Paul Claudel And The Intellectual Drama

Author : Paul Claudel
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781330054352
Total Pages : 171 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (543 download)

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Download or read book The Hostage written by Paul Claudel and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Hostage: A Drama The Yale University Press does itself honour in publishing this book, the second drama of Paul Claudel to appear in English. "The Hostage" bears little resemblance to those theatrical works which sooner or later cross the Atlantic as a matter of course, even when they are not definitely written with a view to exportation. Like the other plays of Claudel, "The Hostage" has nothing in common with that facile art whose sole aim is to fill up-or while away-an evening for us with amusing adventures at once forgotten; with that art which is most at home in the region of the commonplace, timidly shunning the heights where dizziness threatens, and the depths where there is risk of losing one's footing in unaccustomed gloom. "The Hostage" is fundamentally opposed to that type of play in which virtuosity and "metier" count for more than soul and true art, in which interest is derived from the cleverness of the intrigue and from the complication of the action, a wholly material type, in which content counts for less than externals, intellectual beauty for less than volatile emotion, author less than actor, actor less than costume and scenery; tending, in a word, towards a kind of cinema, seeking in vain to hide the poverty of the thought by the lavishness of the concrete expression. "The Hostage" is the work of a great poet; it speaks to the noblest in us and can therefore only leave us nobler. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.