The Liar the Articles in This Study Guide Are Not Meant to Mirror Or Interpret Any Productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival

Insights A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespeare Festival

The Liar The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to be an educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any production at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival’s stages. The Study Guide is published by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, publications manager and editor; Clare Campbell, graphic artist. Copyright © 2018, Utah Shakespeare Festival. Please feel free to download and print The Study Guide, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

For more information about Festival education programs: Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah 84720 435-586-7880 www.bard.org.

Cover Art for The Liar by Cully Long. The Liar

Contents

Information on the Play Synopsis 4 Characters 4

Information on the Playwright About the Playwrights: The Liar 5

Scholarly Articles on the Play Seventeeth Century Fake News 7

Utah Shakespeare Festival 3 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Synopsis In 1643, a charming young law student named Dorante arrives in Paris in search of a wife. He hires Cliton, a manservant who cannot tell a lie. Dorante, on the other hand, cannot tell the truth. He meets and falls in love with the witty and beautiful Clarice and spins a web of outrageous lies to attract her. Later, he mistakes her for her quiet friend, Lucrece, and courts the wrong girl, much to the dismay of Clarice. Unknown to Dorante, Lucrece is secretly engaged to his friend, Alcippe. He is also unaware that his father, Geronte, is trying to get him engaged to Clarice, who actually loves him—but he thinks she is Lucrece. Alcippe, now a violence-prone and jealous rival, and the ladies accuse Dorante of unfaithful- ness and untruths. Dorante’s web of tangled lies paves the way for a great comedy, a multitude of mistaken identities, and sparkling romances. Will he be able to talk his way out of his sticky situations and into the arms of the right woman?

Characters Dorante: A young, new lawyer who just arrived in Paris Geronte: Dorante’s father Cliton: Dorante’s servant Clarice: A young lady of Paris Lucrece: Clarice’s best friend Alcippe: Clarice’s secret fiancé Philiste: Alcippe’s friend Isabelle: Lucrece’s vivacious servant Sabine: Clarice’s puritanical servant

4 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 About the Playwright: The Liar By Lisa Larson When one considers the plot of this year’s production of The Liar, it is positively Shakespearean in its farcical portrayal of lovers, liars, and mistaken identities. But this is one of the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s productions that cannot be attributed to the Bard. Rather, The Liar is an updated version of the French play Le Menteur—originally written by Pierre Corneille and adapted by David Ives. The French version first hit the stage in 1644. More than 300 years later it came to light in the modern era when it was produced in 1990 based on a translation by Ranjit Bolt. However, it was David Ives who was handed the project in early 2000s, bringing this well-kept French secret into the light of modern theatre by translating and adapting The Liar for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. in 2010. While the main plot points are courtesy of Corneille, the translation is so thoroughly updated that Ives gets much of the credit for the production that will be gracing the Utah Shakespeare Festival stage this fall. “I took a lot of Corneille, I took the fundamental structure of the play, but I embellished here and there, I cut when I needed to. I added things,” Ives said in an interview with National Public Radio in 2010. One of those additions is an “entirely new ending” since the original ends in what seems to be “typical French fashion,” Ives said with a laugh. Although Ives says he was unfamiliar with the play when he was asked to adapt it, he was immediately struck by the “rippling purity of the language.” “I could just feel this sort of silvery language,” Ives says. He did his best to stay true to the poetic nature of the writing throughout the adaptation and translation. Being handed an entire package including a well-written plot and delightful comic turns was a real boon for Ives as he began the process. “All I had to do was . . . increase the comic turns,” he said. One of Ives’s additions is the manservant to the lead character Dorante. While Dorante suffers from a seemingly insatiable desire to avoid telling the truth, his servant, Cliton, has the opposite problem and simply cannot tell a lie. It is from this basic premise that a wellspring of fine-tuned comedy and glitter- ing romance emerges to delight audiences on numerous levels. David Ives Born in 1950, Ives wrote his first play when he was just ten years old. However, it wasn’t until he was seventeen that he had a “life-changing” moment while watching A Delicate Balance at Chicago’s Studebaker Theatre that compelled him into a life of writing for the theatre. Since that time he has earned a name for himself by writing his evening of one-acts, collected as All in the Timing and Time Flies. His resume also includes dramatic works, narrative stories, screenplays, and the adaptation of more than thirty musicals. His list of full-length plays includes Polish Joke, Ancient History, Don Juan in Chicago, and more. Ives’s experience and passion for theatre has led him to write the following as part of an article for Zoetrope Magazine November 2000 issue: “If you want to work in the art form that most profoundly sets up a glass to human life, then the theatre is for you. After all, the world doesn’t present itself to us in printed words, or pigment on canvas, or sculpted marble or bronze, or dancers moving to music or fixed two-dimensionally on looping celluloid, but as human bodies, moving three-dimensionally in space and real time, talking to each other or to us or to themselves, working something out to the music of the human voice.” Ives’s contribution to this year’s Utah Shakespeare Festival is an example of what he calls, “translaptating”—combining the words of translation and adaptation. He doesn’t delineate much between

Utah Shakespeare Festival 5 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 “original” work and “translaptation,” particularly with something like The Liar, because, as Ives says, Corneille adapted his “original” version from the work of a Spanish piece. And even Shakespeare, Ives says, was “translaptating” people in the vast majority of his plays. Regardless of how one chooses to define it, Ives says ultimately his work is something that brings him pleasure; if not, he abandons it immediately. Audiences who choose to take part in this season’s The Liar will be grateful Ives had pleasure in translaptating it — for their own enjoyment. Pierre Corneille Although he is often known as the father of French tragedy, Corneille’s Le Menteur is among his comedic contributions as a playwright in the seventeenth century. He is considered one of the great French dramatists, along with contemporaries Moliere and Racine. After writing his first play at age twenty—an elegant and witty comedy drawing upon his personal love experience—he moved on to generate some thirty plays, including Le Cid, Pompee, Atilla, and more. Prior to his work as a playwright, Corneille completed his education and law studies and became a lawyer in 1624. He discharged legal duties as the king’s advocate in Rouen, France. But his true passion was literature. It was sometime between 1625 and 1629 that he wrote Melite, which became a great success in Paris. Arguably one of Corneille’s most well-known pieces is The Cid, as it came to be known. It is positioned as a landmark in dramatic history. Author Martha Fletcher Bellinger referenced it as a play that “contrived to produce a tragedy which, in the depth of passion, poetic fervor and vigor, far surpassed anything that had been seen on the Parisian stage.” Just as Corneille’s “Le Cid” is an important tragedy, Le Menteur (The Liar) is known as an important first comedy. His success as a playwright became less consistent in the latter part of his life, and he spent much time trying one method and then another to generate a comeback. Ultimately, he became embittered by the process, according to his biography on YouDictionary.com His final play, Surena, in 1674 was a skillful imitation of the playwright Racine, whose work began to eclipse his own. He lived ten more years, but wrote nothing more for theatre. For Ives, the opportunity to revive the work of this important playwright, is a way of pay- ing homage. And Ives says he believes Corneille would be glad to have his work brought into a modern age. Audiences at this fall’s Utah Shakespeare Festival will undoubtedly agree.

6 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 The Liar: Seventeenth Century Fake News By Lawrence D. Henley With all of the current discussions concerning “fake news” and questionable truth in leadership, it’s fair to ask this question: is our society suffering from fatigue from all of these incessant discussions of verisimilitude? If your answer is “yes,” you’re probably not alone in your opinion. Fortunately, Corneille’s magnificent farce The Liar brings us a timely, first- rate comedy with renewed social relevance. The play focuses on the remarkable ability of Dorante, a pathological liar, to land on his feet despite his constant need to evade consequences stemming from the proliferation of his outrageous claims. Fans of the Utah Shakespeare Festival have contemporary scriptwriter David Ives (Venus in Fur) to thank for this zestful, updated translation of a French classical gem. In The Liar, the title character is a compulsive teller of tall tales who believes he can employ his sharp, duplicitous wit and evasive wiles to achieve satisfactory outcomes. His unabashed fibbing generally, and sometimes unintentionally, has a mitigating effect. In his own mind, this serves as justification for his devious behavior. Put simply, “These lies are okay because I usually get away with them. Let the ends justify the means!” As Dorante redefines the concept of living on the edge, his far-flung assertions are so clearly and outrageously false that audiences have no alternative but to laugh at them. They’re too stunned to react otherwise! For those who don’t pick up on all of Dorante’s audacious falsehoods, they’re deftly pointed out by the witty Cliton, his servant and confidant. Dorante’s lying is relentless throughout the majority of this play. Desperate to become a grandfather, his father, Geronte, wishes to see the young bachelor married as quickly as possible. Quietly, he makes covert plans for Dorante to marry the lovely and (ostensibly) eligible Clarice. Without knowledge of that arrangement, Dorante arrives in Paris and by accident meets Clarice, out on a walk with her “bestie” Lucrece. Instantly taken by Clarice’s beauty and charm, the law school dropout re-invents and represents himself to the ladies as a great military hero newly returned from the Germanic wars. There’s one small problem here for Dorante: he mistakes Clarice for the more bashful Lucrece, despite Cliton’s attempts to correct the mixup. There will be a significant price to pay for this error later on in the play. Proceeding down this erroneous path, Dorante perpetuates the rampant fiction by concocting additional alternate realities. He enrages Clarice’s clandestine suitor, Alcippe, with his flippant description of a romantic boat ride taken with her at midnight, flaunting lavish food and drink served by virgins, fireworks, and accompanied by heavenly cathedral choirs. He then conjures up a fictitious duel in which his rapier “finishes off” Alcippe, leaving him “face down in gore.” Naturally, Alcippe immediately appears, disproving that crooked yarn. Best yet, in order to keep Geronte off of his back, Dorante invents a shotgun marriage to an imaginary wife (“Orphise”), and then doubles it down by inventing “her” pregnancy! The false tales begin to snowball, and the resulting complications reign supreme. This begs an examination of Dorante’s modus operandi. Is he really so misguided? How does he justify all of his false assertions and incessant loud-mouthing? Here is a sampling of Dorante’s rationalizations: Cliton, the unimagined life’s not worth living. When someone’s got a juicy tale to dish, I have to add some sauce, re-spice the fish. A man starts spooning tales of sweet amour, I have to make that man my dupe du Jour”

Utah Shakespeare Festival 7 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 (David Ives, adapted from the comedy by Pierre Corneille, The Liar [New York City: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.], 22). He further pontificates: “Let truth be told, but let your lies be sung!” (79). While abundantly arrogant, these lines prove that there’s some method to Dorante’s madness. In the final analysis, will Dorante be the one schooled by thorny lessons delivered by the very people he attempts to hoodwink? Will the tables turn on The Liar? It can be surmised that certain elements of Dorante’s character were modeled on the early life of the author. Born in 1606, Pierre Corneille was the first of the eminent seventeenth century triumvirate of French dramatists. Raised in the town of Rouen, Northern France, Corneille studied acting while at college, but his initial profession was the law. A mediocre attorney, he showed significantly greater enthusiasm for his avocation, writing for the stage. In The Liar, his lead character returns to Paris after abandoning law studies in provincial Poitiers. During the reigns of Louis XIII and his son, Louis XIV (a.k.a. “The Sun King”), France had become envious of the stunning litany of cultural achievements in neighboring England and Spain, most notably in literature and the arts. Not to be left in the dust, the French were competitively motivated to rise to the level of their geographic rivals. The prime mover for much of this effort was the famed Bourbon minister, Cardinal Richelieu, later immortalized as the villain of Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Not surprisingly, a number of Corneille’s plays were based on plots or ideas either proposed by Richelieu or adapted from Spanish playwrights such as Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderon, and Miguel de Cervantes. The Liar is generally considered to be a derivation of the plot from Vega’s Amar sin saber á quién. Today, we hail Corneille as the “Father of French Tragedy,” a title that can be somewhat misleading. Actually, the majority of his early work favored comedy, in contrast with the more serious titles that are his legacy. Known mostly for epic tragic works such as Le Cid (1637) and Horace (1640), Corneille’s early plays were primarily lighter fare, such as his first, Melite (1629). The Liar (1643) is his comic masterpiece, a smashing success in its day. While less performed in later centuries than his tragedies and tragicomedies, Corneille’s works were a major influence on the writing of Jean Racine and Molière, the master of French comedy. Corneille’s career in the theatre wasn’t without controversy. Richelieu and his governing French Academy mandated that plays written for the French Court should strictly adhere to the classical “unities” of time, place, and action, derived and descended from Aristotelian theory and ancient Greek and Roman drama. These principles dictated that every scene in a play should occur within a twenty-four-hour period and take place in the same general locality. Multiple and parallel plot lines were frowned upon. Corneille did not initially believe that the unities were essential, and his early works tended to bend the rules of the period. Eventually, he was “encouraged” to revise some of these plays to more closely adhere to the tenants required by the Académie Française. Ironically, Corneille later became a member of the governing body. Le Menteur, or The Liar, was written in poetic verse, derived from the classical format handed down from ancient Greek and Roman poets. The new David Ives translation deliciously employs the phrasing technique known as iambic pentameter. That format divides each line into five segments called “feet,” or “iambs.” This measurement is known as “scansion.” In pentameter form, speaking emphasis is placed on the second beat or syllable (da-DUH da-DUH da-DUH da-DUH da-DUH). As an example, here’s a snippet of dialogue between Dorante and Cliton: DORANTE I’ve had adventures with the tender sex. There was my time with – let’s say, “Princess X.”

8 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 That night at Cannes with her cockatoo… But you don’t want to hear. CLITON Oh, yes, I do! (11). In addition to his delightful, lithe interpretation of Corneille’s text and rhythm, Ives’s translation tosses out frequent modern references, making this four-century old play more relatable to today’s audiences. The script often refers to historically misplaced words such as “Rastafarians,” “Chateau Laffite,” “schizo,” and the baseball reference “innings.” The Liar employs other theatrical devices typically found in classical French comedy. Influenced by the travelling troupes of the commedia dell’arte, Corneille’s characters resemble several recognizable commedia personality types: the status obsessed father (Geronte); the mischievous zanni (Dorante); clever fixers and interloping servants (Cliton for Dorante and Isabelle/Sabine for Clarice/Lucrece); the jealous suitor (Alcippe); and the courting young lovers. Also used here is the device of mistaken identity, exacerbated by Dorante’s nominal failure to pursue the correct lover. This leads to a bevy of mistruths and mischief prior to Dorante’s “coming to Jesus” scene at the play’s end. There can be little doubt that The Liar is a play that has withstood the test of time. Easily as funny today as it was when presented at the French Court in the seventeenth century, Corneille’s hilarious poke at the foibles of human fraudulence delights with its mellifluous verse, vivid characterization, and an emphatic lesson for those who ritually seek to transform the truth. Come see it. You’ll laugh your head off—and that’s no lie!

Utah Shakespeare Festival 9 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880