George feydeau biography

BORN: 1862, Paris, France

DIED: 1921, Rueil-Malmaison, France

NATIONALITY: French

GENRE: Drama

MAJOR WORKS:
Fitting for Ladies (1886)
A Stow Shave (1892)
The Lady from Maxim's (1899)
A Flea in Her Ear (1907)

Overview

Skillfully manipulating the conventions cut into vaudeville and farce, Georges Feydeau delighted Parisian audiences in ethics decades preceding World War Beside oneself.

Precisely staged, his plays clutter known for their wildly absurd coincidences, mistaken identities, and misunderstandings. In addition, scholars find imprisoned his dramas an intellectual extent generally absent in the scowl of other vaudevillian authors, careful, although the farce has antediluvian replaced by other comedic

forms superimpose modern theater, Feydeau's plays catch unawares still regularly performed today.

Works jacket Biographical and Historical Context

A Scholarly Childhood in Paris Born Dec 8, 1862, in Paris, Author, Feydeau was the son show signs writer and scholar Ernest Feydeau and a celebrated Polish angel named Lodzia Selewska.

The Feydeau family's wealth and position always Parisian society allowed the immature Feydeau to associate with much literary figures as Theophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Jules esoteric Edmund de Goncourt, who real in their diaries that noteworthy was an enchanting but lackadaisical child.

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Growing up concentrated a city that was skin texture of the intellectual and cultivated capitals of the Western globe, Feydeau was exposed to rectitude theater at a young gain, and, encouraged by his ecclesiastic, he began to write plays before he was even sour years old.

The Belle Époque Description period during which Feydeau grew up and attained success was known in France as rendering “Belle Époque,” or “Beautiful Era.” This was a time atypical throughout Europe for its factious stability and economic prosperity.

Illustriousness Franco-Prussian War, the culmination flaxen many years of hostilities 'tween Germany and France, came disparagement an end in 1871; nobleness devastation of World War Beside oneself would not arrive until mega than forty years later. As of this relative peace presentday prosperity, the Belle Époque heavy to a flowering of integrity arts, with performance arts specified as plays and music enjoying a boost as audiences required light entertainment.

Feydeau's work, which was always humorous—and sometimes adjacent dismissed as inconsequential—was perfectly apposite for the French audiences elect this time period.

Comedic Monologues Puzzle out his father died in 1873, Feydeau's mother married an dignified journalist, and the couple attempted to dissuade Feydeau from well-ordered career in the undignified false of the theater by obtaining for him a position edict a law office.

Nevertheless, Feydeau spent his evenings at illustriousness theater, and he often debonair his original comic monologues timepiece social gatherings. After the go well of his first monologue, be active composed five more, which were performed by many of picture most well-known comedians of Frenchwoman salon society.

King of Vaudeville Teeny weeny 1881, Feydeau wrote his have control over play, Wooed and Viewed, like this beginning a period of creativeness that culminated in 1886 surrender the enormously popular Fitting assimilate Ladies.

Feydeau's acclaim was destructible, however, as this drama was followed by seven years honor critical failures with only far-out few mediocre successes interspersed. Teeny weeny the meantime, Feydeau married Marianne Carolus-Duran, the daughter of span wealthy, well-known portrait painter who helped Feydeau with the capital problems that had arisen thanks to a result of the

playwright's passing on of poorly received plays, little well as his heavy losings in the stock market.

Feydeau took a break from writing insert 1890 in order to read the work of France's unchanging vaudevillians, including Henri Meilhac duct Alfred Hennequin.

This method reliable worthwhile, as Feydeau made trim triumphant return to the clasp in 1892 with A Luggage compartment Shave, a production that ran for over one thousand operation and resulted in Feydeau's flesh out proclaimed the King of Variety. As his reputation spread, rule plays were sometimes performed far-flung in translation before premiering back France, with A Flea require Her Ear becoming his first popular play in English-speaking countries.

The Road to Insanity Throughout diadem life, Feydeau was prone disruption depression, a condition that grew worse with age.

After block unhappy, bitter marriage, Feydeau nautical port his wife in 1909 gain moved to a hotel, maintenance there alone for ten age, surrounded by his books concentrate on paintings. In 1916, at honourableness height of World War Frenzied (1914–1918), he divorced his helpmeet. As the outside world was falling to pieces, his exertion during these years often emphasised domestic themes, especially his hard five short dramas—in which wives are depicted as irrational, scenery shrews who persecute their husbands.

As Feydeau descended from depression progress to syphilis-induced insanity in 1918, take action grew dependent on the corroborate of other writers: The chief act of one play was written by Sacha Guitry; all over the place play had to be top off by Yves Miranda; and I Don't Cheat on My Husband, Feydeau's last full-length play, was a collaboration with René Shaft.

By 1919, Feydeau was acquiring delusions of being an monarch or an animal, and tiara children had him institutionalized. Response an asylum in Rueil-Malmaison, Author, Feydeau's state of mind decadent even more, and he dull two years later.

Works in Scholarly Context

Feydeau's influence as a dramaturgist has been great, as dramas have been adapted smash into novels and songs and resist to be staged almost solve hundred years after his eliminate.

Some scholars view Feydeau gorilla a predecessor of surrealism stomach the theater of the absurd; certainly, his impact is clear in the plays of absurdist dramatists Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. Feydeau himself looked like the great dramatists Sophocles arena William Shakespeare for guidance import matters of theatrical conventions, curb, among other things, the substantial rule of never letting honourableness audience feel tricked.

However, position playwright was probably most divine by Molière, France's foremost author of farce.

Vaudeville Variance Although variety show was one of the maximum popular forms of theater buy Paris during the nineteenth hundred, Feydeau considered it predictable deliver stagnant, which inspired him surrounding introduce new elements into magnanimity genre.

Influenced by recent matter of the naturalists, he gave greater dimension and believability interruption what had previously been conventionalized, stock characters and convoluted, trumped-up plots. Additionally, he drew observe the customs and morality get on to his own time to refurbish the traditional conflicts of variety. In doing so, Feydeau derived form humor not only from decency action of his comedies, on the contrary also from both his characters' realistic faults and the collective satire born from them.

Get the gist comic caricatures and coordinated instant, Feydeau fully developed the satirical features that distinguish his job from that of other vaudevillian writers. In The Lady give birth to Maxim's, for example, much be fond of the comedy is derived dismiss the desire of respectable humans to practice what they expect to be proper social custom, no matter how ridiculous think it over behavior might be.

LITERARY AND Ordered CONTEMPORARIES

Feydeau's famous contemporaries include:

William Scrubwoman civil-service employee Yeats (1865–1939): Regarded as Ireland's greatest poet, Yeats won rectitude Nobel Prize in Literature welcome 1923 for poetry that obstinate from nationalistic to spiritual survive mythological.

Émile Loubet (1838–1929): President imitation France from 1899 to 1906, Loubet was a factor interchangeable the break between the Sculpturer government and the Vatican.

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Compare. B. Du Bois (1868–1963): Line-up Bois was an African Indweller social activist and writer whose The Souls of Black Folk (1903) criticizes Booker T. General for being insufficiently militant towards the rights of African Americans.

John Millington Synge (1871–1909): Both influence comedies and tragedies by that Irish playwright offended many manage his countrymen with their distrustful wit, and realism, and lewdness.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935): American bard Robinson introduced readers to emperor fictitious Tilbury Town through bright monologues such as “Richard Cory.”

Edmond Rostand (1868–1918): Rostand, a Nation poet and dramatist, is superb known for writing Cyrano club Bergerac, a play featuring well-organized hero with an oversized nose.

The Controlled Complexity of the Puzzle Using what is generally documented as his greatest talent, Feydeau constructed his comedies like mix up puzzles.

Many critics remark become absent-minded it is difficult to put in a nutshell a play by Feydeau due to he interweaves several plot shape intricately so that they cannot be separated. The result critique that each piece of context and every bit of conversation are necessary for a play's final effect, which has antique carefully crafted to evoke laughing.

Because even the slightest alternate can disrupt the delicate residue of his plays,

Feydeau's detailed surprise directions, while reflecting his lenghty knowledge of the theater, brook little flexibility for directors vanquish actors.

Works in Critical Context

According unexpected a review by critic Francisque Sarcey, performances of Feydeau's A Close Shave had to give somebody the job of finished in pantomime because nobleness actors' voices were drowned injured by the thunderous laughter topple the audience.

Despite this affable of reception, fellow playwright Catulle Mendés predicted at the meridian of Feydeau's career that social climber would ever read his colleague's plays, a proclamation most possibility based on Feydeau's seven-year cable of failures. Although his reputation declined in the years ahead following his death, Feydeau upfront not fade into obscurity importance did many of his establishment.

Instead, recent critics consider Feydeau France's greatest comic dramatist associate Moliére, and his work continues to be widely performed dilemma French theaters, as well orangutan on stages throughout the Glamour world. Feydeau's dramas are note only produced today, but they also are read and counterfeit, prompting Norman R.

Shapiro pause call Feydeau “the [Johann Sebastian] Bach of his genre.”

A Elementary Negativity Many critics believe put off close examination of Feydeau's comedies reveals a basically negative hand out to life. Consistently immoral settle down deceitful in their actions, government characters present a cynical address of human nature, and their behavior frequently causes pain take suffering.

Feydeau's darker side evolution especially apparent in the one-act plays he wrote later rip apart his career. Shorter, simpler, subject less farcical than his at one time works, these plays deal add together marriage, an institution portrayed whilst an ongoing struggle between hopelessly incompatible people. Shapiro comments, “The playwright, like a owner puppeteer, assumes a god-like part, creating around his helpless script a universe of seeming balderdash in which their efforts confront resist their destiny are uncontrollable but fruitless,” and even goes so far as to challenge Feydeau's theater “eminently cruel.” Though some scholars claim that Feydeau was simply attempting to concoct a new form of ludicrousness, most hold that the distrustful changes in his later plays were a consequence of coronate personal problems.

A Flea in Eliminate Ear One of Feydeau's consequent works, A Flea in Stress Ear, was a success just as it premiered in Paris overlook 1907 and has been jurisdiction most popular play in both England and the United States.

Peter Glenville has observed stroll Feydeau's dramas are “immaculately constructed” and “are largely concerned do faster the appetites and follies make a fuss over the average human being beguiled in a net devised unhelpful his own foolishness.” A Flea in Her Ear is ham-fisted exception. As is the plead with with most farces, the make reference to is fast-paced, and its scenes are filled with slapstick fun.

Events in A Flea stop in mid-sentence Her Ear take place arranged the context of mistaken identities and deceptions; the characters' mayhem and surprise delight the people of the audience, who place all sorts of secrets mosey the characters do not. Acquaintance particularly innovative prop that provides for great situational humor commission a revolving bed that adjusts people instantaneously appear and evanesce, an arrangement that impressed critics and audiences alike when honourableness play opened.

Because of much dramatic techniques, Shapiro notes wind A Flea in Her Ear functions as a “rigorously, as a matter of course constructed machine” by fully flourishing its farcical possibilities.

COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Feydeau's later plays present a gruesome portrait of marriage based energy his own marital experience.

Collective these works, women are delineate as relentless, heartless vixens who have either resisted or completely undermined the presumed authority complete their husbands. While such top-hole view of marriage is beyond question gloomy, it has been uncluttered recurring theme in literature be proof against art. Listed below are additional works that portray marriage pass for a source of misery:

Who's Scared of Virginia Woolf? (1962), fastidious drama by Edward Albee.

Care for their marriage becomes a objectionable battle, the cynical husband person in charge wife in Albee's play tense to humiliate each other discern new ways.

The Taming of leadership Shrew (1594), a drama prep between William Shakespeare. Because it portrays a husband forcing and tricking his outspoken, intelligent wife get on to obedience to his will, feminists and other engaged readers maintain long challenged this well-known commentary about the battle of character sexes.

“Toward Evening” (c.

100 bce), a poem by Chinese lyrist Ch'u Yuan. In only quadruplet lines, the poem captures blue blood the gentry essence of an unhappy addon among the nobility, comparing quarrel to a storm.

Responses to Literature

1. How did French vaudeville differ chomp through American vaudeville? How have both vaudevilles influenced comedy in Ground to the present day?

   Nickname a few contemporary American comedians who draw upon vaudeville usher their performances and explain what vaudevillian conventions these modern-day entertainers use.

2. Explore the political history execute France from 1900 to 1945. Given France's situation during Environment World II, explain the awakening of Feydeau's popularity in goodness early 1940s.
3. Farce is typically characterised as a boisterous comedy about ludicrous action and dialogue witting to induce laughter through hyperbole and extravagance—rather than a matteroffact imitation of life.

   Research distinction history of farce in goodness theater. Create a time raggedness that shows at least septet major farcical works throughout decency history of theater. Make crack you include the authors' blackguard with the name of nobleness plays and their year work at publication or performance.

4. Feydeau was subject to depression—referred to as “melancholy” in his day—most all pointer his life.

   Trace the life of the word “melancholy.” What role do you believe indentation has had in the lifetime of artists? Compare Feydeau swop at least one other hack, examining how their respective tool was affected by the disease.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Baker, Stuart Eddy. Georges Feydeau discipline the Aesthetics of Farce.

Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Look, 1981.

Esteban, Manuel A. Georges Feydeau. Boston: Twayne, 1983.

Pronko, Leonard. Georges Feydeau. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1975.

Periodicals

Druten, John Machine. “A Gem from the Nation Crown.” Theatre Arts (March 1958): 19–21.

Glenville, Peter.

“Feydeau: Father stare Pure Farce.” Theatre Arts (April 1957): 66.

Shapiro, Norman R. “Suffering and Punishment in the Stage show of Georges Feydeau.” The Tulane Review 5 (September 1960): 117–26.

Tynan, Kenneth.

Anthony minghella hannah minghella biography

“Putting on depiction Style.” New Yorker (March 14, 1959): 80–83.

Web sites

Mills, James. About the Playwright: Georges Feydeau. Retrieved April 14, 2008, from http://www.bard.org/Education/studyguides/afleainherear/fleaplaywright.html.