The raucous and rowdy first productions in 1830s Paris of Victor Hugo’s play

, a Romantic story of love and honor set in sixteenth-century Spain, marked a turning point in the history of French theater. Classicism’s reign was now over. If Madame de Staël’s

(1810-13) had announced the arrival in France of Romanticism, it was Hugo’s

that signaled its public triumph. The antagonism between Hugo’s revolutionary ideas about theater and the reactions of the French theater-going public and traditionalist critics, still attached to the forms of earlier generations, became known as the

[Battle of Hernani]. Hugo and his followers believed that the tragedies of Racine and Corneille, as well as the

in which they were written,…

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Citation: Usher, Phillip John. "Hernani". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 November 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11219, accessed 22 November 2024.]