French Literature

Racine's Athalie or Athaliah was written for private performance at court, and has something of the gloom and piety that marked the later years of the Sun King's reign. It was staged in 1691 by the convent girls at St Cyr, and so belongs to the period between the Counter-Reformation and the grand operas of the following century. The first attempted to bring the majesty of God down to earth in magnificent music, ceremony and architecture. The second aimed at spectacle and stunning stage effects. With its extended choruses (though unperformed in Racine's lifetime, and a troubled history for the play as a whole thereafter), Athaliah is indeed close to opera, but of a peculiarly religious kind (Ocaso Press).

Working from four different versions of Beaumarchais' text, this translation represents the entire script as Beaumarchais published it in 1775, with a few important variants. This version of the Barber of Seville was first performed in March 1996 at the Court Theatre, University of Chicago.

The second half of the seventeenth century marked the first major breakthrough for women playwrights in France, as some of them succeeded in getting their works staged, published and taken seriously by critics and authority figures. The four works included here, translated into English for the first time, represent the diversity of genres cultivated by these writers, while reflecting both the cultural milieu of the era and a concern for the status of women. Françoise Pascal's Endymion, a tragicomedy with special effects, daringly reexamines a classical myth. Marie-Catherine Desjardins' Nitetis, a historical tragedy, focuses on the plight of a virtuous and astute queen married to an evil tyrant. Antoinette Deshoulières's Genseric, also a historical tragedy, rejects prevailing models of male heroism and of conventional tragic plots. Catherine Durand's proverb comedies contain a scathing critique of aristocratic mores and give voice to women's desires for emancipation.

Poet and soldier, brawler and charmer, Cyrano de Bergerac is desperately in love with Roxane, the most beautiful woman in Paris. But there is one very large problem—he has a nose of stupendous size and believes she will never see past it to return his feelings. So when he discovers that the handsome but tongue-tied Christian is also pining for Roxane, generous Cyrano offers to help by writing exquisite declarations of love for the young man to woo her with. Will she ever recognize who she is really falling in love with? Set during the reign of Louis XIII, Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) was one of the great theatrical successes of its time and remains as popular today for its dramatic power and, above all, for its good-natured, passionate and swashbuckling hero.

This new Penguin volume includes the 'greatest hits' of French classical theatre, in vivid and acclaimed English translations. The plays in this volume—Cinna, The Misanthrope, Andromache and Phaedra—span only thirty-seven years, but make up the defining period of French theatre. In Corneille's Cinna (1640), absolute power is explored in ancient Rome, while Molière's The Misanthrope (1666), the only comedy in this collection, sees its anti-hero outcast for his refusal to conform to social conventions. Here also are two key plays by Racine: Andromache (1667), recounting the tragedy of Hector's widow after the Trojan War, and Phaedra (1677), showing a mother crossing the bounds of love with her son...

The play Guillaume Tell by Antoine-Marin Lemierre, which displayed popular themes of the struggle against tyranny, revolt, sacrifice and liberty, is an example of a play promoted by both the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. Productions of Guillaume Tell were actually subsidized by the state, as it was one of several plays deemed by the government to best propagate revolutionary ideals (Theatre, Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris).

Although he is dedicated to revenge, although it is promised to Duke Gomez, Hernani and Dopa Sol love each other. The intensity of this passion tears the hero's heart. Because the king's father killed his own, he must execute his son. However, his heart whispers to him to live. United and divided by a woman, the three men must choose between honor and love. Their greatness will cause their downfall. With its excessive characters, its multiple intrigues, and its mixture of laughter and tears, Hernani is the birth of romantic theater (translated from Flammarion, 2006).

Among the great figures who pioneered the modern movement in world literature, none showed himself more versatile than France's Jean Cocteau. Poet, novelist, critic, artist, actor, film-maker, Cocteau was also one of the greatest dramatists Europe has produced, with over a dozen plays which are frequently revived, not only in France, but in translation in many other countries. For this collection, fine translations of four full-length plays, one short play, and the 'Speaker's Text' for the Cocteau-Stravinsky opera Oedipus Rex have been selected. The longer plays (The Infernal Machine, Orpheus, Bacchus, Knights of the Round Table) are re-creations of classic myth and legend―poetic and highly original interpretations of certain timeless themes which have inspired great drama through the ages. The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party is, by contrast, merely a 'curtain-raiser,' but remarkable as un jeu d'esprit, revealing the wit and psychological penetration for which Cocteau is famous (Amazon).

Octave Mirbeau was one of the most prolific literary figures of France’s storied Belle Époque, and his innovative theatrical works are only recently being rediscovered and appreciated by modern audiences. Business is Business is a classical comedy of manners recalling Molière (Intellectual Books).

Jean-Paul Sartre, the great existentialist novelist and philosopher, displays his mastery of drama. No Exit is an unforgettable portrayal of hell. The Flies is a modern reworking of the Electra-Orestes story (Vintage Books).

Ubu Roi has divided audiences into passionate, dissenting camps since its 1896 premiere in Paris, an event that changed theater forever. With the first word of the play the audience erupted in pandemonium. People stormed the exits as fist fights broke out. Ubu was a scatological mockery that challenged assumptions about good taste and good behavior, a performance that questioned the very nature of theater and divided the audience between those who came expecting the ordinary and those who came hoping for the extraordinary. Now, Ubu is seen as the precursor of the theatre of the absurd and playwrights like Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. Rob Melrose's new translation brings out the Shakespearean echoes of Ubu while using words from classic American comedy to get the Punch and Judy feel.

A bilingual edition of Voltaire's two most famous plays. Zaire, a romantic tragedy based on a love story between a Christian slave and a Muslim prince, and Epistle, a satirical comedy that criticizes 18th-century French society. These two plays represent the pinnacle of Voltaire's theatrical work and are still studied in colleges and universities around the world (translated from Legare Street Press).

In an analysis of seven plays from the Revolution, Rodmell discusses their political and philosophical themes, and the light they throw on contemporary events.

In the final decade of the eighteenth century, theatre was amongst the most important sites for redefining France's national identity. In this study, Annelle Curulla uses a range of archival material to show that, more than any other subject matter which was once forbidden from the French stage, Roman Catholic religious life provided a crucial trope for expressing theatre's patriotic mission after 1789. Even as old rules and customs fell with the walls of the Bastille, dramatic works by Gouges, Chénier, La Harpe, and others depicted the cloister as a space for reimagining forms of familial, individual, and civic belonging and exclusion. By relating the dramatic trope of religious life to shifting concepts of gender, family, religiosity, and nation, Curulla sheds light on how the process of secularization played out in the cultural space of French theatre.

The essays in Novel Stages examine the myriad intersections between drama and the novel in nineteenth-century France, a period when the two genres were in constant engagement with one another. The collection is unified by common intellectual concerns: the inscription of theatrical esthetics within the novel; the common practice among nineteenth-century novelists of adapting their works for the stage; and the novel's engagement with popular forms of theater. The essays provide insight into a specific aspect of the relationship between the theater and the novel in the nineteenth century. Their distinct perspectives form an overview of the literary landscape of nineteenth-century France, and demonstrate many ways in which all major nineteenth-century French novelists, including Hugo, Flaubert, Sand, and Zola, participated in the theatrical culture of their century.

This comprehensive inventory is the result of a study of all performances of plays and operas announced in two Parisian newspapers during the decade of the French Revolution. The research conducted by a team of French and American historians tests the two-century-old assumption that Parisian theatre during the French Revolution was nothing more than a forum for political debate. This work will be an important resource for scholars of French theatre, opera, and literature, as well as for historians of the French Revolution.