Did Victor Hugo read Middleton’s “The Revengers Tragedy”?

Just an idle thought I had….

Was over in London the other week and saw the National Theatre’s in-yer-face production of The Revenger’s Tragedy (which, after decades of scholarly wrangling, one is finally allowed to say is – probably – by Thomas Middleton).  It was great fun, a very loud/garish/modern interpretation of a very visceral play.  Forget As You Like It.  Like T.S. Eliot put it, those Jacobeans just couldn’t help dramatising “the skull beneath the skin”.  Anyway, there I was lapping it all up, and I couldn’t spotting opera references, admittedly a pretty perverse thing to do since The RT was first performed in 1606. In London.  But, whatever – it was just too tempting… the inter-generational love triangle between Spurio and the Duke couldn’t help reminding me of the Father-Son situation with Elisabeth de Valois in Verdi’s Don Carlos (in a very strange way, granted), while the overall scenario was peppered with some of the same narrative turns that appear in Rigoletto.  A debauched court, presided over by a corrupt Duke.  A murder plot that goes horribly wrong, with a mixup leading to a body-bag with the wrong body (containing the precious relative instead of the enemy).  An ‘innocent’ man, seeking revenge and vindication, only to find himself unwittingly becoming the agent of destruction of the one thing he most wanted to protect….

Verdi’s librettist, Piave, based Rigoletto on Victor Hugo’s controversial play Le roi s’amuse (1832)).  It is known that Hugo had some exposure to English drama after he first arrived in Paris in the mid-1820s, but even so, it’s very unlikely that Hugo could have known this strange play.  But you can’t help wondering….