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Updated: May 22, 2025
Molière took two whole scenes from the ridiculous comedy of the "Pédant Joué" by Cyrano de Bergerac. "These two scenes are good," he said as he was jesting with his friends. "They belong to me by right: I recover my property." After that anyone who treated the author of "Tartufe" and "Le Misanthrope" as a plagiarist would have been very badly received.
On one occasion, just before the removal of the mutton, Watts-Dunton had been asking me about an English translation that had been made of M. Rostand's 'Cyrano de Bergerac. He then took my information as the match to ignite the Swinburnian tinder.
But the greatest characters in the drama have almost always taken on the physical, and to a great extent the mental, characteristics of certain great actors for whom they have been fashioned. Cyrano is not merely Cyrano, but also Coquelin; Mascarille is not merely Mascarille, but also Molière; Hamlet is not merely Hamlet, but also Richard Burbage.
So great were his pride and joy on the conclusion of the latter bargain that he amused himself by rehearsing on paper his future style and title: "Antoine Francois de Cyrano Derues de Bury, Seigneur de Buisson-Souef et Valle Profonde."
If you had taken him to the loneliest star that the madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in it the features of a new friend. When 'Cyrano de Bergerac' was published, it bore the subordinate title of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a poet who called a comedy divine.
Harden-Hickey, in our day, was as incongruous a figure as was the American at the Court of King Arthur; he was as unhappily out of the picture as would be Cyrano de Bergerac on the floor of the Board of Trade. Judged, as at the time he was judged, by writers of comic paragraphs, by presidents of railroads, by amateur "statesmen" at Washington, Harden-Hickey was a joke.
p. 148 what the Devil made me a ship-board? cf. Geronte's reiterated complaint 'Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere? Les Fourberies de Scapin , ii, VII; and the phrase in Cyrano de Bergerac's Le Pedant Joue : 'Ha! que diable, que diable aller faire en cette galere?... Aller sans dessein dans une galere!... Dans la galere d'un Turc! Act ii, IV. In France this phrase is proverbial.
Paper is much too small for any really allegorical design; as Cyrano de Bergerac says, "Il me faut des géants." But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern rooms such as we all live in I was continually disappointed. I found an endless pattern and complication of small objects hung like a curtain of fine links between me and my desire.
L'Aiglon was also devised under the immediate influence of the same actor. The genesis of this latter play is, I think, of peculiar interest to students of the drama; and I shall therefore relate it at some length. The facts were told by M. Coquelin himself to his friend Professor Brander Matthews, who has kindly permitted me to state them in this place. One evening, after the extraordinary success of Cyrano, M. Rostand met Coquelin at the Porte St. Martin and said, "You know, Coq, this is not the last part I want to write for you. Can't you give me an idea to get me started an idea for another character?" The actor thought for a moment, and then answered, "I've always wanted to play a vieux grognard du premier empire un grenadier
When "Cyrano de Bergerac" was published, it bore the subordinate title of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a poet who called a comedy divine.
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