Page:Rolland - Two Plays of the French Revolution.djvu/10

4 awakened a passionate interest in the Italian Renaissance, which he immediately translated into plays. It is likely that Orsino, Les Baglioni, and Le Siège de Mantoue, plays of the Renaissance, were inspired by Shakespeare, for whose historical dramas M. Rolland professes a decided partiality. The plays are not published, but if we can judge from the fact that Mounet-Sully wished to produce Orsino, they must have shown some of the power of the later plays. At Rome he was associated with the aged revolutionist Malwida von Meysenbug, whom he had met at Versailles some time before, and doubtless the story of her eventful life had its part in shaping his ideals. Four other plays—three of them on classical subjects—belong to this period: Niobe, Caligula, Empédocle, and Jeanne de Piennes. It is probable that these also belonged to the writer's period of apprenticeship. At the end of M. Rolland's stay in Rome he went to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, in company with Malwida.

Even at this time he was already dreaming of a new theater in France, and his theoretical writings of later times bear unmistakable proof of the impression made upon him by the Bayreuth theater and Wagner's epoch-making ideas on art and the people.

After his marriage in 1892 Romain Rolland returned to Italy, where he gathered material for his thesis, which he presented and successfully upheld at the Sorbonne in 1895. His subject was ''The Origins of the Modern Lyric Theater. History of the Opera in Europe Before Lully and Scarlatti''. This he published in book form in 1895. But in addition to his