Molière

Molière, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in 1622, bears the unchallenged mantle of France’s greatest comic dramatist. Supported by a wealthy bourgeois family, he was educated in a Parisian Jesuit college that introduced him both to classical literature (Terence and Plautus strongly influenced certain plays) and, doubtless, to acting. Shunning the family trade of tapestry weaving, and the law, which he studied [Page 517]in Orléans, he formed in his early 20s the Illustre Théâtre, a company whose success was soon quashed by debts that remained unresolved for decades and even caused his imprisonment. On release, he led his troupe to the provinces where he toured long and widely, also gaining important noble patrons, before returning to Paris in 1658.

His own plays figured frequently in their established repertoire, many deriving from the standard traditions of farce and commedia dell’arte, and several no doubt lost: He only began publishing his work in 1660. However, in L’étourdi (The Giddy-Pate) and Le dépit amoureux (The Love-Tiff), he had already set the pattern of five-act comedies composed in alexandrines, later applied in various major works that helped cement his fame. One also notes the plot structure generally favored during his career whereby, prior to wedlock, pairs of young lovers overcome difficulties mounted by parental opposition. Meanwhile, doctors and pedants form stock butts for ridicule, while considerable comic energy derives from the clown Mascarille, whose cynicism, misfortunes, and counter-morality help undercut the love-plot.

Once reinstalled in the capital, Molière quickly acquired both royal patronage and a permanent site for his company, while success and notoriety followed rapidly on his landmark comedy Les précieuses ridicules (The Affected Ladies), a brief satire in prose of salon society and its pseudo-intellectuals that would help springboard a much later masterpiece, Les femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies). Otherwise, given Louis XIV’s predilection for theater, it is unsurprising that Molière should receive royal commissions for court performance, sometimes at embarrassingly short notice, but the resultant so-called comédies-ballets combined theater, music, and dance to a spectacular degree. He continued to compose briefer farces such as Sganarelle, which was in fact the work produced most often during his lifetime, whereas the two plays L’école des maris (The School for Husbands) and L’école des femmes (The School for Wives) exploit his standard themes of young love frustrated by parental power, although now treated with a psychological depth that has encouraged long-standing critical attention.

In the discussions following the success of the latter play in particular, Molière claimed, in a deliberate flout of 17th-century critical consensus, that comedy was a more problematic genre than tragedy. However, still greater controversy followed his Tartuffe, a satire on religious hypocrisy, and Dom Juan, a spectacular but highly ambiguous treatment of the career and death of the womanizing anti-hero Don Juan. The former work, judged impious, was banned for some years, and the author never presented the latter following its first run, yet modern directors have often chosen them in preference to the remainder of Molière’s works. Meanwhile, the playwright never lost royal favor, enjoying, by the mid-1660s, both wealth and fame.

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