The Romantic Movement II: England and France

In England, Romantic painters such as Constable and Turner broke important new ground in their work, and Romantic writers produced some of the greatest poetry ever written. The beginning of the movement in England is marked by the publication in 1798 of “The Lyrical Ballads,” by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  In the preface to this book, the authors describe poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and as “emotion reflected in tranquility.”  There’s nothing about reason or the rational here...the emphasis is on spontaneity; emotion; overflow...

     

In addition to his fame as a poet, Coleridge, who wrote “Kubla Khan” and “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” was also one of the major theorists of Romanticism.  He had read the German critic Schlegel, and had applied his theories to poetry and drama.  Coleridge attacked the neoclassical principle of verisimilitude, the appearance of reality.  He argued that the basis of dramatic illusion is that the audience accepts the unreality of the theatre experience: a “willing suspension of disbelief.” This important concept is the clearest statement of the audience’s “contract” with the artists who create theatre.  It was formulated at a time when scenic artists had become obsessed with painting exact depictions of places in the play on their wings and flats and shutters, often at the expense of the play, and it remains an argument against literalism on stage.

   

Ironically, though all the major romantic poets attempted to write plays, few had any success on the stage.  Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote The Cenci (1819?) but it was not performed until the twentieth century.  The Cenci involves a father forcing his daughter to have sex with him, and the grim results for the family. 

     

Lord Byron took more interest in theatre than the rest of his colleagues, and one of his plays, Sardanopalus, had fair success when Charles Kean produced it as an historically accurate spectacle. Werner, a play about a man destroyed by his obsession for revenge, became a vehicle for the actor WC Macready.

      

Other plays by British romantic poets include Wordsworth’s The Borderers, Keats’ Otho the Great, Coleridge’s Remorse (a good romantic title!) and female writer Joanna Baille’s De Mountfort.  All these plays are of interest only in the historical sense today.

      

If the plays by the romantic poets were not successful on the British stage, melodrama was! Melodrama made use of the romantic emphasis on emotion and the mysteries of the universe, but in a simplistic manner. In fact one of my former teachers explained melodrama in a phrase, “Romanticism made palatable for the people.” Everything in melodrama was pushed to extremes:  the poetic phrases spouted by the characters, the wildly imaginative yarns that made up the plots of melodrama, and the outrageous suspense on which melodramas depended.  They were cliffhangers – in some cases literally! Along with suspense-filled scenes, characters were clearly defined as good or evil, and the good guys nearly always won in the end. 

The German Kotzebue was one of the most popular melodramatic writers on the British stage. Thirty-six of his plays were translated 

"Monk" Lewis

into English.  English writers also began pumping out melodramatic novels, poems and plays.  Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) was nicknamed “Monk” Lewis because of a tremendously popular novel called Ambrosio, or The Monk (1795), which was turned into an equally popular play. Lewis pumped out a melodramatic piece called The Castle Spectre (1797), which scared the hell out of audiences at the Drury Lane and began a vogue for “gothic” melodramas, usually set in the ruined castles or monasteries from the Middle Ages, featuring outcasts, ghosts, long lost relatives and long concealed crimes. 
 

      

There was also a gothic revival in architecture at this time. The original buildings of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC are examples. Gardens were purposely groomed to look overgrown and dark to set a gothic mood. and the literature, buildings, gardens of the Gothic revival all were based on romantic motifs.   The “gothic” has continued in popularity right through today, sometimes on stage. Dracula is a version of this form.

The gothic melodrama was only one brand in this genre.  Douglass Jerrold wrote a play called Black-Eyed Susan, the best example of 

“nautical” melodrama.  The play is about a sailor named William and Susan, his faithful gal.  He’s about to be hanged for something he didn’t do. She remains faithful as he is about to go bravely to his death (hanged from the yardarm) but he is reprieved at the VERY last moment when the perpetrator of the crime is weighed down by remorse and blurts out a confession. James Sheridan Knowles melodramatized the classics in plays like Virginius (1820). Later in his career Jerrold wrote The Rent Day and The Factory Girl (both 1832) and moved melodrama into a more realistic area, the first examining evil landlords and their tenant victims, the second looking at a time when child labor in England (and other countries) was killing young teens regularly.  As the century moved forward, another social issue, crime, became another popular subject for melodrama. The Six Degrees of Crime was one of many in this sub-genre.

Romanticism in France

Romantic drama did not make a strong entrance into Paris until much later than in England and Germany, primarily because after that essential Romantic event, the French Revolution Napoleon restored order to the nation and crowned himself emperor of France.  Napoleon favored Neoclassical drama over Romantic, as the latter was likely to foment still more revolution. The emporer sponsored annual contests seeking new ordered and rational classical masterpieces for the theatre.  Not even the top prizewinners of these contests are remembered today.

     

The most memorable theatrical events during the first years of the nineteenth century occurred on the boulevards, primarily along the 

Boulevard du Temple, where small, illegitimate theatres were presenting opéra comique, variety acts, and mélodrame, a combination of music (melo) with drama (drame).  The plays featured serious but sensational plots, broken up somewhat by comic scenes, and were underscored with music.  Like English melodrama, the French mélodrame featured very good heroes versus very evil villains, suspense, and poetic justice triumphant at the end.

      

The finest writer of mélodrame was Rene Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844).  Along with Kotzebue from Germany, 

Pixérécourt was one of the most produced playwrights in France, Europe, England and America.  In 1798, Pixérécourt’s Victor; or, The Child of the Forest, about a “wild child” brought up in the woods, caused a sensation.  And in 1814, he wrote The Forest of Bondy; or, The Dog of Montargis, in which a dog proves the innocence of the wrongly accused and about to be executed hero.  Pixérécourt’s audience was made up of the masses of mostly illiterate workers who were inundating the cities of the newly industrialized France and who were desperate for entertainment after long exhausting days at work. Pixérécourt proudly proclaimed his relationship to his audience: “I write for those who cannot read!”

British version, complete with its own spelling of Montargis!

       

So, mélodrame gave some impetus to the Romantic movement in France – but other forces began to push for a new French drama. In 1822 a British acting troupe performed a brief season of Shakespeare in Paris.  There were riots at these performances and the troupe was hissed.  A French writer even labeled the troupe’s work “an invasion!”  Shakespeare didn’t fit the French Neoclassical formula for plays. In the late 18th century Jean François Ducis translated Shakespeare into French, but he twisted the plays to fit the neoclassic ideal.  French audiences were not prepared for the violence and irregularity of Shakespeare’s drama, at least as produced by the English players in 1822. 

But French writers and intellectuals became very excited by the work of German Romantic critic Schlegel, and as early as 1810, the French writer Madame de Stael published D’Allemagne, a work that praised the German Romantics. Stendhal, the French novelist, wrote an essay comparing Racine and Shakespeare, in which he praised Shakespeare over Racine (mon dieu!) and commended the Romantic qualities of Shakespeare’s work.  So in 1827, when 

another British troupe, led by Charles Kemble, played Paris, they created a sensation.  Resentment still ran high among French conservatives, but liberals saw in the freedom of Shakespearean style an analogy to their own cries for greater freedom.  Kemble’s Hamlet was seen by the French as the quintessential, brooding, romantic hero. Even more popular was 

Harriet Smithson’s Ophelia, especially her mad scene. A “mad scene” on the French stage?  Mais non! At least mais non a few years before, when in France such disturbing actions were messengered in. Beginning in 1828 it was mais oui!  Delacroix, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas all raved about Smithson, and composer Hector Berlioz was so smitten that he pursued and wooed her, hopelessly for a long time, until he wrote the Symphonie Fantastique for her. The music won her over, and he eventually married her! Happy ending? Mais non! The marriage, alas, was not at all happy, and ended badly.

      

Victor Hugo quickly became a leader of the Romantic movement.  In 1827 he wrote a play called Cromwell and included a preface 

that became the manifesto for the Romantics.  In 1829 his play Marion de Lorme was banned because of its political sentiments.  Then Hugo wrote another play that was allowed to be produced at the Comédie Française early in 1830.  This play, called Hernani, was the triumph of the French Romantic movement.  It broke the unities, it used ordinary language, horror of horrors breaking away from the Alexandrine; it exhibited crude passions, even showed a king exhibiting them; people were killed ON stage. To quote Ibsen out of context, “People don’t DO such things!” At least not, until then, on the stage of France’s national theatre.

      

The opening night of Hernani is one of the great nights in theatre history.  Everyone in attendance knew that something was going to 

happen. The conservatives arrived in their usual dress black and white, while the young romantics wore red capes and sported beards and spikey haircuts! The battle lines were drawn, and as soon as the first lines of the play were spoken, hisses and cheers filled the auditorium.  Later in the same scene, a king was forced to hide in a closet -- agh!  decorum was smashed!  more screams of protest, countered by hurrahs!  The play continued in a state of near constant cries from the audience.  There was at least as much performing in the house as there was on stage. 

      

After Hernani, a flood of Romantic plays, novels, operas, concertos inundated French stages, bookstores, concert halls.  The revolution was political as well as artistic.  Later in 1830 came the unsuccessful revolt in Paris that Hugo immortalized in Les Miserables.

      

In addition to Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Alfred de Musset were 

the finest French romantic writers.  Dumas dramatized his novel The Three Musketeers, and Musset wrote in a romantic vein about the heartbreak of naive young lovers in such plays as Les Caprices du Marianne. 

And then, like lots of things that begin explosively, the Romantic movement in France burned itself out, a mere 10-15 years after it had begun, when a movement called Realism took over – but more of that later. Before that we'll look at theatre spaces, design, and performance in the Romantic era.