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Take out your hankies--you're going to be equally yelling with laughter and yelling with severe sadness before this play is finished. Seriously: select an emotion and Cyrano de Bergerac will have you sense it. You wish to swoon? You would like to feel scorn? Pity? Cyrano's body difficulties are you covered. Stress? There's a dang battle scene that is filled with humor (and blood and guts).

Nevertheless, the significant emotion you'll feel throughout the reading (or viewing, in case you're fortunate enough to see a stage production of Cyrano) is admiration for Edmond Rostand's verbal acrobatics and blisteringly witty banter.

Cyrano de Bergerac is a play about an eloquent, talented, and courageous man and his passion for a beautiful lady, Roxane. Straightforward? Not too much. Because Our Hero is sort of an uggo--he has a nose the size of the elephant's back and a resulting inferiority complex the size of Jupiter.

He also decides to use his eloquence to woo his beloved Roxane... on behalf of his own hottie buddy Baron Christian.

What could possibly go wrong with this situation?

Playwright Edmond Rostand composed Cyrano de Bergerac as a comedy and a satire of the excessively romanticized literature of France from the 1600s (such as Alexandre Dumas's The 3 Musketeers). As such, you'll discover that it's chock-full of historical references to authors, royalty, philosophers, dramatists, and scientists at the time. Light-hearted in character, this work is filled with frivolous pomp and overblown conversation bursting at the seams with rhyming couplets. The interpreted meter you frequently see in English versions is iambic pentameter, which, as most of us know, is a party waiting to happen.

Basing his primary character on a historical figure of the exact same name, Rostand correctly resisted a lot of the real Cyrano's lifetime--as told from the real-life Le Bret and also a number of other biographers--within his own beloved play.

The real Cyrano de Bergerac was a French dramatist who dwelt 1619-1655, so Rostand failed his history homework. De Bergerac really did struggle in the Siege of Arras at 1640 and died in 1655. But we are thinking he likely wasn't as much pleasure as the fictional man--because that is nearly impossible.

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