Musset-Text.Pdf
f'. tl ;; ~" INTRODUCTION I ~, , ~I;'" '" ! Although Alfred de Musset (I8IO-57) is traditionally anthologized, with Lamartine, Vigny, and Hugo, as one of the major French Ro ~.: mantic poets, he really should be considered, with Gautier, Nerval, i~i.. .. £1....: and others, among the movement's second generation. Like many a t ~: youth, he had ambivalent feelings about the ideas and sentiments of ~,j. his elders. On the one hand, his autobiographical novel, The Confes f: {' sions of a Child of the Century, is a major model of Romantic con t fessional prose; on the other hand, he became identified among his ~~; , i" ~. peers as a major proponent of the revival of neoclassical tragedy in ~, the theater, as well as a sarcastic, even virulent, lampooner of Ro I.': ~j mantic stylistic excesses, in his widely read and amusing Letters of ~L ' Dupuis and Cotonet, in which he gave a well-known definition of F)'" Romanticism as "the overuse of adjectives." Musset's primary renown in modern times has been as a drama " :1 ,~ tist. When Vietor Hugo's Hernani and Alexandre Dumas pere's An 1"::'11 I)'p; tony were produced around f830, they made a considerable stir in "d' ~-.!j.! the theater. But the "Romantic" Musset has remained perhaps the l" only "classic" dramatist of his time. Actually, the best of his plays 11 were not staged during his life: of his most original works, What \" {I Does Marianne Want? alone was performed, in a radically altered ~J and disfigured version, in 185I. Lorenzaccio had to wait until 1896, forty years after the author's death, and was then done in a "regular ~, ized" form commissioned by Sarah Bernhardt so she might add the ~., play's hero to her list of transvestite roles - a travesty in both the :f: usual and the etymological senses of the term," ~f ~~ 'See my study Theater ofSolitude: The Drama of Alfred de Musset, Hanover, N.H., ;1 r974, pp.
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