Book dossier

Amphitryon

by Molière

Richard Wilbur, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and recipient of the PEN translation award, dazzles the reader with his English verse translation of this most unusual of Moliere's plays - a play whose characters are not seventeenth-century Frenchmen but ancient Greeks and Greco-Roman gods, a play combining the flavors of vaudeville, fantasy, high comedy, farce, and even opera. The play begins with irreverent midair banter between the gods (the audiences of Moliere's day thrilled to the use of stage machines for "flying" the actors) and only literally comes down to earth thereafter. Moliere's ebullient verse, so brilliantly captured by Wilbur, adds sparkle to the proceedings throughout. . In serving up this very funny tale of Jupiter's successful ruse to bed the wife of the Theban general Amphitryon, Moliere takes lusty aim at the high-handed amorality of the powerful - and says more than a few things in passing about love and marriage. Amphitryon shows Jupiter, Moliere, and Wilbur all at the peak of their form.