III.

Molière in Paris

During his years in Paris, Molière wrote over 30 plays for his company. In l’École des Femmes (The School for Wives, 1662) he broke new ground by taking a stock farce theme, giving it a full five-act treatment, and raising it to the level of high comedy. At the same time, he incorporated satire on contemporary male attitudes to women and their place in society. This was the first sign that the dramatist was prepared to shock as well as entertain his audience by criticizing entrenched ideas and attitudes. Le Tartuffe (first version, 1664; third and final version, 1669) proved even more shocking. The protagonist Tartuffe is a religious hypocrite who pretends piety in order to try to seduce the gullible Orgon’s wife and to trick him out of his house and possessions. The religious authorities persuaded the king to ban the play, and Molière had to rewrite it considerably before being allowed to perform it again. Le Misanthrope (1666) introduced a different kind of central figure—a man of principles and high standards, constantly criticizing the weakness and folly of others, yet blind to the faults of Célimène, the young widow he has fallen in love with and the embodiment of the society he condemns. Although the play is highly successful today, its reliance on constantly witty dialogue unbroken by the scenes of broad comedy they had come to expect of Molière seems to have puzzled the play’s first audiences, who received it coolly.

Others among Molière’s most successful plays are l’Avare (The Miser, 1668), a loose adaptation, in the spirit of the commedia dell’arte, of a work by the Roman comic dramatist Plautus, and Le Médecin Malgré Lui (The Physician in Spite of Himself, 1666), a satire on the medical profession. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman, 1670), a comedy ballet with music by the king’s favourite composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully, mocks a successful but naive cloth merchant who aspires to being received at court. The lessons he takes in music, dancing, fencing, and philosophy are broadly comic, and the play ends happily with a mock Turkish ballet.

Molière’s last comedy, Le Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid, 1673), about a hypochondriac who fears the ministrations of doctors, is in the tradition of those satires on medicine widespread in 16th- and 17th-century literature. Ironically, during the first week of the play’s run, as Molière was playing the leading role, he was stricken ill on stage and died a few hours later.

Molière’s satirical comedies, directed against social conventions and the weaknesses of human nature, give a more accurate portrait of contemporary French society than do the tragedies of his contemporaries Pierre Corneille and Jean-Baptiste Racine. Although his stock characters and comic effects were borrowed from older traditions—from the farce tradition, from the comedies of the Greek writer Aristophanes, from the Roman comedy of Terence and Plautus, and from the Italian commedia dell’arte—he gave psychological depth to his demagogues, misers, lovers, hypocrites, cuckolds, and social climbers. Like the troupes of Italian actors, with one of which he shared the Palais-Royal theatre when he first returned to Paris, Molière’s company was trained to extract the full potential from the characters and situations portrayed. This training included the study of appropriate facial expressions, gestures, and gags. Molière himself has given us an entertaining picture of his rehearsal methods in the one-act playlet l’Impromptu de Versailles (1664).