Géraldine Vogel

For Edmond Rostand, dramatic writing is a medium ensuring communion between the author and the spectator, a bond questioned by Plato. This article studies how Edmond Rostand’s poetic plays illustrate the quest for the public’s understanding of the poet and how the characters thrive for their lost social recognition. His works shed light on the poet at work, each of the characters being an accomplished or budding versifier to reveal that poetry is legitimate work, which requires skills. Edmond Rostand’s poetic style deconstructs literary and social norms that have led to his contemporaries’ loss of authenticity. Misunderstood by theater goers and critics, disappointment led the playwright to improvisation and to pantomime, in which gestures could not alter the fragile and fleeting idea, making poetry easier to comprehend and bridging the gap between the author and his audience, establishing the poet as a worthy citizen again.

In Edmond Rostand’s works, poetry is constantly compared to a battle. The dramatic poems and the poems are places where poetic characters such as Cyrano de Bergerac struggle to put ideas into words so as to woe women and conquer the spectator. But writing poetry is also fighting for the right to participate in a personal recollection and conception of History. Haunted by Romanticism, the Empire and the monarchy, symbolised by the figure of Victor Hugo and Napoleon I in The Eaglet (L’Aiglon), the playwright disproves the world in which he and his characters evolve, as well as the literature of their time. In order to do so, he seeks to revolutionize traditional theatrical techniques. First, the characters he stages refute their author by creating their own world and lives as they write their poems. Then, he stages “paintings” to emphasize perspective and extend poetry in view of creating a whole new universe estranged from the audience’s passive daily life. Thus, he encourages the spectator to create a poetic world for himself, a world in which men – referred to as «poets» – would avoid conflict and live in harmony. This extension provides insight for viewers to better cope with their day to day life.