Richard Wilbur's translations of the great French dramas have been a boon to acting troupes, students of French literature and history, and theater lovers. He continues this wonderful work with two plays from Pierre Corneille: Le Cid is Corneille's most famous play, a tragedy set in Seville that illuminates the dangers of being bound by honor and the limits of romantic love; The Liar is a farce, set in France and dealing with love, misperceptions, and downright falsifications, which ends, of course, happily ever after. These two plays, together in one volume, work in perfect tandem to showcase the breadth of Corneille's abilities. Taking us back to the time he portrays as well as the time of his greatest success as a playwright, they remind us that the delights to be found on the French stage are truly ageless.

Includes the plays The Liar, The Illusion, Le Cid Pierre Corneille (1606–84), the great seventeenth-century neoclassical dramatist, wrote over thirty plays during his long and varied career. Triumphant in both comedy and tragedy, his plays remain at the core of the repertory. When the young Molière saw The Liar (Le Menteur), a delightful chronicle of a pathological liar’s adventures in love, he decided to become a playwright. The Illusion (L’Illusion Comique) is a fascinating and mysterious tragi-comedy, one of the first plays to explore consciously the relationship between theatre and the real world. Le Cid, Corneille’s best known play, was controversial in its day, and led to a resurgence in French drama. Ranjit Bolt’s version of The Liar finds a way of rendering rhyming couplets which ‘no one else from the history of translating for the theatre has ever done...with some style and without sacrificing the sense of gallantry that is so essential to the original text.’ (BBC Radio3’s Critics Forum.) Both The Liar and The Illusion recently enjoyed critical and box office success at the Old Vic, reaffirming Ranjit Bolt as one of the world’s foremost translators of drama.

THE STORY: THE THEATRE OF ILLUSION is a tale of magic, love, revenge, mistaken identity, and mistaken perspective. Described by the author as a comedy, a caprice and an extravagance, it is widely considered to be Pierre Corneille's masterpiece.

THE STORY: Paris, 1643. Dorante is a charming young man newly arrived in the capital, and he has but a single flaw: He cannot tell the truth. In quick succession he meets Cliton, a manservant who cannot tell a lie, and falls in love with Clarice, a