Rostand described Les Romanesques as "a Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending". Percinet and Sylvette, the "all-too-romantic" title figures, love each other against their fathers' orders and consider themselves the new Romeo and Juliet. They meet in secret at the wall separating the gardens of their feuding fathers, hoping wistfully for an end to the hostilities, which does in fact come - from a source the young people could not have suspected - just in time for the first-act curtain.
But real life is more than romance, and only when the lovers learn this, with the help of a swashbuckling swordsman named Straforel, can they find their true love for one another and their genuine happy ending.
The success of Les Romanesques encouraged Rostand to continue to write verse dramas, leading to his masterpiece, Cyrano de Bergerac. The All-Too-Romantics is a foretaste of Rostand's later plays: here already are the wit, the verve and the panache, as well as the fluent, virtuosic verse - lyrical and humorous by turn. Here too is Rostand's idealistic enthusiasm for life. And the swordsman Straforel, the flamboyant liaison between romance and reality in The All-Too-Romantics, is a forerunner of Cyrano himself.
After its premiere in 1894, Les Romanesques was swiftly translated into a dozen languages. It was the inspiration, in 1960, for The Fantasticks by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, which then went on to become the world's longest running musical.
Genge Press is the brainchild of Sue Lloyd, created to make the works of Edmond Rostand more readily accessible to anglophones. Ms. Lloyd is the author of Rostand's only full-length biography in English, The Man Who Was Cyrano: A Life of Edmond Rostand. Other books published by Genge Press include: Sacred and Profane Love - Two Plays by Edmond Rostand: The Woman of Samaria and The Last Night of Don Juan in prose translations, and Rostand's final play, Chantecler, in the original French but fully annotated in English. All are in print.
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