The Comic Illusion
A father who drove his son from the house ten years ago comes to a magician's grotto in Touraine to learn what became of him, and is shown the boy alive in Bordeaux, valet to a soldier whose boasts nobody believes. The apparitions run through a courtship, a rival, a prison and a killing, and the last of them shows the son murdered — which is not what the father has been watching. Corneille called the play a strange monster and wrote it as a defence of the theatre in the decade the French church wanted the profession excommunicated.
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- 51% · 11 shared