Hernani

Apartamentos Aldagaia (Apartment), Hernani (Spain) deals

---

Hernâni Jorge Santos Fortes

No one could be Victor Hugo. It was too exhausting a task. These were the foot soldiers of the Romantic Movement, most of them having been recruited personally by Hugo his father, after all, had been a general. They could be counted on to register loud approval at all the critical moments of the drama. Stacking the audience had a long tradition in French theater. Hugo, meanwhile, was dashing around Paris, calling at newspaper offices, appealing for last-minute support and warning of attempts by his enemies to arrange organized hissing. By the time the curtain went up at 7: One group was counting on disaster, the other hoping for triumph.

With the opening line of the play, the Romantics got in the first punch. The battle was on. Not to be outdone by such tasteless behavior, the guardians of good taste took to shouts and hissing of their own. Objects and insults were thrown. The play was interrupted repeatedly.

At times it was hard to hear the text and therefore difficult to know when to be outraged or when to be smug. After the final curtain, young Romantics performed a victory dance in the lobby. Hugo later received a bullet through the window of his apartment.

Navigační menu

What exactly was all this fuss about? After all, Hernani is a stage play set in Spain in But the French establishment of was a weak and rotting structure. The king, the eminently forgettable Charles X, would be dethroned within a few months. The French Revolution and its descent into carnage were a mere three decades in the past, not more distant than George H.

Bush is to us today. Romanticism was nothing much more than a movement for freedom of individual expression. But because it mirrored, even perhaps fed, the parallel struggle for political freedom, it was deemed dangerous. Victor Hugo was hero or insurgent. It depended on your point of view.

But all this tends to obscure the play. Hernani is a wonderfully rich emotional ride through some remarkable narrative terrain, a place where heroes and villains still reign, where kings abduct damsels in the night and where men and women are ready to die for honor. The characters, like their author, are a little larger than life. We should not forget that Hugo, a great admirer of Shakespeare, was a magnificent storyteller. Regardless, though, Hernani stands very proudly on its own merits.

Navigation menu

The action, the passion, the sweep of the story, the tragic ending all combine to create unforgettable theater. What —ism the piece belongs to is of secondary importance. Victor Hugo was born shortly after the French Revolution, and his family was divided in ways that reflected the great social and political upheaval that roiled France during his lifetime. Hernani comes into the power of Ruy Gomez, who spares his life on receiving his hunting-horn, with the pledge that the bandit shall take his own life whenever he hears that horn.

The nobleman and bandit, seeking revenge against the king, form a conspiracy. The king, however, is elected Roman emperor, and is transformed in character by the honor.

He surprises the conspirators, but with gracious magnanimity pardons their crime. Hernani is found to be a noble who had been unjustly deprived of his rank and possessions. They are restored to him with the title Don Juan of Aragon. But Ruy Gomez is implacable, and in the midst of their rapture, after the wedding feast, Hernani hears, from outside, the sound of the fatal horn. The poison, prepared by Ruy Gomez, is at hand. Hernani's honor has been pledged, and even though he sacrifices love as well as life, he must keep his word. He drinks from the fatal cup, but his wife drains the same, and they die in an ecstasy of devotion and self-sacrifice.

To this powerful climax is no doubt largely due the decisive victory which finally ended the long vexed controversy between the Classic and Romantic schools of dramatists and novelists.

Availability

Few effects have ever been produced on the stage which exceed in power and pathos the climax of this great tragedy. No more thrilling catastrophe can be imagined than the swift plunge from the bliss of perfect happiness and security which the newly-wedded pair were entering and enjoying down to the fearful alternative of death or dishonor, forcibly signalled by the startling note of the fatal horn.

But the abiding popularity of the play, when the storm of its launching had subsided, was due to its swiftness in action, the lyrical beauty of its poetry and the enchanting pictures of youthful love and fidelity, emphasized rather than destroyed by the heartrending catastrophe.

Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization, vol. Historical Publishing Company, Back to Victor Hugo Index.

• DANCE FOR A DIAMOND
• Simón y los hembros (Spanish Edition)
• La cazadora de vampiros (Romance de Vampiros) (Las Aventuras de la Cazadora Gardella nº 1) (Spanish Edition)
• Versuch über die Entzauberung der Welt: Max Webers Begriff zwischen Religionssoziologie und Kunstphilosophie (German Edition)
• Meeting the Dead: A Novel
• Tra la perduta gente - Score
• Stranger on his Continent