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. I09-r:2.5. Lorenzaccio, which in recent years has become one of Musser's if: most popular stage works, has been omitted from this collection because it stands alone in Musser's dramatic production among the best of French Romantic historical tragedies and because it differs radically from the Comedies and Proverbs in both form and language. I;;~ ['; \1"':')~..' ix .~. x Introduction xi Introduction ·aii "i i ':i; The reason for which Musser's plays were not produced on stage and a number of others (as well as Musser's influence on so impor­ in their own time, but saw the light of day in the pages of the Revue tant a dramatist as Georg Buechner). Musset himself was often des deux mondes and the published volumes entitled Un Spectacle accused of excessive facility: Flaubert in particular detested-or was dans un fauteuil ("Armchair Theater"), has become part of French it envied?-the ease with which he seemed to write. But there can be theater lore. Before his first major, and greatest, dramas- What no denying either the significant contribution that his stage works Does Marianne Want?, Fantasio, You Can't Trifle with Love, and made to French theater or their profound originality. ~. Lorenzaccio-Musset wrote several plays designed for specific theat­ After these four plays, Musset continued to write drama almost r rical productions. But when his Venetian Night was staged at the until his death. His last completed stage work, Bettine, dates from Odeon in Paris in 1830, the efforts of the notorious theater claque, 1851, but he left unfinished dramatic projects as well. The four later in particular at the signal of an unfortunate contact between his works included here- The Candlestick, You Never Can Tell, A Pass­ heroine's white dress and a freshly painted green trellis, led to such ing Fancy, and A Door Has to Be either Open or Shut- seem the best an uproar that the author swore never to let his plays be staged of them to me, a judgment that has been ratified by theater history. again. This was a vow he managed to keep for about fifteen years (in Like You Can't Trifle with Love, they owe a good deal more than the proverbial words of his own title, II ne [aut jurer de rien, "You their titles to the genre of the "dramatic proverb," an upper-class Never Can Tell"), until the one-act play, A Passing Fancy, was pro­ salon entertainment that enjoyed considerable popularity in the duced without his authorization in 1847. eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose most famous practition­ What makes Musset's best dramas so original and interesting is, ers were Carmontelle and Leclercq. Somewhat like the game of cha­ )", at least in part, a result of that vow. Unconstrained by the limita­ rades, this was intended to provide an opportunity for amateurs to >' tions of a flourishing but convention-ridden theater (many of whose act out familiar expressions, though in Musser's case it became far ;,! strictures, oddly enough, grand opera was then in the process of more complex. If these later plays seem less powerful and original overcoming), the author was enabled to write a "theater of the than those written during Musset's affair with George Sand, that mind" that did not have to take spatial or temporal unities into con­ has more to do with their standard upper-class themes, and their ~~ r~~ sideration, that was not limited by the resources of the proscenium social realism, than with any faltering of theatrical mastery on the , stage, and whose prose language was imbued with a poetic spirit author's part. On the contrary, all four of them achieved greater pop­ f· perhaps more genuinely lyrical than Musset's own highly consid­ ularity on stage than their predecessors, and it may indeed have ered verse. been this evidence of able stagecraft that encouraged actors and pro­ All of Musser's plays are delightful. His best dramatic works­ ducers to put on Musser's more problematic earlier ones. .. i the four plays cited above-were written at the age of twenty-three, in a period from the spring of 1833 to the winter of 1834, during Today, for a number of reasons both technical and thematic, which he was carrying on an affair with the novelist George Sand Musset's theater production seems to be more viable, more contem­ ;}, (Aurore Dupin Dudevant) that led the lovers to Venice, and their porary, than at any point in its history. In terms of technique, the love to world-wide notoriety. The extent of Musser's accomplish­ influence that cinematography has exercised over stagecraft since i'( ment-the plays' linguistic and technical mastery, their variety, and the early years of this century has doubtless played an important their originality (not to mention Lorenzaccio's inordinate length and role in this. Dramas that seemed impossible to stage under the con­ complexity) - bely both his youth and the rapidity of their creation. ditions of the pre-rwentieth-century European stage now present no Scholars have documented the influence on his work of Shakespeare, problems, thanks to advances made in lighting and machinery, not Byron, Schiller, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean-Paul Richter, George Sand, to mention the altered expectations of a theater public accustomed 1 ~' ~, I, i! 'f xii Introduction xiii Introduction ~' ( by cinematic scene-changes, flashbacks, and dissolves to a radically younger, fresher, more appealing one; yet she is still the ill-married different narrative sequence." "modern" woman in a traditional society, whose elderly husband ~'I' But these technical questions would be of little importance if represents status but not fulfillment. The apparently ideal Cecile­ ~'1; Musset's work did not speak relevantly to the contemporary pub­ ideal from the standpoint of a ma}e libertine and of the contempo­ ,f.i! lic-that is, if they were not thematically more contemporary, more rary bourgeois world - has qualities that go beyond the solid virtues up-to-date, than other French dramas of their period. This is re­ that make her seem to be the realization of My FairLady's irritated­ ~.i flected in the title I have chosen for Musset's Les Caprices de Mari­ and specious-question, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" ; anne: although it is usually rendered as "Marianne's Caprices," or and its echoes of Freud's question cited above. And Mathilde, in con­ f! perhaps better "Marianne's Whims," here it is translated as What junction with her witty, apparently scatterbrained, and quite femi­ ,I; Does Marianne Want?, a deliberate echo of Freud's anguished ques­ nine friend Ernestine de Lery, places the entire basis of stylish tion, "What do women want?" marriage in question, while she renews the traditional image and vir­ The notion behind this choice of title is not merely a desire to be tues of the abandoned, yet faithful wife. contemporary or relevant in linguistic terms. Part of what makes Another major contemporary theme of Musset's stage works is "11 Musser's plays so viable on the contemporary stage is, perhaps first the individual's isolation within both society and the universe. The Ii of all, the fact that his female characters-Marianne, Elsbeth, Ca­ playwright's youthful characters are as alienated as those in Waiting 1'.11 I" mille, Jacqueline, Cecile, and Mathilde in particular-all seek to for Godot or (in a more "Romantic" vein) Woyzek. Lorenzaccio is define what it is that "women want," each in her own way and perhaps the supreme example among his plays of this tendency, but n according to her own needs and situation.