# of Words: 363

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 As such, you'll discover that it's chock-full of historical references to authors, royalty, philosophers, dramatists, and scientists at the time.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.

Related Papers

Death In Venice Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a novella about a writer who falls in love with a young Polish boy, which has been raising eyebrows ever since its publication in 1912. To be clear, when we state author, we are referring to an adult one--that means this love is all types of forbidden. Before you consider burning your copy of the book in outrage, though, consider this: This book is really about artwork. And desire. And how art and want are super entangled with each other. Can it be a sexy mess?......Read More

The Giver Lois Lowry

Imagine if you had been told that, as old twelvemonths, you had to get a job... and then keep it for the rest of your life. Terrifying? Try this: imagine if you had been always been viewed over by an obscure brute force. Yikes? All of this is dreadful, however The Giver is the gift that keeps on giving (you nightmares): envision a society in which there are not any emotions. No love, no hatred, to bliss, no jealousy, no aggravation. Excuse us while we spend the following day beneath our......Read More

Glengarry Glen Ross David Mamet

Sure, observing someone stab another person at the trunk or seeing him skirt the legislation could be interesting, but toss a little competition from the combination, and things could get downright thrilling. This is the form of planet David Mamet is known for producing--a world filled with conflict and tension in which folks behave badly, and we as the audience only get to sit back and appreciate. Wait--did you think it was all just driving around and showing individuals fine homes? Nope. That......Read More

Related Topics