“Philosopher…physicist…poet…swordsman…musician
…sky voyager…great debater…lover, too, not for his own good.
Here lies Hercules-Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac,
who did everything…and did nothing.”
—Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac

"I’m a picker, I’m a grinner, I’m a lover, And I’m a sinner.
I play my music in the sun"
—Steve Miller, “Joker”

 

by Drew Lichtenberg, Associate Dramaturg

At first glance, the character of Cyrano de Bergerac appears to be a tangle of opposites, a conjunction of contradictions. Made famous by Edmond Rostand’s enormously popular 1897 play (see sidebar), Cyrano has become one of the iconic roles of the theater. It would be easy to see him as a figure of pure theatrical exigency, an entirely aesthetic being, eternally larger than life and dreamed up by Rostand to serve the needs of Romantic pageantry.
But Cyrano was also quite real. Rostand based his character on an actual historical person, named Hercules-Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (see sidebar), who lived from 1619 to 1655. The real Cyrano was classmates with the comedian Molière in study groups led by Pierre Gassendi—a philosopher, physicist, and contemporary of logician René Descartes. Perhaps it surprises us that the real Cyrano composed plays (which Molière promptly plagiarized); wrote fantasies equal parts physics and metaphysics (The Comical History of the States and Empire of the Moon and the Sun); and yet also fought with the fierce Gascon companies in bloody battles like the Siege of Arras. It should certainly surprise us that this remarkable figure would lie fallow in the obscure folds of history until resurrected by Rostand in the late 19th Century.

In both the theater of history and the history of theater, Cyrano’s temperament shifts between what can look to us like irreconcilable extremes: fiercely independent, accepting no patron, yet a loyal defender of friend and country; quick-witted, silver-tongued, fearless in battles both intellectual and physical, yet fearful when it comes to the simple act of professing love. Real or fictional, he is a multitude of selves, overlapping and folding ever inward—a romantic dreamer and a man of action, an amateur scientist and an inveterate fabulist, a poetic fighter, a fiercely truthful exaggerator, a heroic loser, all in one ineffable bundle. Even Cyrano’s physical appearance speaks to an irresolvable duality: instantly identifiable by his quintessentially Gallic proboscis, his grotesque external features belie a mild inner profile. After all, who can’t relate to feeling, and failing to conquer, the pains of unrequited love?

Yet all of these seeming contradictions can also be seen as part of a larger mosaic that unifies them. A sense of context reveals the extent to which Cyrano entered history and fiction as a profoundly synthetic figure, one for whom the characteristics that we see as opposites in fact represented the requisite touchstones of a balanced temper. For Cyrano reflects the French beau ideal of the Renaissance Man, a figure in which disparate cultural and historical associations unite to form a kind of national hero. As a national icon, Cyrano’s Frenchness is determined by the character’s capacity to accommodate opposites, to demonstrate well-roundedness. In this sense, he is utterly unlike the myths we Americans tend to make from our history: we celebrate the stoic, the taciturn, the homespun; we revere the Lincolns, the Washingtons, the Jeffersons, the Daniel Boones, Davy Crocketts, Harriet Tubmans, and Johnny Appleseeds. And we give the type fictional life through the likes of Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda and Clint Eastwood. We conveniently forget that many of these folks were slave-owning, multilingual, propertied elitists; or proudly ethnocentric eccentrics with a penchant for violence; or otherwise complex and contradictory individuals. We’d rather recall Ben Franklin the quipping backyard inventor of Poor Richard’s Almanac than the sophisticated, ethically relativist internationalist of our first Paris embassy—just the side the French fell for, before we gave them Jerry Lewis.

What is easy to forget, though, is that the combination of qualities we perceive in Cyrano as being paradoxically contradictory were for centuries considered perfectly consistent aspects of a cohesive character. This held true more widely, and for longer, than we might credit. The combination emerged from Medieval ideals of the true knight—the preux chevalier, manly yet gentle. It was codified in Renaissance Italy as the ideal courtier, also popping up in the gallant early-modern person of Englishman Walter Raleigh or tales of the German Baron Munchhausen. The archetype celebrated a combination of dashing physical action, intellectual introspection, emotional expressivity, verbal acuity, immense pride, and infinite humility—all carried off with an apparent lack of effort dubbed sprezzatura. Or panache, a word contributed to the English language by way of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play.

The original Cyrano, reimagined for the stage at a moment when France longed to revisit ancient glory and celebrate what it meant to be French, lived during the moment in which France emerged as the dominant political, intellectual, and military force of Europe. A soldier in the elite French Guard and cultivated apostle of the philosophes and libertins, Cyrano nevertheless puts individual capacity ahead of inherited title, embracing a meritocratic way of life. Despite his aristocratic roots, he makes common cause with the common man and steadfastly refuses to take noble patronage. He is the democrat’s aristocrat, the ordinary man’s exemplary man.

In this respect, Cyrano has a few peers in the dramatic canon—Ibsen’s Peer Gynt for Norway, the Spaniard El Cid, and Shakespeare’s echt-English Henry V are some examples: national heroes of the drama who share common characteristics. They form the center of epic narratives, have a foot in history and the other in fable, and their temperaments are multifaceted in similar ways, both (ostensibly) exemplary of national character and somehow inclusive of similarly contradictory aspects. The fact that the theatrical Cyrano was drawn so closely from a real-life source only adds to the character’s fascination. He is both myth and history, ethnography and alchemy, all at once.

But perhaps even this Cyrano becomes just another mirage. After all, we watch his story at multiple levels of remove, three worlds away from the real McCoy. To Rostand—writing for a post-Romantic boulevard theater at the end of the 19th Century—the era of musketeers, love poems, and duels represented a halcyon era. France in the late 1890s was a very different place from France circa 1640. The theater was dominated by dour “social problem plays” that diagnosed the diseases of society. The disastrous Franco-Prussian war served as the capstone to a century of political and military decline. Worst, the infamous Dreyfus Affair had torn the country apart, foreshadowing yet-more-turbulent 20th Century struggles over ethnic and religious minorities. Rostand, in fact, had the same relation to Cyrano and his age, a time 250 years in the past, as we do to our own semi-legendary Founding Fathers and Revolutionary Era. Little surprise, then, that he turned to this subject for solace. Now, with Jo Roets’ adaptation, we encounter a 21st-century Cyrano, distilled and very much acknowledged, even celebrated, as a theatrical myth. The episodic narrative remains in outline, as does the most famous nose in theater history, but with a renewed focus on the play’s resonant themes and eternal triangle of character dynamics, with Cyrano at the apex. After all this time, the fascination remains. In spite of his specific deformity and his extravagant irregularity, Cyrano speaks for (and to) all of us.