to become Spain's chief minister under a false name — delivers a devastating indictment of the corrupt councilors of state to their faces. The speech begins: 'Good appetite, gentlemen! O ministers intègres! / Conseillers vertueux! Voilà votre façon / De servir, serviteurs qui pillez la maison!' (Upright ministers! Virtuous counselors! This is how you serve, you servants who plunder the house!) and continues for over sixty lines cataloguing the specific corruptions and betrayals that have reduced Spain from a great power to a state where 'un laquais de basse condition' (a lackey of low condition) is the only honest man in government. The speech is considered one of the great moments of French Romantic political drama — a direct anticipation of the political satire in Les Misérables — and was the scene that Hugo was most proud of in the play. The fact that the honest man denouncing corruption is himself living under a false name and a stolen identity is central to Hugo's tragic irony.
How does Ruy Blas relate to Hernani?
Ruy Blas (1838) and Hernani (1830) are the two pillars of Hugo's dramatic output and the defining works of French Romantic drama. The relationship is one of development: Hernani established that Romantic drama could conquer the French stage and defined the genre's formal principles (the mixture of the sublime and the grotesque, the unities broken, the Romantic hero against society), while Ruy Blas is the fullest realization of those principles in a single play. Hernani is more radical and confrontational — the 'Battle of Hernani' premiere was a cultural war — while Ruy Blas is more polished and theatrically sophisticated. The shared thematic core is the noble soul in the ignoble social position: Hernani is a nobleman who has been reduced to an outlaw, Ruy Blas is a lackey who is too noble for his station. Both plays end in the deaths of all three members of the romantic triangle, but Ruy Blas's ending is more emotionally complex because the tragedy is inseparable from the political diagnosis — Ruy Blas dies not only for love but because his society has no place for someone of his quality.
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