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Home , Alexandre Dumas, Cromwell (play), Francisco Goya, Hernani (drama), Romanticism in France, Sublime (literary)

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February 8 & 10, 2016 • No clear definition possible: A reaction against something rather than a movement for something.

• Counter-Enlightenment attitudes

• Artistic Exploration

• Embodied most strongly: - in the visual , music, and , - with major impact on Historiography, Education and Natural History.

• Rise of Popular Theatre

• movement = prized intuition and emotion over sentiments and Leading the People (1830) Eugene Delacroix in their Apartment (1834) The Third of May (1808) Validated: • strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, (trepidation, horror, terror, and awe) • Imagination: Mental process involving several functions > Sensory impressions > Creation of coherent vision > Feelings and responses • Making sense of and giving meaning to the external world through emotions • Understanding and Experience • Love > Union with nature and universe> or the Universal Being è Romanticism was a departure from the Age of Reason • It replaced REASON with IMAGINATION as the chief faculty of the human mind • Rejected the NEWTONIAN depiction of the universe as clockwork, substituting a dynamic, unknowable universe • It placed the individual outside the social structure • Mood and feelings • Influence of Shakespeare

è The appeal of Romanticism was emotional rather than logical, and its power came largely through its disruption of accepted theatre values • Success = Scandal > Consider the battle of in February 1830 The fragmented European literate opinion into four major political-cultural camps:

- Liberals clung to Enlightenment principles of rationality and hoped for a return to moderation;

- Conservatives rejected the rationalistic excesses of the Revolution and looked to national traditions for stability;

- Radicals, believed the Revolution had not gone far enough. They continued to work against despotic regimes;

- Reactionaries rejected all aspects of the Revolution and yearned for a return to a Catholic and absolutist Europe Romanticism and Historiography • Enlightenment thinkers looked at history in the eighteenth century to deduce universal principles about human behavior from the past for application to all nations in the present and future.

• Romantic historian Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803,) denied this possibility. In his Ideas on the of the History of Mankind (1784) -- Every historian’s understanding of the past was necessarily compliant to a Volksgeist, the spirit of a national people. – The history of each national people was unique, said Herder.

• Herder’s legacy animated historians and others to search for the origins of their nation’s Volksgeist, to explore what they took to be unique features of their “imagined community”, and to celebrate their own national heroes.

• National Consciousness of History – Many of Herder’s ideas continue to be influential today. • The mix of romanticism, , and nationalism inspired by Herder played out primarily in conservative ways in many countries in nineteenth-century Europe.

• In England, theatre artists began working with historians to mount more accurate productions of national historical plays, principally the dramas of Shakespeare. - Antiquarianism aimed to immerse spectators in the spirit of past and exotic cultures through an accurate rendering of their details.

- Shakespearean productions became a means of honoring the of the national and a conservative understanding of the national past. This began with Charles Kimble’s production of King John in 1824.

- James Robinson Planché (1796-1880), a leader in antiquarianism, costumed subsequent Shakespearean productions with attention to historical detail and provided managers with extensive on the banners and insignia of medieval heraldry.

- William Charles Macready (1793-1873), who dominated the English stage from the into the early , popularized the goals of antiquarianism by aiming consistently for historical accuracy in costuming, props, and painted scenery for his major productions.

• In , romantic revolutionaries staged nationalistic, open-air festivals to celebrate the victory of the people in the 1790s. , however, revived and the theatrical institutions of the old regime soon after he became emperor.

- After 1815, with the return of the monarchy, reactionaries blocked the rise of .

- By 1830, had announced the goals of a Romantic theatre in his preface to his historical play in 1827, and Romantic productions had already achieved some success at the Comédie française.

- The French reactionaries took their stand in 1830 at the Comédie’s production of Hugo’s Hernani.

- Hugo put together an alliance of conservatives and liberals to support his Romantic Hernani, which intentionally violated many of the rules of Neoclassicism.

• In , several groups and individual wrote plays to celebrate, what they believed, was their people’s unique culture and glorious past. The tradition began with the Hamburg National Theatre in 1765.

- (1759-1805) – celebrated historian, playwright, and director, was the most ambitious, complex, and talented of the early German cultural nationalists.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) – director of Court Theatre

- National Theatres – Attempts to establish national theatres and write national history plays The Battle for Hernani

The play opened at La Comédie Française in on February 25, 1830. • The auditorium became a spectacular battlefield. • Performances sparked near-riots between opposing camps of French letters and society: Romantics vs. Classicists, Liberals vs. Conformists, and Republicans vs. . • Romanticism grew increasingly politicized – It would liberate the arts from the constraints of . • The Battle of Hernani helped consolidate a youth movement against the conservatives of the day. Only five months later, ’s regime fell in what is known as the "three glorious days" of the . • 's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). - The sublime and the beautiful = mutually exclusive.

• Victor Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell (1827) as a Manifesto of Romanticism – Opposition to Burke: - Sublime— of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. - Grotesque – Strange Creatures (creepy) [Gargoyles] • Victor Hugo’s and the Beast (La belle et la bête) • Victor Hugo's Hunchback of (Notre Dame de Paris) • Lewis Carroll’s Alice in the Wonderland è The : Two ways of understanding him/her: à Confident or successful hero – Accepted his/her social condition and enjoyed his solitude - Established his own principles of behaviors and adhered to them regardless of consequences

à Romantic hero could not withstand the emotional despair in his life - He wandered the world in search of stability, acceptance, or permanence - Social outcast who knew he could never find peace in this life, but he could not help feeling cheated nonetheless – Thus search truth and revenge

è Some examples of the Romantic Hero:

• Edmond Dantès in , Father’s

The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) • in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables

(1862)

• Hernani in Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830) • in Schiller’s William Tell (1804) • in Schiller’s Mary Stuart (1800) Major Playwrights

• Victor Hugo (1802-1885) – Cromwell (1827), Hernani (1830), (1831), (1838), The King Amuses Himself (1832), de Marana (1835)

• Alexandre Dumas père (1802-1870) – Henry III and His Sons (1829), Christine (1829), Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle [The Great Lover] (1834)

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) – (1808 & 1831)

• Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) – Mary Stuart (1800), William Tell (1804)

• Georg Büchner (1813-1837) – Danton’s Death (1836), Woyzeck (1836)

• (1792-1822) – The Cenci (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820)

• George Gordon, (1788-1824) – Manfred (1817), The Two Foscari (1821) Victor Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell (1827) Some Statements • The grotesque of the ancients is timid and always seeking to hide itself. One senses that it is not on familiar ground because it is not in its natural surroundings. It is hidden as much as possible.

• The beautiful has only one type; the ugly has thousands. The fact is that the beautiful, in human terms, is merely form considered in its simplest aspect, in its most absolute symmetry, in its most perfect with our constitution.

• Nature then! Nature and truth! – And here, for the purpose of demonstrating that new ideas, far from destroying , only wish to reconstruct it solidly and soundly, let us try to indicate what is the impassable limit, which, in our opinion, separates the of art from the reality of nature.

• The theatre is an optical point. All that is found in the world, in history, in life, in man, can and ought to be reflected in it, but under the magic wand of art. Romantic Critics à (1767-1845), - Shakespearean dramatic form was organic – it germinated and flowered from within, like a plant. - In contrast, neoclassical plays achieved unity externally and mechanically. à Influence on a whole generation of English romantic critics, including (1772-1834) – He advanced the concept of organic unity and dismissed the neoclassical unities of time and place. - Coleridge – “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment that constitutes poetic faith”

à Victor Hugo (1802-1885) emphasized Schlegel’s that dramatic genres are primarily distinguished by their distinctive emotions. • Hugo claimed that romantic plays combined sublime with grotesque moods Alice in the Wonderland Arent van Bolton (1604) - Awe Gargoyle

Goose and Man Quentin Messys’ The Ugly Duchess (1530)