Doña Sol de Silva is one of the most celebrated characters from what is probably Victor Hugo’s most famous play, Hernani. Before the advent of literacy amongst the masses, the theatre was the means to inform and educate the public, so in many countries, including France, it was heavily controlled and censored. Victor Hugo rebelled against the crushing forces of classicism and conformism and ushered in modernism in the form of a drama set in 16th-century Spain. Swashbuckling and intense as the play may seem today to us, Hernani not only broke the barriers of form but used an historical setting as a criticism of the current regime, a device that Victor Hugo was to make much use of in the future. The hero is a noble outlaw, a bandit and a rebel, passionately in love (with Doña Sol) and driven by inexorable fate. Victor Hugo, at 28 years of age, makes clear his ambitions as to the kind of Romantic hero he was to be in his life. Hernani is celebrated because the fight between the two forces of conservatism and modernism was literally that, a fight, which has gone down in history as The Battle of Hernani. The ‘Battle’ took place upon the opening of the play in Paris in February 1830 and has gone down in literary history. It took a month of disrupted performances and chaos in the theatre for a determined Hugo and his troupe to wear the opposition out.
In 1868 a troupe of French actors came to Guernsey to play Hernani in Guernsey’s only and tiny theatre, specifically to honour Victor Hugo. Hugo was persuaded to attend; he and Juliette Drouet saw the performance from behind a curtain. An audience that had watched in virtual silence greeted his appearance at the end of the play with enthusiastic applause – the conservative grandees of Guernsey were making their peace with Victor Hugo.
‘Doña Sol’ was obtained from Roses Loubert in France. It is a gallica (or centifolia) rose, compact in form with arching branches; its flowers are pinkish-red with white flecks and very full. It was bred by Jean-Pierre Vibert (1777-1866), one of the most famous of 19th-century French rose growers.