Hugo, Victor Marie
Hugo, Victor Marie (1802–85),French poet, playwright, and novelist. One of the beacons of the Romantic reform movement, Hugo was among the most fervent partisans of English drama during the Restoration period in France. With the inception of his literary salon, the ‘Cénacle’ (1829), bourgeois and anticlerical liberals joined the aristocratic and monarchist Romantics with the intention of overthrowing the old school of their classical forefathers. Hugo's rallying forces promulgated a new dramatic style capable of expressing not only the supple laws of nature through the run-on line, but above all the unruly spirit of Shakespeare through the alliance of tragic and comic genres. In his ‘Preface’ to Cromwell (1830) Hugo cited Shakespeare as his precedent for defending the total autonomy of the aesthetic voice. In proclaiming ‘The poet must only take counsel from nature, from truth and from inspiration which is also a form of...
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