Cyrano de Bergerac (play)
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Cyrano de Bergerac is a play by Edmond Rostand based on the life of the real Cyrano de Bergerac. The play is one of the most popular in the French language and has been filmed several times. It was written in 1897 and was an immediate triumph.
In the play (much as in real life) Cyrano is a soldier and also an excellent poet and writer, and he is also the possessor of an extremely large nose. He has also become an exceptional duelist, as a result of having to defend his honour following insults directed against his nose. Early in the play we see him responding to just such an insult by simultaneously duelling his denigrator and composing a poem describing the duel, winning the duel exactly as the poem comes to its last line.
The play concentrates on Cyrano's love for the beautiful Roxane, whom he is obliged to woo on behalf of a more conventionally handsome, but less articulate, friend, Christian de Neuvillette, with whom she already is in love.
The play has been translated and performed many times, and is responsible for introducing the word panache into the English language. It has been the subject of several films, including a 1950 film starring José Ferrer (for which he won an Academy Award), a 1990 French-language version starring Gérard Depardieu, and a comedic Hollywood version, Roxanne, starring Steve Martin.
The entire play is written in verse, in the classic rhymed couplets with 12 syllables per line called alexendrins. It is also meticulously researched, down to the names of the members of the Académie Française and the dame précieuses glimpsed before the performance in the first scene.
It takes place during the reign of Louis XIII, when Cardinal Richelieu was waging war against the Spanish in the north of France and Flanders during the Thirty Years' War. The siege of Arras, in which Christian de Neuvillette dies is a historical event, which took place in about 1640 and in which the real Cyrano took part at the age of 20.es:Cyrano de Bergerac fr:Cyrano de Bergerac (pièce) it:Cyrano de Bergerac (teatro) nl:Cyrano de Bergerac
