THEATRE OF SOLITUDE: THE DRAMA OF ALFRED de MUSSET.
David Sices'54 (Chairman, Department of RomanceLanguage and Literatures). Hanover: TheUniversity Press of New England, 1974. 268pp. $11.
Alfred de Musset's plays are little known outside France because of the difficulty in translating poetic language and because even in France his technical stage innovations and themes, condemned by official censorship, made production difficult, if not impossible.
Sices has omitted biographical criticism based on the relation between Musset's life and work, the subject of numerous books, and concentrates instead on a thematic and structural study of the plays. In them the young romantic poet expressed in the most personal and pessimistic manner the fate of an artist in society, his isolation and struggle against conformity, the difficulty of reconciling art and love, and the eroding effect of time on dreams and ideals.
His four best plays were written in the extraordinarily short time of less than two years, 1833-34, when Musset was only 25. The best plays of the Romantic period and indeed of the century, they were rejected, however, by Romantics because of his independence and by Classicists because of the bold departure from traditional theater as inherited by Racine.
Following this period of intense activity, Musset's plays experienced an early decline. Although recognized for their wit and poetry, they reveal a loss of structural originality, imagination, and fantasy. Because Musset's idealism had to be reconciled with the world, his drama became structurally and morally more acceptable to middle-class censorship. Even the stage adaptation of his first great play LesCaprices de Marianne, designed by Musset himself in 1851, through alterations of structure and language shows a weakening of contemporary social criticism and psychological conflicts in the characters. In scene after scene Sices sees the 1851 changes "effacing his youthful beauty and sapping its vitality."
The best historical tragedy of the 19th century, Lorenzaccio, influenced by Shakespeare and Byron, was inspired by Florentine corruption under Alexander de Medici. One idealist cannot transform political and moral realities, and his inability to redeem the world and the absence of redemptive love reinforce the pessimism. The play shows "the ignominious defeat of the individual in the face of an anonymous, mediocre collectivity." Not until 1952 could the play be fully and successfully produced on the modern stage of the Theatre National Populaire, equipped with modern facilities vital for quick and frequent set changes.
Monique A. Bilezikian is an instructor inFrench at the University of Michigan.
