A terrorist, an old man, and a prince go for the same woman.
Three commit suicide and the other one is elected
Holy Roman Emperor.
The French Romantic Theatre movement is born.
Hernani, written in 1830 by Victory Hugo
Written and first performed in 1830, Hernani rocketed a very young Victor Hugo to fame. Thrust into a huge controversy with the established theater community in Paris, he became the leading figure in a revolution in French theater. It’s the play where he made his bones. It was a direct response against French Classicism.
In 1978, I had just come back from a year abroad in France as part of the University of California’s Education Abroad Program (EAP) and back in San Diego, I was taking a class taught by Jonathan Saville, who was also the longtime theater critic for the San Diego Reader. The class was deadly – – I was beyond bored and underwhelmed, especially after a year of studying and drinking in Poitiers.
The first thing we read was Hernani. I was so bored, that I offered to translate it to English for credit rather than sit in the seminar. I thought it would take a quarter to do. Two quarters later, I had completed seven drafts, all typewritten, all without a word processor.
The manuscript sat in my file cabinet in the garage for almost twenty years until I scanned it and made it available on bedard.com. Since then, the translation has been used by a host of university drama departments studying 19th-century French Theater. It has also been used by the English National Opera to help them navigate through Verdi’s Ernani.
Buy the pdf version from bedard.com
Buy the kindle from amazon.com
Buy the printed version exclusively available at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, France
Buy the iBooks version from the Apple Bookstore.
The many ways you can purchase a copy of Hernani.