Cyrano de Bergerac

The French original is the true first: Paris, Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1898. CENSUS CORRECTION — the claim that 'the first US translation (R. H. Russell, New York) appeared the same year' is not supported and should be struck: R. H. Russell's New York edition is 1899, and it prints the Gladys Thomas / Mary F. Guillemard translation. Four English translations appeared in 1898 (Howard Thayer Kingsbury; Thomas & Guillemard; Charles Renauld; Gertrude Hall, the last published by Doubleday & McClure), and in the United States the play was first published in French by the William R. Jenkins Company in 1898. The Kingsbury translation — Boston/New York/London: Lamson, Wolffe and Company, 1898, the text played by Richard Mansfield at the American premiere (Garden Theater, New York, 3 October 1898), with a Mansfield portrait frontispiece, in publisher's red cloth lettered and decorated in silver — is reported to be the first in English, but that precedence could not be corroborated against a second independent source. Until it is, no English edition should be asserted as 'the' first English; catalogue each as 'first edition of the X translation'.