SOURCE: Lowin, Joseph. “The Frames of Lorenzaccio.” French Review 53, no. 2 (December 1979): 190-98.

[In the following essay, Lowin describes Musset's structural framing of action, character, and theme in Lorenzaccio.]

Were one to view a full-length play, not as one observes a stage production, through perception of its temporal, linear development, but, spatially, as one views a painting, with an immediate impression of a static whole, one would perceive the most “important” scene of the play at or near the center of the canvas, receiving the greatest concentration of light. It would be less clear but no less true that the first and last acts of the play would be at or near the margins of the canvas in a subtle play of darkness, shadow, and diffused light. One might find as well, embedded in works of art of considerable technical subtlety and nuance—for example in Las Meninas by Velázquez or in Hamlet—a structure which, by its mirroring of the whole of the work of art, reveals its unity.

In what ways does the play—as a literary text—circumscribe itself so that it may best posit a created world within its limits? How does the play reveal what it is that is going on? If many plays lend themselves to such “frame analysis,” few lend themselves to such an analysis more fully than Musset's Lorenzaccio.¹

The central scene of Lorenzaccio, the one receiving the greatest concentration of light, is, of course, the enormous third scene of the third act of the play, containing an extended dialogue between Philippe Strozzi and Lorenzo in which Lorenzo realizes and expresses for the first time his true motives for the proposed tyrannicide. The action of the play revolves around this moment of self-revelation and affirmation of consciousness.² This essay will focus on the ways the action of the play frames the central scene, making two main points. The first point concerns the correlation between “marginal” characters and structural “marginality.” It stresses the significance of formal and thematic symmetry and shows that the margins of the play are not necessarily finite. One finds in the play a recurrent insistence on an “elsewhere” which expands the given space. The second point builds on the first and takes up where the first leaves off. It concerns the more meaningful of the dilations of the scenic space, the ones which are contractions as well as expansions and which are reduced models of the play. Emphasis is placed on the thematics of the frame, which embraces either a paysage or a portrait, either virtue or corruption, or which conceivably might embrace a void.

The analyses of Hassan el Nouty³ and Bernard Masson⁴ and the mise en scène of the director of the Za Branou Theatre in Prague, Otomar Krejca (discussed in Masson, pp. 337-91) pay particular attention to the opening and closing of the play. According to Nouty, although the situation at the beginning and at the end of the play is static in appearance only, there is enough of a similarity between the initial and final situations to allow for the view that the architecture of the piece is circular, even helical; viewed thus, the play has no true ending. Although Nouty's analysis affirms the vagueness of its ending, he seems to deny that Musset's work has any borders. As our analysis will show, they are there and they play an important role in the esthetic wholeness of the work. Bernard Masson analyzes the play with even more attention to detail. He notes that scene for scene and sometimes decor for decor the last act returns us to the point of departure. History is like nature; a tyrant replaces a tyrant the way one night follows another. According to Masson, the fifth act of the Za Branou production of the play, which took place in Prague in 1969, is a complete annihilation of the action of the play. In Krejca's mise en scene, according to Masson, “la pièce de Musset n'aura été après tout qu'un long, tumultueux et fertile entracte” (Masson, p. 389).

Unclosed circle, spiral, or broad intermezzo, the play, though it may have no ends, does have margins. The first and fifth acts are what permit the viewer to distinguish the play from what is non-play, much as a frame on a painting permits one to distinguish between the painting and the wall. Although a part of the work, the framework is definitely a limit of the work. And it is a limit in a very positive sense.

In Lorenzaccio, above all, the first and fifth acts insist on their own marginality. It is evident that the intrigues played out in act I and mirrored in act V are peripheral not only to the main action of the play but also to the political life of the Florence of 1537.

The quarrel between the Strozzi and Salviati families, for example, is a personal one and, finally, has no wider repercussions. One might have thought at the beginning of the play that since the Strozzi name appears to stand for virtue and the Salviati name for vice, this strand would have been woven more prominently into the text. In act V the Strozzi-Salviati quarrel is reduced to a quarrel between children, who fight not only because that is what their families do, but because that is what children do. By the end of the play as well, Philippe, the only Strozzi who might have been called on to play a central role, has abdicated that position and has placed himself outside even the periphery of the intrigue.

Another pattern which serves as a framework around the main action of the play is that of the episode of the marquis and marquise Cibo. Like Philippe, the marquise, although peripheral, attempts to have some effect on the central action. Like Philippe, she fails abysmally and is relegated finally to the margins of the play where she belongs. She belongs there not at all uselessly but because Musset gave her a role to play which carries with it much of the significance of the structure of the play. More than any of the male characters, she mirrors the essence of Lorenzo's dilemma.

The movement of the scene in which the Cibo couple makes its first appearance is directed outward, away from the main stage. Laurent Cibo takes leave of his wife the marquise to inspect his properties on the outskirts of Florence and will be gone for the duration of the central action of the play. He is totally outside the framework. The marquise is left behind ostensibly to make an attempt at centrality: an adulterous affair with Alexandre will save Florence. Before she plunges in, however, she follows her husband visually, away from the scene, away from Florence. She breaks through the framework of the play by opening a window and seeing, with her mind's eye only, the vast expanses of freedom and purity that are represented by the Cibo domain at Massa, where, we are told, she has spent idyllic hours. What is far away, what is off-stage, what is past, is good.

The window of the marquise represents the first instance in the play of what Masson calls dilation of scenic space. He makes much of the proliferation of windows in Lorenzaccio: “Musset suggère un au-delà du décor, qui fait du microcosme scénique la cellule d'un univers plus vaste qui le contient. Tel est le sens premier de ces fenêtres qui ouvrent sur un envers du décor et évoquent un ailleurs où les personnages en scène ne sont pas, mais où ils pourraient être” (Masson, p. 124). It is not only windows, however, which create the possibility of infinite expansion.

In another instance, Catherine, Lorenzo's aunt/cousin/sister/beloved, and Marie, Lorenzo's mother, are seated on the banks of the Arno. Like the marquise, who “sees” Massa, Marie sees another locus amoenus, the Cafaggiuolo of Lorenzo's youth and purity. She sees a mirror of Florence—and its opposite. Again, not only are the bounds of space overcome but those of time as well. For with Marie, we are privileged to gain a glimpse of the Lorenzino d'autrefois. Marie's lament presents us with another para-text: the story of a potentially different unfolding of events. Had Lorenzo remained where he belonged by birth, at the center, he would not be today what for Marie has become “un spectre hideux.” The marginality of the scene between Marie and Catherine on the banks of the Arno is further emphasized at its conclusion when the two women become witnesses to the departure of citizens who have been banished from Florence by the duke. The movement of the scene is a generalized, structured, impersonal, mannered, almost choral one, away from the center toward the periphery and beyond, leading out of the view of those on stage. This movement away from the center is mirrored in the scene of the reconciliation of the marquis and marquise Cibo in the last act. They have once again become the idyllic lovers of act I, as though the adultery had not taken place. The manner of Musset's presentation of the reconciliation is significant. Not a word is spoken onstage by the lovers. Rather, two anonymous gentlemen, in six simple répliques, describe the happy couple, oblivious to the tumult surrounding them, passing hand in hand through the stage. For all their presence contributes to the effect of the scene, they might as well be in the wings.

Probably the most important scene of the first act which is subsequently reduplicated in the last takes place between the silk merchant and the goldsmith. Masson remarks that the scene itself is a “spectacle dans un spectacle: il y a ceux qui se divertissent et ceux qui regardent se divertir” (Masson, p. 188). The people are spectators of their own political and social destiny. But they are more than just spectators; they are witnesses, commentators, critics of the scene they are observing and about which they bear solemn testimony. The stylized language of their testimony is significant. The orfèvre delivers a discourse in which the political life of Florence is transformed metaphorically into architectural life. Substance becomes structure; the tableau becomes its framework. The language of the goldsmith is crucial. His speech appears unnatural, contrived, stilted, as though read from a text. To the silk merchant, his interlocutor, it appears to have come from a script: “Vous avez l'air de savoir tout cela par cœur.” The formal nature of the goldsmith's speech rises to consciousness in the mind of the merchant and is subjected to analysis or criticism within the play itself.

In the final act of the play, these two peripheral characters, the merchant and the goldsmith, reappear. Their roles now are reversed. Whereas previously it was the goldsmith who indulged in prolixity, he now remains relatively silent, and it is the merchant's turn to be garrulous as he delivers himself of the famous speech of the six Sixes. His language is so contrived as to appear absurd and is dismissed as such by the goldsmith. Abruptly, with almost no transition, the two bourgeois disappear from the scene to be replaced by another couple, the Preceptors, accompanied by the Strozzi and Salviati children. It is as though the bourgeois had dissolved into the Preceptors. Even the language remains the same; it is the language of caricature. It is outrageously affected, pedantic, précieux. The two Preceptors appear to be influenced neither by the macrocosmic political upheaval which has just taken place nor by its microcosmic reflection which appears before their eyes in the actions of the contentious children. The Preceptors themselves are a mirror, reduced to the absurd, not only of the Cibo couple, but of the artist Tebaldeo. Like Tebaldeo, they are interested only in the work of art that results from the revolution. One of the Preceptors has, in fact, written a sonnet describing the events as he perceives them, and is parading it before his colleague for commentary and appreciation. Because of the scuffling of the scamps only a two-line fragment of the sonnet is recited. These two lines are sufficient to show that we are in the presence of an antiphrastic interior reduplication of the larger work:

Chantons la liberté qui refleurit plus âpre,
Sous des soleils plus mûrs et des cieux plus vermeils.

(V,5, p. 198.)

If the reflowering at the end is more harsh than the situation at the beginning, the liberty of which the poet/pedant speaks is ironic. Liberty is the one thing which is decidedly not the result of the action of the play.

Undramatic language, produced by undramatic, peripheral characters, leads away from the action of the text in the direction of its limits. The structure of repetition constitutes a framework around the main action of Lorenzaccio. Grouped in the framework of the play, at its margins, are the spectators, the commentators, and the inefficacious actors. Theme and structure play off against each other in the diffused light as the distinction between the two is blurred at the point of their conjuncture. Paradoxically, by alluding to an “elsewhere,” the framework states poetically but clearly that the limits of the text may be transcended, both by expansion and contraction.

It is at the point where expansion and contraction occur simultaneously that Musset's contribution to the poetics of framing is most striking. The notion of simultaneous expansion and contraction is embodied in what is the most peripheral set of répliques in the first act. It relates to the non-appearance of Benvenuto Cellini on stage and to his presence as potential story-teller in the wings. The content of Cellini's “bonne histoire” is never recorded in the play and will remain an unknown para-text, an abstract possibility. The peripherality of Cellini, the artist who “appears” in the wings, is reflected by the peripherality of Tebaldeo, the artist who does actually appear on stage.⁵

Of the thirty-eight scenes of Lorenzaccio, none is more peripheral than the one in which Tebaldeo appears so prominently. Of the forty-four-odd characters in the play, few are more unnecessary. None of Musset's characters illustrates more forcefully Musset's technique of literary framing.

In act II, scene 2, Lorenzo notices that Tebaldeo is carrying a painting in his hands. He calls attention to it metonymically: “Vous avez, il me semble, un cadre dans les mains” (II,2, p. 89). The ensuing conversation has as its subject the contents of the frame. From Tebaldeo we learn that his painting of the Campo Santo is an “esquisse bien pauvre d'un rêve magnifique.” This humble statement provokes a number of assertions by Lorenzo which reveal the true function of Tebaldeo's “frame.” What is crucial is not what is on the canvas but what might be put inside the frame. “Vous faites,” says Lorenzo, “le portrait de vos rêves? Je ferai poser pour vous quelques-uns des miens.” Tebaldeo's frame, therefore, serves a function similar to that of the unseen canvas in Velázquez's painting, Las Meninas. Not only might it reflect the scene being painted, but it might also reflect a scene outside the borders of the work of art.

Lorenzo, in fact, declines to see the painting at all. His taunting remarks, “Est-ce un paysage ou un portrait? De quel côté faut-il regarder, en long ou en large?” appear to be the tasteless appreciation of a philistine. This blurring of the distinction between a paysage and a portrait has far-reaching significance, however. The marquise Cibo, when she feels the need to escape from the suffocating atmosphere of her adultery, does not go to a window for relief from the dramatic tension; instead, she contemplates a portrait of her husband. What is crucially important about the picture is that the marquise transforms the portrait into a paysage: the marquis becomes Massa. She sees in the portrait something that is not there, or rather something that is evoked by it and which results in its expansion. This distortion of the contents of the frame is central to Musset's handling of interior framing, where the reduced model is transformed into a structure even larger than the main body, where concentration leads to expansion.

For Lorenzo, as well, what is in a frame is far less important than what might be there. For Lorenzo, Tebaldeo's frame could contain the portrait of a courtesan (whom Tebaldeo would decline to paint) or it could contain a view of Florence. These two options, the portrait and the paysage, are qualitatively different microcosmic reflections of Lorenzo's own corruption. Tebaldeo's refusal to paint “la Mazzafirra toute nue” (II,2, p. 90), coupled with his enthusiastic willingness to paint corrupt Florence, appears to irritate Lorenzo keenly. As long as the contents of Tebaldeo's frame do not make a severe distinction between Lorenzo's corruption and that of society, Lorenzo can see himself as a mere reflection of the corrupt society, as a mirror—or as a work of art. As soon as the artist, however mediocre, insists on a severe distinction between personal and social corruptions, Lorenzo is threatened. Is his criminal life a reflection of the portrait of a lowly courtesan or is it the reflection of a noble city which has become like a whore? “Est-ce un paysage ou un portrait? De quel côté faut-il regarder, en long ou en large?” Tebaldeo's frame is important for what it might contain, the mirror of Lorenzo's moral dilemma. It is both a scale model and a dilation of the scenic space. The insight provided by the frame applies an unbearable pressure on Lorenzo. The only issue from the abyss represented by the frame is to attempt to corrupt the artist, to make him an accomplice in a political act. After his confrontation with Tebaldeo, Lorenzo is challenged by another incarnation of virtue, Catherine. She proposes to read from a book on Roman history. Lorenzo interrupts and “reads” his own version of the text: “Il y avait une fois un jeune gentilhomme nommé Tarquin le fils” (II,4, p. 100). Lorenzo changes the “histoire de sang” into a “conte de fées,” rewriting the text, as the marquise has repainted the portrait.

Tebaldeo, a reflection of what Lorenzo once was, and Brutus, a model for what he wishes to become, are only two of the many doubles of Lorenzo in the play. In fact, all the male characters in the play who display individuality, with the exception of Cardinal Cibo,⁶ mirror Lorenzo. All are virtual incarnations of Lorenzo, either past or future, either probable or at least remotely possible.

The case of Philippe is especially instructive. In the central scene of the play, the one receiving the greatest concentration of light, Philippe challenges Lorenzo directly, the way Tebaldeo had challenged him only obliquely. It is in this scene (III,3) that Lorenzo is led, by a mysterious process which lacks both logical and chronological development, to his self-revelation. The scene itself only seems to lack internal coherence. It is held together in fact by the repeated use of framing metaphors, devices which focus on the surface of things and on the inexorable forces—from both inside and out—which cause a puncturing of the surface.

Philippe, using the metaphor of the container, demands that Lorenzo exhibit its contents. “Que l'homme sorte de l'histrion! Ne m'as-tu pas parlé d'un homme qui s'appelle aussi Lorenzo, et qui se cache derrière le Lorenzo que voilà?” (III,3, pp. 128-29). And then he throws down the gauntlet. “Es-tu au dedans comme audehors une vapeur infecte? Toi qui m'as parlé d'une liqueur précieuse dont tu étais le flacon, est-ce là ce que tu renfermes?” (III,3, p. 132, my italics). Philippe demands a change of perspective from inside to out.

Lorenzo rises to the challenge with deliberation. His answer is not a direct one, however. He notes that there is a danger in looking beneath the surface, beyond mere reflection, or even beyond a complex system of reflections. Lorenzo sees himself as having once been an admirer of surfaces. He claims to have been able to penetrate the surfaces of things, to reach their essences, and to have found them corrupt. He even uses the architectural metaphor the goldsmith had proposed in describing the political life of Florence, comparing life itself to a city. Lorenzo claims to have looked through the windows of the city, not outwardly to Massa or Caffagiuolo, but inwardly at evil, and, having done so, even though protected by a cloche de verre, to have become tainted.

The surfaces, both of the macrocosm represented by the corrupt city whose windows are its limits and of the microcosm represented by the Lorenzino d'autrefois who contains virtue's precious liqueur and who is himself contained in a protective bell-jar, have been hopelessly intertwined. As Lorenzo reviews the text and texture of his life, he sees that there have been other surfaces as well, which have been more than mere surfaces. At one time Lorenzo was able to externalize the virtue he knew he contained. He would even walk around with his good fantôme at his side. He takes seriously his mother's fantastic vision of the spectre of the Lorenzino d'autrefois. He records as well that, in order to execute his “political” plan, he chose still another surface identity, the theatrical mask of vice. Lorenzo fully realizes now that this mask has stuck to his skin. And yet, it is not the interfusing of surfaces which is, finally, important.

What Lorenzo has come to fear is not that the interior of the flacon be infecte, not that the interior of the frame be vicious, but that it be empty. He is concerned lest the bell-jar house a vacuum. The enigma of Lorenzo's life is not solved by the assassination; it is merely expressed, externalized, exhibited, mirrored in the larger world of the play. Lorenzo has been the scaffolding in which there existed a scale model of the larger-than-life Lorenzo. The expressed Lorenzo is, although not the political savior of Florence, a man of virtue, a witness to virtue—and its prophet. His action is his text, and it is given to be read.

What remains after the writing of the text is a void. In Venice, outside the stage of Florence, Philippe remarks that after all that has taken place, Lorenzo has not changed. Lorenzo concurs, but with one caveat: “Il n'y a de changé en moi qu'une misère—c'est que je suis plus creux et plus vide qu'une statue de fer-blanc” (V,6, p. 200). Lorenzo, in realizing his act, in realizing his mother's dream, has realized at the same time his greatest fear: he has lost his potentiality. Both the “Lorenzaccio” and the “Lorenzino” spectres are now externalized. “Lorenzo,” however, remains, metaphorically, an empty frame, a frame that contains neither paysage nor portrait.

The ending of Lorenzaccio, the play, is parallel to the end of Lorenzo the person: it is neither good nor bad; it is neither progress nor change. Côme's inauguration speech is a text read off-stage which renders ambiguous the action which has taken place on stage. Indeed, we may question whether Lorenzaccio as a whole is a portrait or a paysage. “De quel côté faut-il regarder, en long ou en large?” As in the case of Tebaldeo's painting, one can only speculate about what the frame might contain. As in the case of Lorenzo, what we actually see is only a frame.

Outer and inner framing are functions of an esthetic system. By the use of a complex network of frames, Musset expands the work of art beyond its material limits. His contribution in Lorenzaccio is that he was able to expand the limits without transgressing the strict bounds of the genre in which he wrote. He was able to fashion the frame out of the painting.

Notes

1. A theory of “frame analysis” as an interdisciplinary methodology can be found in Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). Among literary critics, see Boris Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), and Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1977).

   All references to Lorenzaccio will be taken from the following edition and will be made in the text: Alfred de Musset, Théâtre complet, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).

2. Apparently, Anne Ubersfeld (in “Révolution et topique de la cité: Lorenzaccio,” Littérature 24 (1976), 41 sees the regicide as the center of the play. The present analysis, by its very method, excludes such a perspective. It agrees wholeheartedly, however, with Ubersfeld's general statements concerning the rest of the action: “S'il se passe beaucoup de choses dans la pièce, elles sont toutes marginales par rapport au régicide.” Many, she says, “n'ont aucun caractère de nécessité dramatique.”

3. Hassan el Nouty, “L'Esthétique de Lorenzaccio,” Revue des Sciences Humaines, 108 (1962), 589-611.

4. Bernard Masson, Musset et le théâtre intérieur. Nouvelles recherches sur “Lorenzaccio” (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974). Subsequent references to this work will be made in the text. One might agree fully with Masson's well-developed argument that for Musset a spectacle dans un fauteuil is not so much a théâtre de lecture as it is a théâtre intérieur; one might insist, however, that it is interior theatre to the extent that it demands of the spectator, at the theatre or in the armchair, that he look at the work with closer attention to both detail and perspective than a mere reading or stage production permits.

5. Masson comments at length on the central role Cellini was to have played in Lorenzaccio. He shows convincingly (pp. 13-31) how Cellini's Vita, more than any other work, might have served the function of intertext for the play. Masson also enunciates a hypothesis for Musset's relegation of Cellini to the wings and for his replacement in the text by the non-historical painter Tebaldeo Freccia.

6. The cardinal is neither central nor peripheral to the action of Lorenzaccio. At most, he is peripheral to the peripheral story of the marquise, encircling her like a vulture. He is a shadow of a much larger political intrigue, that of the Pope and the emperor, being played elsewhere. He is not merely peripheral to the text; he is foreign to it.