Drama

The Burgraves

Name: The Burgraves
Author: Victor Hugo
ISBN: 9781589634824

by Victor Hugo

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Synopsis

About the Author Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a novelist, poet, and dramatist, and the most important of French Romantic writers. In his preface to his historical play Cromwell (1827) Hugo wrote that romanticism is the liberalism of literature. Hugo developed his own version of the historical novel, combining concrete, historical details with vivid, melodramatic, even feverish imagination. Among his best-known works are The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. Victor Hugo was one of the greatest personalities of French literature. Though not without the faults and eccentricities which frequently characterize great geniuses, he never entered any field of literature without excelling in it. The novel, the lyric, the drama, criticism, all fell from his facile pen without apparent effort. Hugo died in Paris on May 22, 1885. He was given at his death a national funeral. It was attended by two million people. Victor Hugo is buried in the Panthéon. Product Description The burgraves were medieval princes who inhabited the fortified castles of the Rhine and ranked second only to kings. They mostly led a lawless life, harrying the country and stopping at no crime. Through four generations of burgraves evil and corruption are shown driving out the rough ideas of honor which had hitherto existed side by side with ferocity. The complete failure of this play when produced on March 7, 1843 at the Coméédie-Franççaise was the end of Hugos career as a dramatist.

About the Author, Victor Hugo

"If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away," the larger-than-life Victor Hugo once confessed. Indeed, this 19th-century French master's works -- from the epic drama Les Misérables to the classic unrequited love story The Hunchback of Notre Dame -- have spanned the ages, their themes of morality and redemption ever applicable to our times.