Manzoni wrote the first draft of his Lettre à M. Chauvet sur l’unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie in Paris, leaving it with his friend Fauriel. On the basis of instructions provided by Manzoni in their later correspondence, Fauriel corrected this letter and published it in 1823 together with the French version of Manzoni’s two tragedies. The Lettre came about as a response to an article by the French critic Victor Chauvet, who had admired the Carmagnola, but criticized its disregard of the Aristotelian rules of the unities of time and place. Manzoni had already written on the arbitrary nature of such rules in the Prefazione to his drama, but in his letter to Chauvet he argues his case in greater detail. He demonstrates the absurdity of such rules in the modern theatre with reference to a wide range of examples from European theatre, including Corneille, Racine, Schiller, Goethe and other famous authors, and using Shakespeare as his main point of reference. The great English playwright, who was much loved by the Romantics, does not enclose his stories and characters within artificial boundaries, but represents them in the time and space required for their personalities and behaviour to come across as natural and realistic. The Lettre is also Manzoni’s clearest theoretical statement on the poetics of the real historian and the relationship between history and invention. According to Manzoni, the tragic in drama stems not only from the passion of love, as in the traditional theatre; for those who reconstruct its documentary evidence, History can also provide the material for great dramatic poetry. For Manzoni, the modern author of tragedy combines within himself the figures of historian and poet: as a historian he investigates the facts and reconstructs their enactment in time and place; as a poet he uses realistic “invention” that is faithful to the actual facts in order to recreate everything that the documentary evidence does not tell us, namely the mind and soul of the human beings who experienced the tragic conflict in which they were caught up in on account of the harsh laws of History.
Manzoni’s Lettre to Chauvet
