Musset: Five Plays: Moods of Marianne; Fantasio; Lorenzaccio; Don't Play with Love; Caprice

Description

A collection of this major 19th century French playwright The Moods of Marianne dramatises Coelio's courtship of Marianne through his go-between friend Octave; Fantasio is set in a fictional Munich and concerns the marriage of a young princess to Leopold of Belgium as a sacrifice for international peace following the Napoleonic Wars; Lorenzaccio is a vast fresco of fifteenth-century Florence, mixing freely a depiction of public life, court intrigue, intimate scenes and moments of deep personal introspection; Don't Play with Love concerns an arranged marriage gone awry; and Caprice is about the marriage of Mathilde to Monsieur du Chavigny and is already about to cheat on her.

An infant prodigy of French romanticism and much inspired by Shakespeare and Schiller, Alfred de Musset (b. 1810) wrote the first modern dramas in the French language. His best-known plays include Les Caprices de Marianne (1833), Lorenzaccio (1833 - often referred to as the French Hamlet), and Un Caprice. His plays are some of the best of French theatre in the nineteenth century, though he was also an esteemed poet and novelist. He received the Legion d'honneur on 24 April 1845, at the same time as Balzac, and was elected to the Academie francaise in 1852. He died in 1857. Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris. He was dramatist, poet, and novelist and after his graduation in medicine he became one of the first Romantic writers. Main works including: poems, Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (1829), Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil (1832), Poesies completes (1840), Poesies nouvelles (1850); novels such as La Confession d'un enfant du siecle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, 1836), Histoire d'un merle blanc (The White Blackbird, 1842) and plays : La Nuit venitienne (1830), Andre del Sarto (1833), Lorenzaccio (1834), On ne badine pas avec l'amour (1834), Un Caprice (1837), Carmosine (1850), Bettine (1851). Musset also received the Legion d'honneur on 24 April 1845, at the same time as Balzac, and was elected to the Academie francaise in 1852. He died in 1857.