Cyrano de Bergerac vs. Roxanne: Tragedy to Comedy
This essay compares Edmond Rostand's 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac with the 1987 Steve Martin film Roxanne, examining how the modern adaptation shifts the original's tragic architecture into romantic comedy. The paper argues that the fundamental difference in tone and ending stems from changes in social intimacy between the sexes, the role of physical appearance in courtship, and the constraints of courtly love conventions. By tracing parallel scenes and dialogue, the essay shows how 20th-century attitudes toward sexuality, friendship between genders, and romantic realism make a tragic ending both dramatically implausible and culturally unnecessary in the film adaptation.
- Introduction: Two Versions of the Large-Nosed Hero: Play and film share premise but differ in tone
- The Ending as the Key Difference in Tone: Tragic vs. comic resolution and its causes
- Roxane's Blindness and Roxanne's Awakening: Heroines recognize true love at different moments
- Courtly Love vs. Modern Romance: Letter-writing and desexualized courtship analyzed
- Slapstick, Sexuality, and Social Intimacy: Modern gender dynamics undermine tragic conventions
- The Role of Chris and the Path to a Happy Ending: Chris's shallowness enables the film's happy ending
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay anchors its comparative argument in a concrete, specific claim: that the shift from tragic to comic endings reflects broader cultural changes in gender intimacy and sexuality, not merely Hollywood convention.
- It uses direct quotations from both the play and the film's dialogue to draw genuine parallels, allowing the texts to speak for themselves rather than relying on paraphrase alone.
- The discussion of courtly love conventions and their incompatibility with modern romantic expectations gives the comparison an analytical depth beyond surface-level plot comparison.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper employs close reading of dialogue across two different media — stage drama and film — to support a thesis about cultural and tonal transformation. By placing equivalent speeches from Rostand's Roxane and Martin's Roxanne side by side, the author demonstrates how the same narrative moment (the heroine's recognition of true love) carries different dramatic weight depending on its social and historical context.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a thesis contrasting tragic and comic architectures, then works through the most significant plot divergence (the ending), moves to parallel scenes of recognition, analyzes the underlying courtly-love conventions that the film cannot sustain, and closes with the character of Chris as a structural device that enables the comedy's happy resolution. Each section builds logically on the previous one.
Introduction: Two Versions of the Large-Nosed Hero
Both the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand and the film Roxanne (1987) starring Steve Martin tell the tale of a witty man with an enormous nose who loves but fears to woo a beautiful woman. The 1897 play has retained its popularity even into the modern era, inspiring devoted tributes to the thwarted poet and fighter. However, while Rostand's nineteenth-century French play is essentially tragic in its architecture — albeit with many comic touches and funny lines — the 1987 American film offers a modern retelling that is considerably gentler and funnier in its construction. This shift in tone arises largely because of the increasingly intimate connections between the sexes in modern life, an intimacy that exists on both a friendly and a sensual level.
In contrast to the play, the film Roxanne suggests that the most overwhelming obstacle the large-nosed hero faces is not his face but his own internal self-consciousness. The original presents the hero's nose as a much greater obstacle and suggests that true love in the absence of physical beauty can only be fully acknowledged on the brink of death. The ending of the film is therefore the most fundamental shift in plot from the original play, and in examining that ending the difference in overall tone becomes clear.
Works Cited
Rostand, Edmond. Cyrano de Bergerac. 1897.
Roxanne. Dir. Fred Schepisi. Columbia Pictures, 1987.
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