Corneille: Three Masterpieces: The Liar; The Illusion; Le Cid [Paperback]

Includes the plays The Liar, The Illusion, Le Cid

Pierre Corneille (160684), the great seventeenth-century neoclassical dramatist, wrote over thirty plays during his long and varied career. Triumphant in both comedy and tragedy, his plays remain at the core of the repertory.

When the young Moli?re saw The Liar (Le Menteur), a delightful chronicle of a pathological liars adventures in love, he decided to become a playwright. The Illusion (LIllusion Comique) is a fascinating and mysterious tragi-comedy, one of the first plays to explore consciously the relationship between theatre and the real world. Le Cid, Corneilles best known play, was controversial in its day, and led to a resurgence in French drama.

Ranjit Bolts version of The Liar finds a way of rendering rhyming couplets which no one else from the history of translating for the theatre has ever done&with some style and without sacrificing the sense of gallantry that is so essential to the original text. (BBC Radio3s Critics Forum.) Both The Liar and The Illusion recently enjoyed critical and box office success at the Old Vic, reaffirming Ranjit Bolt as one of the worlds foremost translators of drama.