Cromwell

Overview

About four hundred and fifty pages, Victor Hugo’s vast verse drama about Oliver Cromwell, published in 1827 and never actually staged during Hugo’s lifetime, its considerable length and staging demands making full production genuinely impractical. The play dramatizes Cromwell in 1657, hesitating over whether to accept the English crown while surrounded by competing royalist and Puritan plotters, a genuine crisis of political legitimacy staged across considerable dramatic length.

Despite the play’s own limited theatrical life, the volume is remembered chiefly for its Preface, which became the manifesto of French Romanticism. There Hugo divides human history into primitive, ancient and modern ages, each producing its own characteristic literary form, lyric, epic and drama, argues that modern art must mix the sublime and the grotesque as Shakespeare did, and rejects the classical unities of time and place that had governed French drama since Corneille and Racine.

What happens

Cromwell’s hesitation. The play centers on Oliver Cromwell in 1657, weighing whether to formally accept the English crown offered to him, a decision complicated by competing pressures from royalist supporters hoping to restore traditional monarchy and Puritan allies suspicious of any move toward kingship.

Competing plotters. Cromwell is surrounded throughout the play by various royalist and Puritan factions, each pursuing their own political agenda and each attempting to influence his ultimate decision, staging the considerable political complexity and genuine uncertainty surrounding England’s post-civil-war settlement.

The three ages of history. In the Preface, Hugo divides human history into three successive ages, primitive, ancient and modern, arguing that each age naturally produces its own characteristic literary form, lyric poetry, epic poetry and drama respectively, treating literary development as tied directly to broader historical and social change.

The sublime and the grotesque. Hugo argues that modern dramatic art must deliberately mix the sublime and the grotesque within a single work, citing Shakespeare as the model for this mixed mode, rejecting the classical tradition’s strict separation of tragedy and comedy into formally pure, distinct genres.

Rejecting the classical unities. Hugo rejects the neoclassical unities of time and place, the rules confining a play’s action to a single location within a single day, rules that had governed French drama since Corneille and Racine, arguing that modern drama requires considerably greater formal freedom to represent genuine historical complexity.

A manifesto outlasting its play. The Preface’s theoretical arguments would prove considerably more historically consequential than the drama they introduce, providing French Romantic drama its actual founding manifesto roughly two years before Hugo’s own Hernani put these same principles onstage to a famously riotous premiere reception.

How to read it

Read the Preface as the volume’s genuine historical importance rather than treating the play itself as equally central; while Cromwell dramatizes a genuinely significant political crisis, it is the theoretical arguments accompanying it that actually reshaped French dramatic practice for the following decades.

Pay close attention to how Hugo’s argument for mixing the sublime and the grotesque, citing Shakespeare directly as his model, positions English dramatic tradition against French neoclassical convention, using an outside example to argue for reforming his own national theatrical tradition.

Notice how directly Hugo’s rejection of the classical unities connects to his broader argument about historical development; treating dramatic form as tied to historical age gives his rejection of inherited neoclassical rules a theoretical foundation beyond simple personal preference or stylistic innovation.

Consider the considerable gap between the Preface’s outsized historical influence and the play’s own genuine theatrical obscurity as itself significant; Hugo’s theoretical arguments proved persuasive and actionable in ways the specific dramatic work meant to demonstrate them apparently did not.

Read this Preface alongside Corneille’s Le Cid and Racine’s Phèdre to see directly what dramatic tradition Hugo was actually arguing against; encountering the classical French tragedy these earlier playwrights perfected makes clear exactly what formal constraints Hugo’s Romantic manifesto sought to overturn.

Questions it raises

• Does the Preface’s theoretical argument for mixing the sublime and the grotesque hold up independently of the play it introduces, or does its persuasiveness depend partly on readers accepting Hugo’s own subsequent theatrical practice, particularly Hernani, as successful demonstration of these principles?
• How persuasive is Hugo’s three-age historical schema, primitive, ancient and modern ages each producing their own characteristic literary form? Does this framework illuminate genuine patterns in literary history, or does it impose an artificial developmental narrative for primarily rhetorical purposes?
• What does the considerable gap between the Preface’s lasting influence and the play’s own theatrical obscurity suggest about the relationship between theoretical manifesto and actual dramatic practice? Can a work’s ideas succeed independently of the specific artistic demonstration meant to embody them?
• How does Hugo’s rejection of the classical unities compare to the actual dramatic achievements of Corneille and Racine working within those same constraints? Does the unities’ rejection represent unambiguous artistic liberation, or did the constraint itself produce genuine formal discipline worth preserving in some form?
• Given that Hugo cites Shakespeare as his model for mixing the sublime and grotesque, what does this cross-national literary influence suggest about how French Romanticism positioned itself relative to English dramatic tradition? Was this appeal to Shakespeare primarily strategic or a genuine aesthetic conviction?
• What does the play’s own dramatization of Cromwell’s hesitation over the crown, a genuine historical crisis of political legitimacy, contribute to the volume beyond serving as occasion for the more famous Preface? Does the play deserve more serious attention on its own terms than its limited theatrical history suggests it has received?