The Liar (Corneille)
The liar , original title: french Le Menteur is a comedy in five acts by the French poet Pierre Corneille . It premiered in 1644 at the Théâtre du Marais in Paris . Encouraged by the great success of this performance, Corneille wrote a follow-up piece, La Suite du Menteur , which was performed in 1645, albeit with less success.
action
The protagonist Dorante, who has just arrived in Paris after dropping out of law school in Poitiers , is eloquently courting a beautiful young woman he sees in the Tuileries Garden . He doesn't even know her name and lies to her longstanding love longings and heroic involvement in a war in Germany. The fact that she already has a lover, and that his father Géronte is planning a marriage for him, makes matters more complicated, but also more appealing: Lying is life-sustaining for Dorante. Almost drunk by his own eloquence and imagination, he becomes more and more entangled in his own lies until he almost gets stuck in them.
Impact history
The play is an adaptation of the comedy La verdad sospechosa by the Spanish playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón .
In the German-speaking world, this plea for lying, in whose closing verse even the audience is asked to lie, is virtually unknown. It is considered to be the first French character comedy before Molière . In the 1920s, Hans Schiebelhuth submitted a German translation, which was not published until 1954 and was soon considered linguistically out of date. In 2004 Rainer Kohlmayer published a new German broadcast.
Individual evidence
Web links
Mélite | Clitandre ou l'Innocence persécutée | La Veuve | La Galerie du Palais | La Suivante | La Place Royale | Médée | L'Illusion comique | Le Cid | Horace | Cinna | Polyeucte | La Mort de Pompée | Le Menteur | Rodoguns | La Suite du Menteur | Théodore | Héraclius | Don Sanche d'Aragon | Andromède | Nicomède | Pertharite | Œdipe | La Toison d'or | Sertorius | Sophonisbe | Othon | Agésilas | Attila | Tite et Bérénice | Psyché | Pulchérie | Suréna