Hello and welcome to another post written by me, Zoe. This post takes inspiration is one of my most recent experiences in my humanities classroom. More specifically, a lecture that happened in my classroom. In short, my teacher made it very clear how utterly boring our posts are. Unfortunately, I’d have to agree with her. So this week’s post is going to be invigorating, inspiring, and hopefully, engaging enough that at least one of my teachers doesn’t have the urge to decapitate me after it’s over. So, here we go.
If you have any knowledge of the world at all, you would know Switzerland is a country. If you have any knowledge of me at all, you would know I lived there for around a year. One of the least worse projects I encountered in the school I attended in Switzerland, was a project about a man. A mildly famous man in french speaking European countries, who goes by the name, Cyrano de Bergerac. He is merely a cultural figment of our collective memory, but most people imagine him as looking like the long nosed man with silky smooth words portrayed in the play entitled, Cyrano de Bergerac.
The story of this magical man is one of much french expectation. The story in brief involves a man named Cyrano, a long nosed poet and wordsmith, a gorgeous idiot named Christian who wants to pull the final main character, Roxanne, Cyrano’s third cousin. She is beautiful and will love any man who has a way with words, unless he’s ugly. Cyrano falls madly in love with Roxanne and on the way on way to the floor, manages to find Christian, falling to the same fate. Eventually, the idiot is helped by Cyrano’s words, and marries Roxanne. When I say helped by Cyrano, Christian is fed words by Cyrano, and directly shouts them into Roxanne’s window. When Christian dies, Roxanne decides she can learn to love her brutish cousin, and they are married. The play ends when Cyrano meets his death.
The themes in this play are found throughout Romeo and Juliet as well. A man falls in love with a woman and has to overcome some kind of challenge to be with her. The two are obviously different, but when I was talking with my science partner and friend, she brought up the typical French trope of an ugly man falling in love with a beautiful woman. I brought up the English trope of a beautiful couple being separated by a common obstacle.
It’s interesting to see the cultural differences in the two common play examples. When you combine some stereotypes about the two places and both play tropes, you manage to find some connections. The typically sexy French men of Paris that drive middle aged women who read romance novels crazy, and the big toothed, cockney accented brits. Audience members go watch plays to escape to another realm and forget every day life. I think if we go with the stereotype, we can assume these playgoers are seeking a drastic change, and playwrights oblige.
This post has come to a conclusion, but don’t stop thinking about where things come from. This post has hopefully brought you a new thing to think about. If you agree or even disagree, be sure to leave your opinions in the comment section, and I thank you for reading.