Cyrano de Bergerac
By Edmond Rostand
30 Dec, 2019
Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. There was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, and the play is a fictionalization following the broad outlines of his life.
The entire play is written in verse, in rhyming couplets of twelve sy
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Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. There was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, and the play is a fictionalization following the broad outlines of his life.
The entire play is written in verse, in rhyming couplets of twelve syllables per line, very close to the classical alexandrine form, but the verses sometimes lack a caesura. It is also meticulously researched, down to the names of the members of the Académie française and the dames précieuses glimpsed before the performance in the first scene.
The play has been translated and performed many times and is responsible for introducing the word "panache" into the English language. Cyrano (the character) is in fact famed for his panache, and he himself makes reference to "my panache" in the play. In 1990 the play was adapted into a French comedy-drama film directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and starred Gérard Depardieu, Anne Brochet, and Vincent Pérez. The film was a co-production between companies in France and Hungary. The 1990 adaptation is considerably more lavish and more faithful to the original than previous film versions of the play. The film had 4,732,136 admissions in France. Less