by Victor Hugo (Author), John Strand (Adapted by)

HERNANI, Victor Hugo's third play, written when he was 28, was not so much a piece of theater as a bombshell dropped directly into the laps of les classiques, the conservative defenders of French drama and its perfect garden of rules, regulations, and Aristotelian commandments of How Things Must Always and Forever Be. Deviation was considered heretical; innovation unnecessary, and to some minds, criminal.