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A Stage For Poets
Studies in the Theatre of Hugo and Musset
By Charles Affron PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06201-3
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION:
The Problem of a Poetic Theatre
THE stage belongs to the poet. Guaranteed by the oldest literary and critical traditions, it is his birthright. The theatrical genre and the diction of poetry create a set of complements that draws into tension the formal time of the play and the reciting voice. A poem's texture is released from the space of the reader's mind and inhabits the movement of a theatrical dialectic. Speech, the common radical of social activity, is drastically altered, and the new pattern is consciously opposed to the spectator's idiom. While seeing men perform inside the frame of a proscenium the public perceives its own vocabulary arranged in various artificial series. The poet-dramatist's voice is heard because it is different; a play is not a conversation. French romantic theatre loudly enunciates this voice. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the lyric poets impose their diction on the theatrical genre, and in doing so illuminate the essence of both poetry and theatre. A variable focus is provided into the artist's dual identity — poet and playwright.
A. Romanticism and the Theatre
An examination of the French romantic theatre is complicated by the character of its practitioners and its own noisy publicity. The novelty and the revolutionary aspects of romanticism are expressed in the genre most fully defined by classical criticism, most obviously and insistently before the public's eyes. The history of romanticism is punctuated with important dates related to the theatre: Constant's version of Wallenstein (1809), Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare (1823), the visit of the Kemble-Smithson troupe (1827), Hugo's Preface to Cromwell (1827), Dumas' Henri III et sa cour (1829), Vigny's version of Othello (1829), and the bataille d'Hernani (1830). In their quarrel with the classics, the romantics unleashed their loudest voice in the theatre. The novel and lyric poetry are of course genres exploited during the period, but they did not offer the same opportunity for direct confrontation of the old manner. Any controversy aroused by the publication of a recueil or a toman noir is paled by the shouting matches attendant upon a controversial première.
The unities and the notion of bienséance continue to rule dramaturgy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1809 Benjamin Constant succinctly characterized the kind of stylistic rigor that seemed to be essential to French dramatic art. "We have a need for unity which makes us reject all which, in the personality of our tragic characters, mitigates the single impression we wish to produce. We eliminate everything from the previous life of our heroes which is not absolutely related to the principal action." The taste for French classical theatre, this "need for unity," was consistently challenged by the cult of Shakespeare, the most dangerous representative of the romantic manner. It is hardly necessary here to reiterate the story of Shakespeare's reputation in France, the bastardized versions, the fiasco of Penley's troupe in 1822, the furor over mention of the mouchoir in Vigny's Le More de Venise. For the romantics, Shakespeare is the prime example of mixed form and tone. Vigny, too seldom credited with his initiatory role in the history of romanticism, projected the scope of such a mixture: "a modern tragedy suggesting in its conception, a wide panorama of life instead of a narrow rendering of the plot's catastrophe; in its composition, characters, not roles, peaceful scenes with peripeties, mixed with comic and tragic scenes; in its execution, a style that is familiar, comic, tragic, and sometimes epic." In a similar vein, Stendhal and Hugo based their apologies on a sense of reality, and a corresponding flexibility of style which supposedly presented life in its roundness.
The polemic fire burns brightly, and its brilliance perhaps diverts the eye. The acclaimed precursors, Shakespeare, Schiller, Scott, and Byron, help us date French romanticism, provide useful models for particular scenes and characters, but are foreign to the true originality of French romantic theatre. The distance between art and propaganda is so great that the merits of the first suffer from the bombast of the second. In their unceasing efforts to score obvious distinctions the playwright-theoreticians barely analyze the works themselves. Hugo, in particular, falls victim to a fuzziness of definition which can be ascribed to excessive enthusiasm. "Lyric poetry is especially suited to drama. Without impeding, it follows all its caprices, manifests itself in all of its forms, at turns sublime as Ariel and grotesque as Caliban. Our epoch, dramatic above all, is for just that reason eminently lyric." (Préface de Cromwell, 1, 424) Where is poor Miranda? Her ecstatic reaction to nature seems just as appropriate to Hugolian lyricism as the fantasy of Ariel or the grotesquerie of Caliban. Herein lies the difficulty which inhibits an accurate reading of romantic theatre. Hernani's battle was to rage over the wrong issues.
B. Hybridization in Art: Romantic Theatre and Opera
The problems of a poetic theatre are double because of its double allegiance. Lyric poetry and theatre are to some extent mutually exclusive. The solitude of the first is at odds with the dialectic of the second; timelessness is compromised by the proscenium and the audience. Unlike the classical theatre, whose poetry is fundamentally theatrical, the romantic theatre, with typical bravado, introduces its lyricism into an apparently inimical genre. The solutions it finds represent a certain faith in art's flexibility, an attempt to realize poetic conceits in a theatrical context. Attention to this has been scant. Critics have been distracted by the purely historical importance of the genre, and possibly discouraged because of the intermittent favor the romantics have enjoyed with the theatre-going public. That other barometer of approval, the literature course, has also been unsympathetic. Even the token deference to the exemplary Hernani is often replaced by the date of the "bataille." Musset has fared better, but only because one can pretend his plays are not really theatrical. Taste has been unkind to this extroverted manifestation of romanticism. Readers who savor lyric poetry do not necessarily appreciate its translation into gesture, decor, and character.
The only form of romantic theatre which has survived on the stage is opera. The public still goes to the opera to achieve that wordless transport effected through song. Absurdities of plot and character, incongruence between face, physique and identity are forgotten because a singer makes beautiful sounds. It becomes vitally important that a gypsy hag mistakenly threw her son into the fire while her mother was being burned at the stake; it seems appropriate that advanced tuberculosis has not impaired the strength of a character's lungs or that a shapely soprano impersonates an adolescent boy. AU of these improbabilities contribute to the degree of stylization in opera. Disbelief is suspended because it cannot for an instant be engaged. As soon as characters sing rather than speak a vital pact has been made between the public and art, one which gives the creator license to violate the common notions of time and substitute a universe where characters address each other in extremes of pitch quite unlike those of normal speech. This new modality lightens the gypsy hag's burden of absurdity. The tone of her passion and torment are self-sufficient and transcend her caricatural being. The soprano bares the soul of the adolescent boy more accurately than he could himself. The death of the tubercular victim is granted a span appropriate to art, not medicine. Music is the principal factor in the metaphorical structure of an opera. Obviously, it can never be ignored. In opera, the combination of its essential character and its conventions extends the time of the lyric without compromising its power of transport.
Opera is an analogy useful for gaining insight into romantic theatre. It is a mixed genre; its center is lyric. The French call it théâtre lyrique. The perception of song governs the theatrical expectations of its public. These characteristics are shared by some examples of the drame romantique? Their lyric qualities are cited even by adverse critics. They grudgingly grant it poetic value even if it fails as theatre. A strictly theatrical definition of the drame romantique seems inappropriate however in light of its hybrid nature. Is it not possible to redesign the framework of a play in order to accommodate the voice of the lyric poet?
The reaction of Francisque Sarcey to Sarah Bernhardt's performance of the Queen in Ruy Bias indicates the kind of impression romantic theatre was capable of making. "That delectable cantilena was breathed forth in a sad voice by Mile. Sarah Bernhardt. She did not seek nuance; it was a long caress of sounds which had in its very monotony something sweet and penetrating. She only added the music of her voice to the music of the poetry." These effusions hardly explain or justify that "something sweet and penetrating." The reasons for the relish felt by Sarcey are not however impervious to analysis. They are located in his inarticulated perception of poetry and theatre. This mixture of genres presents an intriguing challenge to the poet, an opportunity to test the resonance of his song and to examine dramatically his urge to sing.
Hugo and Musset are poets who write plays and novels reflective of poetic movement. It is absurd to expect Hugo to write a play structured like Phèdre or to conceive of character as Shakespeare does in Hamlet. He searches for harmony and metaphor rather than the measure of the five-act classical tragedy and the imitation of psychological complexity. Hugo's novels bear witness to the same concern for pattern, vibrant antithesis, and integrity of image that we find in his theatre. Notre-Dame de Paris is an ingenious amplification of object through a series of metaphorical extensions. Plot and character, the usual coin of the novelist, are consumed by the organic image of the cathedral. The grossness of characterization and the mechanics of coincidence are designed to put Notre-Dame de Paris in a variety of foci. The development of Esmeralda, Quasimodo, or Claude Frollo beyond their emblematic configurations would be a violation of the novelist's pattern. In the same way, a more subtle definition of character or a less florid rhetoric would mitigate the resonance of Hernani. Hugo's principal consideration is always the fullness of image and song.
Musset's theatre has other claims, yet it too is governed by poetic concerns. His most important plays are written in prose, but this does not prevent them from manifesting his serious interest in poetic style, inspiration, perception, and harmonics. Musset's theatrical voice does not quite have the volume and range of Hugo's, but it sets off bittersweet echoes of Lucie and la Malibran. Obsessed with the character and tone of verse, he allegorizes people in a manneristic theatrical dialectic.
The three major genres tempt Hugo and Musset, and their readiness to write novels, plays, and poems betrays a romantic attitude. The desire to combine contrasting moods and various levels of diction within a single work is symptomatic of a freely manipulated formal spectrum. Musset writes Contes d'Espagne et d'ltalie, consisting of short stories and dramatic pieces in verse. Versatility and generic hybridization tend to make clear-cut distinctions arbitrary and of relatively limited use. Is Don Paez a poem, a play, or a short story? It is all three at once. The pictorial qualities of Hugo's poetry are obvious, his sense of the dramatic is conveyed by the overriding antithetical structure present in whatever genre he uses, his narrative technique is displayed as early as the Odes et Ballades (1826). Therefore the concept of poetry must be taken in its broadest sense in order to accommodate these particular poets. In their avidity to explore the various dimensions of art they project their imagination into formal combinations that wrench poetry from its immediately recognizable contexts. In both Hugo and Musset there appears a basically poetic consciousness which shapes ballads and drames.
At the risk of simplistic definition we must attempt to locate the matrices of this poetic consciousness, to discover why a poem is essentially different from a play, beyond distinctions of rhyme, meter, and form. It will be useful to sketch the nature of three overlapping categories: time, voice, and metaphor. I will first signal those characteristics of romantic lyric poetry which facilitate an understanding of the theatre of Hugo and Musset, in the hope that this review will furnish a framework for the subsequent textual analyses. Consideration of the epic will be postponed until the discussion of Les Burgraves. The purely lyric qualities of poetry seem to be a functional point of departure, since they bring us closest to the most singular attitudes of these poets.
C. Lyric Time
The time of the theatre is fundamentally existential, the time of moments which in their passage govern the rhythm of the play. Theoretically, there is no going back and no stopping. To elicit attention and concentration the playwright may exploit this anguishing inexorability of movement, and the spectator's virtual captivity. There is no place to go and nothing else to listen to. The classical theatre insisted upon the perception of chronological time. The unité de temps is derived from the shape of a day. This shape may be more or less apparent, but its finiteness is exposed in plays whose rhythms differ as much as Bérénice and Phèdre. Five acts and a denouement are elements that impose time upon a play. Even plays that openly flaunt the rule of unity are trapped by their mode of presentation. Nothing can really alter the fact that actors answer each other sequentially, that the sequence is linear, and that in two or three hours the public will have seen and heard the whole play. This texture of time spent is not appreciably transformed by devices such as flashback, or the rapid episodic passage of years. The medium of the actor stamps a play with lived time. Encounter and conflict are punctuated by varying temporal spans whose tracings are immediately distinguished by the spectator. Patterns of character and incident are underlined by conventions of coincidence, the coup de théâtre, the scene of recognition. The theatre's clock can be accelerated, slowed, and syncopated, but its tick is basically unrelenting.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Stage For Poets by Charles Affron. Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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