Ruy Blas

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...