Cyrano de Bergerac

Description

First time in Penguin Classics for Rostand's popular comedy about the love-sick swain with an ear for a fine phrase and an extravagantly large nose. 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.

Savien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) French soldier, satirist, and dramatist, whose life has been the basis of many romantic but unhistorical legends. The best-known of them is Edmond Rostand's verse drama Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Bergerac's major works were two posthumously published accounts of fantastic voyages, VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (1657) and L'HISTOIRE DES ETATS ET EMPIRES DU SOLEIL (1662). Carol Clark is an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She taught French there for many years, lecturing particularly on seventeenth and nineteenth-century topics. She has previously translated Baudelaire and Proust for Penguin.