Works
Scarron was very prolific as an author. The piece most famous in his own day was his Virgile travesti (1648-1653), a parody of the Aeneid, but the reputation of this work later declined. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, the Virgile travesti "is now thought a somewhat ignoble waste of singular powers for burlesque" and the Roman comique (1651-1657) is Scarron's best work: "This history of a troupe of strolling actors... is almost the first French novel...which shows real power of painting manners and character, and is singularly vivid. It is in the style of the Spanish picaresque romance, and furnished Théophile Gautier with the idea and with some of the details of his Capitaine Fracasse."
Scarron also wrote some shorter novellas, including La Precaution inutile, which inspired Sedaine's Gageure imprévue; Les Hypocrites and may also have inspired Molière's Tartuffe. His plays include Jodelet (1645), Don Japhel d'Arménie (1653), L'Écolier de Salamanque (1654), Le Marquis ridicule ou la comtesse faite à la hâte (1655), La Fausse Apparence (1657), Le Prince corsaire (1658).
Most of his works were adapted from Spanish sources, particularly Tirso de Molina and Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla.
Scarron is a character in the D'Artagnan romance Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas.
Read more about this topic: Paul Scarron
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomplish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1876–1959)
“Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
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My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)