Marivaux: Plays Ppr

by Pierre de Marivaux

Marivaux's light-hearted comedies of love and intrigue are enjoying a vigorous revival

One of the most original of French eighteenth century dramatists, Marivaux wrote over thirty comedies of love and intrigue. This, the only major single-volume selection of Marivaux's plays in English, brings together five full-length and five shorter pieces in lively translations by John Bowen, Michael Sadler, John Walters, Donald Watson and Nicholas...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0413185605
• ISBN13: 9780413185600
• Release Date: June 1988
• Publisher: Berg 3pl
• Length: 560 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating!

This collection of French Roccoco plays is a treasure! Five full and one act plays! The realism Marivaux gives in his works is a true insight in the hearts of lovers, rather than the ornated sentiments and metaphysical carvings of the earlier Baroque fashion. His characters express and feel uneasiness, concern, and the need for advancemed development in a relationship and learning to avoid the blindness of sudden amorous submission. This was the nature Marivaux wished to give out, to see beyond a person's outer core. Parisian audiences didn't think too highly of his realistic principles and he too had his own escapades of avoiding the certain whims of female deception in his time. These plays can be sweet, tender, comic, sometimes cutting into our inner phsycological selves, and even nerve pressing. His 'The Dispute' is a battalion on the natures of the two sexes; who is faithful and who is false. There is no established answer or proven truth to discriminate soley on one gender. Both members can be capable of certain doings by their own individual nature. This treasury is not what we would call lovely artisic Roccoco expressions or like the amorous pastorals and odes written at the time, but a phsycological search with the human and soul depthness of love and friendship and of course destiny itself. There are a few divertissements (French Poetic Sequences) that will delight and yield simple views on human nature. Please do not misunderstand that this man does not mean to criticize any gender, but to help us to know ourselves and the nature of that one emotion that verse, music, and art is mainly centered on; it is love.