Ruy Blas

by Victor Hugo

Overview

Victor Hugo's romantic melodrama Ruy Blas was first performed in 1838 for the opening of the Theatre de la Renaissance. There was a revival at the Odeon with Sarah Bernhardt in 1872, and at the Theatre-Francais in 1879. Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a novelist, poet, and dramatist, and the most important of French Romantic writers. In his preface to his historical play Cromwell (1827) Hugo wrote that romanticism is the liberalism of literature. Hugo developed his own version of the historical novel, combining concrete, historical details with vivid, melodramatic, even feverish imagination. Among his best-known works are The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. Victor Hugo was one of the greatest personalities of French literature. Though not without the faults and eccentricities which frequently characterize great geniuses, he never entered any field of literature without excelling in it. The novel, the lyric, the drama, criticism, all fell from his facile pen without apparent effort. Hugo died in Paris on May 22, 1885. He was given at his death a national funeral. It was attended by two million people. Victor Hugo is buried in the Panthéon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783386069991
Publisher:	Antigonos Verlag
Publication date:	08/19/2024
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)
Language:	French

About the Author

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was an internationally renowned novelist, playwright and poet known for his political activism and human rights advocacy. "If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away," the larger–than–life Victor Hugo once confessed. Indeed, this 19th–century French author's books – from the epic drama Les Misérables to the classic unrequited love story The Hunchback of Notre Dame – have spanned the ages, their themes of morality and redemption as applicable to our times as to his.

Date of Birth:

February 26, 1802

Date of Death:

May 22, 1885

Place of Birth:

Besançon, France

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

Pension Cordier, Paris, 1815-18