providing a sense of irony that, at least to modern readers, seems a breath of fresh air for the romantic theater.

Critical investigation has been slow to appreciate and evaluate Musset’s achievement. Scholars and theater literary managers alike hardly knew what to make of this “stage of dreams.” What they sensed as inattention to the demands of actual production could be excused only because of the literary aspirations of the plays; stageworthy they could not be. In modern times, however, critical estimation and an ever-increasing number of appearances on the boards (in France) made amends for tentative beginnings, and Musset has come to be generally considered the most significant and innovative playwright of French Romanticism. In the best of his theater, Musset realized many of the theoretical aspirations of dramaturgy in his day. Perhaps the most significant of his achievements, however, was his sensitivity in depicting the darker recesses of the human heart and mind, and his comprehension of and sympathy for the human condition.

Fantasio

Fantasio, first published in Revue des Deux Mondes in January of 1834, is the least performed of the major comedies, and its production history is typical of the early fate of most of Musset’s plays. The play first appeared at the Comédie-Française nine years after Musset’s death, revised by the playwright’s brother, Paul, who tampered with the order of several scenes, expanded the original two acts into three, and altered the nature of the relationship between Fantasio and Elsbeth into something approaching a more conventional love interest. Both theatrical producers and literary critics throughout the rest of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mistook this inept, structurally and spiritually unfaithful version for the original, and the play received little serious consideration. It was not until later productions that the piece was performed using the original text. Critics have additionally, and perhaps misguidedly, expended immense energy in the examination of the play as a depiction of the author’s emotional and psychological state, a habit characteristic of Musset criticism (admittedly amply generated by the author’s frequent informal pronouncements on the relationship of his life and work).

The action is divided into two acts and occurs in Munich; the time is unspecified. In the first act, the King of Bavaria has arranged a marriage of political convenience between his daughter, Elsbeth, and the Prince of Mantua, a man personally unknown either to the king or to the princess. An abrupt change of scene finds three young men carousing in the street, drinking and discussing the forthcoming royal wedding. The youths are joined by a handsome young companion, Fantasio, who immediately confesses to a state of spiritual and intellectual ennui. He is not only pursued by his creditors but is also prey to a decidedly cynical perspective of the world, in which both God and love are dead, and a life of true adventure is no longer possible. Presently, a funeral procession passes by: It is for the king’s jester, Saint-Jean. A taunting remark by one of the pallbearers provokes Fantasio to masquerade as a new jester for the court. In the meantime, on his arrival at an inn outside the city, the Prince of Mantua confides to Marinoni, his aide-de-camp, a scheme to switch roles and costumes in order to observe incognito his future wife and father-in-law.

The second act opens with Elsbeth’s avowal of dismay at the arranged marriage and her sorrow at the death of the beloved Saint-Jean. Fantasio appears in the palace gardens in the disguise of the hunchbacked jester himself and engages the princess in a witty conversation, using the traditional liberties of the jester’s role to comment disparagingly on arranged marriages. Later, when Fantasio catches sight of her weeping, he decides to help Elsbeth out of her unfortunate personal situation. Several scenes follow in which the prince and Marinoni so fumble their assumed roles that they deeply offend the king and the princess. Fantasio stations himself in a window, seizing the opportunity to snatch off the prince’s wig as he passes on the street below. The enraged prince demands the jester’s imprisonment and declares war on Bavaria. When Elsbeth visits Fantasio in prison, she discovers his true identity. In return for releasing her from an unbearable personal situation, she frees the young man, promising to allow him to return as jester whenever he tires of the everyday world of creditors and responsibility.

Fantasio has all the appearance of a whimsical potpourri of political satire, social commentary, philosophy, sentiment, fantasy, and farce. There is an almost improvisational air created by the rapid shifts of scene and the general absence of dramatic action. The very “weight” of the two acts seems capricious: The first act is divided into three scenes, the second act into seven. Moreover, the first act is almost entirely expository (the lengthy second scene functions somewhat in the manner of a philosophical dialogue), and there is no real action until the second act. In spite of its chameleonlike surface, the play is bound together by several features, notably its delight in linguistic play and its obvious thematic emphasis on the concept of the self (signaled by the costume switches and role reversals among the characters).

In the long scene of act 1, even before Fantasio has the inspiration for his change of roles, his mind is clearly occupied by the philosophical implications of human role-playing and the conflict between external appearances and internal reality:That gentleman passing by is charming. Look at him: What lovely silk breeches! What delightful red flowers on his waistcoat. . . . I am positive that that very man has a million ideas in his head which are absolutely foreign to me: his essence is peculiar to him alone. Alas! everything men say to one another amounts to the same thing; the ideas they propose are almost invariably identical from conversation to conversation; but somewhere deep inside these individual machines, what creases, what hidden crannies! Each man carries an entire world inside him. An unremarked world which is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies!

Fantasio has described the egocentric problem of the artist (and, by extension, of all humankind): the desire to escape the confines of one’s own flesh. Despite Fantasio’s sense of ennui and his frustration with the ways of the world, one strength remains: his imagination. A jester’s funeral procession is enough to spark his mind. Fantasio instinctively understands that the feeling, imaginative person can always step into another individual’s shoes. His exchange of roles is more than a simple exchange of outward appearance; Fantasio is successful at his masquerade because he has a powerful sense of empathy with others.

The prince and Marinoni stand in marked contrast to Fantasio’s resilient adaptability. They fumble their exchanged roles so pitifully that they annoy the entire court. They are mere puppets, incapable of adapting themselves to the unfamiliar task of projecting themselves into another man’s skin. The prince’s great sense of outrage at Fantasio’s prank reveals his limitations in the perception of his role; he allows his clothing and the superficial appurtenances of his rank to define his identity. Unlike Fantasio, the prince has no inner resources on which to rely; he has, in fact, no “self,” and he patently lacks the key to freedom—imagination.

In the world of Fantasio, the self is caught in a conflict between personal will and the larger forces of human destiny. All the major characters walk this tightrope: Elsbeth must marry a man whom she does not know and does not love; the welfare of a nation depends on a politically expedient marriage; Fantasio is faced with the possibility of surrender to his creditors and, worse, to his world-weary frame of mind. Fantasio’s ability to see life from different perspectives, however, is his trump card, the measure of his ability to survive. The literal prison from which Elsbeth frees him at the end of the play corresponds to the mental-spiritual prisons he describes in act 1 and from which he is liberated by an act of imagination. Fantasio’s fate is, to some extent, then, of his own making; he earns his freedom as a reward for teaching the meaning of freedom to another human being. By issuing Fantasio an open-ended invitation to return to Elsbeth’s garden and to his role as jester, Musset places his hero in a never-never land that he was not to grant to the protagonists of any of his subsequent plays.

No Trifling with Love

Musset’s next play, No Trifling with Love, published in Revue des Deux Mondes in July of 1834, has often struck critics as even more stylistically and structurally whimsical than Fantasio. Perdican, the son of a provincial baron, and Camille, his cousin, return separately to the château where they were reared together, he from the university, she from a convent school. Their arrival is preceded by that of Perdican’s tutor, the bibulous Master Blazius, and by that of Camille’s spindly, sour-tempered governess, Dame Pluche; these two stock characters are greeted with ironic formality by a chorus of local peasants. Also drawn with the broad strokes of caricature are the pompous, dull-witted baron and the village curate, Master Bridaine. The baron, who has assumed that his niece will marry his son when they reach the appropriate age, is piqued and confused by Camille’s prudish reserve in greeting her cousin, a reaction that is soon discovered to arise from her decision to enter the convent. Her cool attitude is in striking contrast with Perdican’s warm and nostalgic rediscovery of the pleasures and acquaintances of childhood.

The young girl’s decision to take the veil does not seem fixed, however, and she is aroused half-consciously by her cousin’s attentions. She begins to play a double game, maintaining a show of icy reserve yet somehow leading the young man on. Perdican, frustrated by Camille’s ostensible rejection of their past lives and of his present attentions, pays court to an attractive village girl, Rosette, Camille’s foster sister. Camille requests a rendezvous with Perdican before her return to the convent. In an impassioned scene, the cousins exchange their antithetical views of life and love. Camille reveals that her experience at the convent as the confidante of one of the nuns, Sister Louise, has altered her views of worldly pleasure and human commitment. Before entering the convent, Sister Louise had suffered a failed love affair and has bitterly confided her disappointment and frustration to the young schoolgirl. Perdican accuses Camille of arriving at her present state of heart and mind vicariously. In his view, Camille has rejected life without experiencing it herself.

This emotionally charged interview wounds the vanity of both parties and provokes a contest of mutual deceit. The contest revolves around the pawn Rosette, who is herself torn between her sincere attraction for Perdican and her suspicion concerning the sincerity of his declarations. In the final scene, Perdican encounters Camille at prayer and, overhearing her declaration of love for him, rushes to take her in his arms. The two immediately hear a terrifying cry from behind the altar. Rosette has overheard them and has fallen dead from grief and shock. There is no longer any question of a relationship between the cousins, and Camille bids Perdican a brief and austere farewell.

For more than a century, critics have tried to assign a generic tag to this peculiar play. Musset termed it a proverbe (it certainly adheres to the concept of the form, with its dramatic illustration of the aphoristic title), yet critics have often categorized it with the “comedies” in view of its complexities: its expanded length (three acts), its highly stylized techniques (the extensive use of the chorus, something in the manner of Greek drama, and the narration of much of the plot by the stock characters), its sometimes startling shifts of style and mood, and its melodramatic conclusion. The play, in fact, spans generic differences, creating its own structure. The binding force of what appears superficially as a hodgepodge must be discovered not so much in form, but in language and theme.

Critic David Sices proposed that the underlying theme that permeates the stylistic, structural mosaic of No Trifling with Love is the concept of the multiple, unintegrated personality. Musset is not merely trying to dramatize the conflicts of personality between the two protagonists, or those between the protagonists and the stock characters. He has set himself the additional and more intricate task of dramatizing the multiple aspects of the individual personality itself. It is Camille’s and Perdican’s internal psychological complexity and the unintegrated segments of their own individual personalities—the unstable states of belief, opinion, and emotion—that constitute the obstacle to their ultimate union and guide their conduct throughout. The comic impulse traditionally tends toward union and resolution, and, significantly, that is precisely the state which this peculiar comedy cannot attain.

Somewhere within Camille, in spite of her cold exterior, is a warm, passionate young woman who longs for love almost as much as she fears it. Because of her experiences at the convent school, she eschews the actual commitment of a relationship with its human instability and unreliability. She has gained a false experience of human love (because it is not her own), yet she cannot quite control her desire to experience love for herself. Her stiffness contrasts sharply with her only half-conscious attempts to draw her cousin on to further declarations of affection. Perdican is an intelligent, articulate, and sensual young man who also happens to be stubborn and sensitive. His warm affection and desire for the anchoring values of his childhood contrast with his only half-conscious callowness in using Rosette as a pawn. The two cousins are unable to stabilize the various and contending fragments of thought and emotion that motivate their behavior. Musset’s sensitivity in portraying this instability moves the play in the direction of psychoanalysis.

Interwoven with this serious central plot is the two-dimensional framework of the comic characters. Everything about Blazius, Bridaine, Pluche, and the baron is conventional and lacking in depth. Like the prince in Fantasio, they function mechanically and are, consequently, baffled by the vital, three-dimensional contest between the two young cousins. Only in the battle between Blazius and Bridaine for the place of honor at the baron’s table is there a comic echo of the more serious battle between the protagonists, and this subplot serves to underscore the banality of the world they represent. Indeed, the stock characters are, in a sense, depictions of the human personality devoid of youthful hopes and ideals.

The “message” of the play is hard; Musset offers no escape into the magical garden of possibility, as in Fantasio, for Camille and Perdican, no second chance for the hapless Rosette. All that is offered is one small light against the encroaching darkness: To have loved is to have lived.

Lorenzaccio

The plot of Musset’s superb historical drama Lorenzaccio, based on the murder of the sixteenth century Florentine tyrant Alessandro de Medici by his cousin Lorenzo (popularly known by a pejorative form of his name, Lorenzaccio), is grandiose in scope (a full five-act tragedy) and highly involved, with intertwining plots and a large cast of characters. Three parallel conspiracies aimed at the destruction of Alexandre (as he is called in French) combine in this vast canvas depicting the moral life of a modern political city. The central action involves the conduct and the philosophical struggles of the young Lorenzo.

Alexandre, the illegitimate son of Lorenzo II de Medici, has ruled Florence for six years as duke with the combined support of Pope Clement VI and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His corrupt and decadent conduct threatens the welfare of the entire city, from aristocracy to thriving merchant class. No effective attempt at revolt has been successfully organized, however, and only the ever-increasing number of exiles from the city, both forced and voluntary, signals popular discontent.

Lorenzo, noted in earlier days for his studious and idealistic nature, has returned to his native Florence from Rome with the intention of assassinating his tyrannical cousin and helping to restore the Florentine Republic. To accomplish this end, he assumes a mask of corruption and cowardice in order to remain unsuspected by both the duke, with whom he becomes a companion in debauchery, and the citizenry in general. His only confidant is the elderly patriarch of one of Florence’s leading patrician families, Philippe Strozzi. To him alone, Lorenzo reveals not only the nature of the insidious role he has assumed but also the terrible consequences of his action. He has become the role that he plays and is incapable of regaining his lost sense of innocence and integrity. Moreover, although resolved to carry out his original plans, he has come to recognize the futility of his act in a city in which the citizens are too spineless to validate the murder by the reestablishment of the Republic. Using his young aunt as a decoy, Lorenzo sets an ambush for the lustful duke and stabs him to death in bed. His moment of exaltation is brief, and he flees for safety to Venice, where he is murdered, his body ignominiously tossed into a canal. The play concludes with the installation of Cosimo de Medici on the ducal throne, thus squelching once again any hope for the reinstitution of the Republic; Lorenzo’s predictions have been borne out.

One of the extraordinary aspects of Musset’s play is that it is largely accurate historically. At the beginning of their affair in the summer of 1833, George Sand turned over to Musset the manuscript of a scène historique concerning Lorenzo’s plot. The scène historique was a popular form, derived from the more full-blown historical drama, which aimed at the straightforward dramatization of historical events as they happened, without artistic elaboration. Musset used this work as the foundation for a much larger concept, considerably expanding the number of characters and scenes, thoroughly researching the events and correcting Sand’s inaccuracies, giving a sense of private lives and psychological depth to his characters, and, finally, centering the action on Lorenzo.

Most impressive is the play’s pervasive Shakespearean scope and spirit. There are many echoes of the great tragedies (such as Macbeth, pr. 1606, pb. 1623, and Othello, the Moor of Venice, pr. 1604, revised 1623) in the language, themes, and dramatic situations of Lorenzaccio. The most obvious is the theme of action (and its antithesis, inaction), clearly derived from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601), which runs throughout the play, from Lorenzo’s philosophical and practical hesitations to the cowardly compliance of the Florentine citizens. Intimately bound up in this theme are the themes of the significance of action and the illusion of human ideals. Lorenzo is the quintessentially disillusioned man, and the collective disillusionment of the Florentines is brilliantly sketched in the numerous street exchanges among members of the city’s aristocracy and business community. The ultimate disillusionment of the almost allegorically positivistic Philippe Strozzi, occurring at the murder of his daughter, is conveyed with a telling sense of poignant dramatic effect. The pattern of failed ideals filters down even to characters who appear only once or twice.

One example of the way in which Musset utilizes a minor character and scene to add thematic resonance occurs in the second scene of act 2, in which Lorenzo, in the company of Cardinal Valori, encounters a young painter, Tebaldeo Freccia. Tebaldeo admits that in the presence of such masters as Raphael and Michelangelo his own stature is small indeed. Lorenzo is moved by Tebaldeo’s humility and instantly recognizes a fraternity between himself and the painter who can only partially realize his vision. The theme of the artist who attempts to reorder the world in the act of creation is a mirroring of Lorenzo’s attempt to reorder the political world of Florence. Like Tebaldeo, Lorenzo will immediately sense the limitations of his creative act after completing Alexandre’s murder. The failure of art is inherent in the larger theme of disillusionment in human action.

In the end, corruption, not virtue, appears to be humankind’s natural state; Musset’s vision of human progress and perfectability is unmitigatedly dark. Lorenzo does “define” himself by his one fatal act, but, paradoxically, the definition gives no meaning to anyone or anything outside himself. The reinstatement of Medici control over the city argues the essential meaninglessness of history and of the sum of individual and collective experience. The definition endowed by action is the most for which the individual can hope. It is not difficult, in this regard, to understand the interest stirred by the play among the existentialist writers of the years surrounding World War II. The play is not without its faults: In structure, dialogue, and thematic statement, it has been accused of long-windedness and repetition. Nevertheless, its largely successful attempts to contain the vastness of life within the scope of its broad canvas as well as the brilliant characterization of the title role make Lorenzaccio the preeminent example of romantic historical drama.