Historical tragedy and romantic drama

Abstract

The aim of this article is to recover the historical tragedy as a recognized romantic genre, i.e., as a genre that meets the expectations of intellectuals identified with romanticism in the first decades of the 19th century (Staël, Manzoni, Schlegel, Stendhal, Lebrun, Delavigne etc.), anticipates and shares several characteristics with the romantic drama (mixture of genres, disrespect for classic units, historical realism, enrichment of decoration and costumes, complexification of plot, etc.) and, finally, as a genre that maintains a noticeable relation with both drama and melodrama throughout the century, often  sharing the same stages and actors with them. In order to achieve this objective, I study the journalistic reception to the play Le Cid d'Andalousie, by Pierre Lebrun, staged in 1825, and I contest the widespread conception that the romantic theater can be exclusively identified with the drama as proposed by Victor Hugo, in 1827, in the preface to Cromwell, and that the tragedy belongs only to classical tradition.