Victor Hugo (1807-85) was a formidable playwright as well as a leading French poet and celebrated novelist. His plays dispensed with the stultifying neoclassical rules and transformed French theatre history, introducing melodrama into the serious theatre. The first two plays in this volume, Marion de Lorme and Hernani, provoked storms of protest and controversy at the time: the former was banned by the censor in 1829, while productions of Hernani took place amidst pitched battles in the theatre where it premiered. It nevertheless revolutionised French drama by marking the advent of Romanticism. Two other plays, Lucretia Borgia, a tragedy in prose, and Ruy Blas, which is generally acknowledged as being his finest, complete this first volume of Hugo's plays in the English language.