Hugo romanticism

            Victor Hugo was one of the most prolific French authors of his day whose influence is felt even today. His most famous works include the novels The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the immensely popular Les Miserables, which of course served as inspiration for one of the twentieth century's most popular musicals Les Mis; however, it is his dramatic works, rather than his novels, that incited so much animosity, praise, and even riots. Victor Hugo's fame as a playwright grew out of the riots surrounding the opening performance of his play Hernani. It is through this dramatic work and the preface to his earlier unstageable play Cromwell, which the manifesto of the French Romantic Revolution was born.
             Victor Hugo was born February 26th, 1802, in Besancon, where his father was commandant of the local garrison. He gained early notoriety for his poems, and before he was thirty years old, he had published numerous works, and his name famous. Hugo did not limit himself to one style of writing, he wrote odes and ballads, romances, and, of course, dramas. Shortly before the French revolution of 1830, a literary revolution took place, at the head of which was Hugo. .
             In 1827, Hugo published Cromwell, a long, unstageable, historical drama. The play is not regarded to be as important to the Romantic Revolution so much as the play's preface. John Frey states in his book, A Victor Hugo Encyclopedia, that the preface to Cromwell is the "culmination of Romantic emancipation from the tenets of the French classic dramaturgy- (76). .
             To fully understand just how revolutionary Hugo's ideas were one must understand the strict theatrical rules held in place the French Classical system. Classicism refers to the aesthetic principles in Aristotle's "Poetics." For theater, this included: the "classical unities": Unity of Time, all events in the play must take place within a twenty-four hour period, Unity of Place, all the play must unfold in one locale or in locations that the characters can reach within twenty-four hours, and the Unity of Action, there must be only one plot within the play and no subplots unless they support the main plot.