Hans of Iceland: A Play in Three Acts

By Victor Hugo

Based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name (penned when the author was only twenty-one), this macabre play begins in a morgue. The fearsome outlaw, Hans of Iceland, whose face has been seen by no one, determines to kill a regiment of Musketeers that he blames for the death of his son. His revenge intersects in a bloody way with the more conventional romantic plot of a young nobleman who loves the daughter of a political prisoner that the former Chancellor of Norway has held in thrall for many years. The tension ratchets up, culminating in a conflagration à la Samson that seems to anticipate the Grand Guignol movement by nearly a century. The story has the nightmarish logic of a bad dream. As one contemporary reviewer said: "If genius is very close to madness, then this work is very close to genius." Great drama from a great writer!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Jan 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781434442765

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is one of the most well-regarded French writers of the nineteenth century. He was a poet, novelist and dramatist, and he is best remembered in English as the author of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). Hugo was born in Besançon, and became a pivotal figure of the Romantic movement in France, involved in both literature and politics. He founded the literary magazine Conservateur Littéraire in 1819, aged just seventeen, and turned his hand to writing political verse and drama after the accession to the throne of Louis-Philippe in 1830. His literary output was curtailed following the death of his daughter in 1843, but he began a new novel as an outlet for his grief. Completed many years later, this novel became Hugo's most notable work, Les Misérables.

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