PAJ Books
1 total work
Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) is traditionally considered one of the major French Romantic poets, but his primary renown today is as a dramatist. Although most of his best plays were not performed during his lifetime, they have remained viable in the French theatre over the past century. But they are less often seen on the English-language stage, in part because most of them exist only in outdated translations that fail to convey the tone and flavour of a playwright whose sensibility was strikingly modern. In "Comedies and Proverbs", David Sices provides an English edition of seven of Alfred de Musset's comedies. From gender stereotypes to the perils of social conformity, from the alienation of the individual to the ambiguousness of moral experience and the conflict of passion and reason, the themes of de Musset's comedies speak to us today perhaps even more clearly than they did to his contemporaries. The plays are also of interest today because of their form, which, freed from the restrictions imposed by 19th-century theatre practices and resources, can at last be realized on the stage thanks to modern lighting and sets.