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Molière, original name Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, (baptized January 15, 1622, Paris, France—died February 17, 1673, Paris), French actor and playwright, the greatest of all writers of French comedy.

Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France often combined against him, the genius of Molière finally emerged to win him acclaim. Comedy had a long history before Molière, who employed most of its traditional forms, but he succeeded in inventing a new style that was based on a double vision of normal and abnormal seen in relation to each other—the comedy of the true opposed to the specious, the intelligent seen alongside the pedantic. An actor himself, Molière seems to have been incapable of visualizing any situation without animating and dramatizing it, often beyond the limits of probability. Though living in an age of reason, he had the good sense not to proselytize but rather to animate the absurd, as in such masterpieces as Tartuffe, L’École des femmes, Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and many others. It is testimony to the freshness of his vision that the greatest comic artists working centuries later in other media, such as Charlie Chaplin, have been compared to Molière.

Early life and beginnings in theatre

Molière was born (and died) in the heart of Paris. His mother died when he was 10 years old; his father, one of the appointed furnishers of the royal household, gave him a good education at the Collège de Clermont (the school that, as the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, was to train so many brilliant Frenchmen, including Voltaire). Although his father clearly intended him to take over his royal appointment, the young man renounced it in 1643, apparently determined to break with tradition and seek a living on the stage. That year he joined with nine others to produce and play comedy as a company under the name of the Illustre-Théâtre. His stage name, Molière, is first found in a document dated June 28, 1644. He was to give himself entirely to the theatre for 30 years and to die exhausted at the age of 51.

A talented actress, Madeleine Béjart, persuaded Molière to establish a theatre, but she could not keep the young company alive and solvent. In 1645 Molière was twice sent to prison for debts on the building and properties. The number of theatregoers in 17th-century Paris was small, and the city already had two established theatres, so that a continued existence must have seemed impossible to a young company. From the end of 1645, for no fewer than 13 years, the troupe sought a living touring the provinces. No history of these years is possible, though municipal registers and church records show the company emerging here and there: in Nantes in 1648, in Toulouse in 1649, and so on. They were in Lyon intermittently from the end of 1652 to the summer of 1655 and again in 1657, at Montpellier in 1654 and 1655, and at Béziers in 1656. Clearly they had their ups as well as downs. These unchronicled years must have been of crucial importance to Molière’s career, forming as they did a rigorous apprenticeship to his later work as actor-manager and teaching him how to deal with authors, colleagues, audiences, and authorities. His rapid success and persistence against opposition when he finally got back to Paris is inexplicable without these years of training. His first two known plays date from this time: L’Étourdi; ou, les contretemps (The Blunderer; or, The Mishaps), performed at Lyon in 1655, and Le Dépit amoureux (The Amorous Quarrel), performed at Béziers in 1656.

The path to fame opened for him on the afternoon of October 24, 1658, when, in the guardroom of the Louvre and on an improvised stage, the company presented Pierre Corneille’s Nicomède before the king, Louis XIV, and followed it with what Molière described as one of those little entertainments which had won him some reputation with provincial audiences. This was Le Docteur amoureux (“The Amorous Doctor”); whether it was in the form still extant is doubtful. It apparently was a success and secured the favour of the king’s brother Philippe, duc d’Orléans. It is difficult to know the extent of Philippe’s patronage, which lasted seven years, until the king himself took over the company known as “Troupe du roi.” No doubt the company gained a certain celebrity and prestige, invitations to great houses, and subsidies (usually unpaid) to actors, but not much more.

From the time of his return to Paris in 1658, all the reliable facts about Molière’s life have to do with his activity as author, actor, and manager. Some French biographers have done their best to read his personal life into his works, but at the cost of misconstruing what might have happened as what did happen. The truth is that there is little information except legend and satire.

Although unquestionably a great writer, Molière insisted that his plays were made for the stage, and his early prefaces complain that he had to publish to avoid exploitation. (Two of the plays were in fact pirated.) Comedies, in his view, were made to be acted. This fact was forgotten in the 19th century. It took such modern actors as Louis Jouvet, Jean-Louis Barrault, Francis Huster, Michel Bouquet, and Denis Podalydès to present a new and exact sense of his dramatic genius.

Toward the end of his life, Molière arranged for the publication of an attractive edition of his complete works; that edition, however, did not appear until about 10 years after his death. Ever attentive to furthering his status as a preeminent man of letters in Europe, Molière walked the fine line between his role as a literary lion and his status as a (distinguished) subject of the king. That the king was not pleased with Molière’s efforts at self-promotion may well have been one of the reasons why Louis XIV authorized Jean-Baptiste Lully to oversee all the material aspects of musical productions in France, including Molière’s comédies-ballets. Molière is now considered one of the first French “authors” in the modern sense of a writer who is vigilant about his commercial success as well as the state of his legacy.

During the short span of Molière’s productive years, he was not at all a classical author, with leisure to plan and write as he would. Competition, the fight for existence, was the keynote of Molière’s whole career. To keep his actors and his audiences was an unremitting struggle against other theatres. He won this contest almost single-handed. He held his company together by his technical competence and force of personality.

Molière’s first Paris play, Les Précieuses ridicules (The Affected Young Ladies), prefigured what was to come. It centres on two provincial young women who are exposed by valets masquerading as masters in scenes that contrast, on the one hand, the women’s desire for elegance coupled with a lack of common sense and, on the other, the valets’ plain speech seasoned with cultural clichés. The women’s fatuities, which they consider the height of wit, suggest their warped view of culture in which material things are of no account. The fun at the expense of these pretentious people is still refreshing and must have been even more so for the first spectators who recognized in the précieuses the major flaw of an essentialist age: affectation, the desire to be what one is not.

Les Précieuses, as well as Sganarelle (first performed in October 1660), probably had its premiere at the Théâtre du Petit-Bourbon, a great house adjacent to the Louvre. The Petit-Bourbon was demolished (apparently without notice), and the company moved early in 1661 to a hall in the Palais-Royal, built as a theatre by Richelieu. Here it was that all Molière’s Paris plays were staged, starting with Dom Garcie de Navarre; ou, le prince jaloux (Don Garcia of Navarre; or, The Jealous Prince) in February 1661, a heroic comedy of which much was hoped; it failed on the stage and succeeded only in inspiring Molière to work on Le Misanthrope. Such failures were rare and eclipsed by successes greater than the Paris theatre had known.

Scandals and successes of Molière

The first night of L’École des femmes (The School for Wives), December 26, 1662, caused a scandal, as if people suspected that here was an emergence of a comic genius who regarded nothing as sacrosanct. Some good judges have thought this to be Molière’s masterpiece, as pure comedy as he ever attained. Based on Paul Scarron’s version (La Précaution inutile, 1655) of a Spanish story, it presents a pedant, Arnolphe, who is so frightened of femininity that he decides to marry Agnès, a girl entirely unacquainted with the ways of the world. The delicate portrayal in this girl of an awakening temperament, all the stronger for its absence of convention, is a marvel of comedy. Molière crowns his fantasy by showing his pedant falling in love with her, and his elephantine gropings toward lovers’ talk are both his punishment and the audience’s delight.

From 1662 onward the Palais-Royal theatre was shared with Italian actors, each company taking three playing days in each week. Molière learned much about physical comedy from the Italian specialists in the commedia dell’arte. He also wrote plays that were privately commissioned and thus first performed elsewhere: Les Fâcheux (The Impertinents) at Vaux in August 1661, the first version of Tartuffe at Versailles in 1664, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman) at Chambord in 1670, and Psyché in the Tuileries Palace in 1671.

On February 20, 1662, Molière married Armande Béjart, the daughter of Madeleine and the comte de Modene. There were three children of the marriage; only a daughter survived to maturity. It was not a happy marriage; Armande’s flirtations are indicated in hostile pamphlets, but there is almost no reliable information.

Molière cleverly turned the outcry produced by L’École des femmes to the credit of the company by replying to his critics on the stage. La Critique de L’École des femmes in June 1663 and L’Impromptu de Versailles in October were both single-act discussion plays. In La Critique Molière allowed himself to express some principles of his new style of comedy, and in the other play he made theatre history by reproducing with astonishing realism the actual greenroom, or actors’ lounge, of the company and the backchat involved in rehearsal.

The quarrel of L’École des femmes was itself outrun in violence and scandal by the presentation of the first version of Tartuffe in May 1664. The history of this great play sheds much light on the conditions in which Molière had to work and bears a quite remarkable testimony to his persistence and capacity to show fight. He had to wait five years and risk the livelihood of his actors before his reward, which proved to be the greatest success of his career. Most men would surely have given up the struggle: from the time of the first performance of what were probably the first, third, and fourth acts of the play as it is now known, many must have feared that the Roman Catholic Church would never allow its public performance.

Undeterred, Molière made matters worse by staging in 1665 a version of Dom Juan; ou, le festin de pierre (“Don Juan; or, The Feast of Stone”) with a spectacular ending in which an atheist is committed to hell—but only after he has amused and scandalized the audience. Dom Juan was meant to be a quick money raiser, but it was a costly failure, mysteriously removed after 15 performances and never performed again or published by Molière. It is a priceless example of his art. The central character, Dom Juan, carries the aristocratic principle to its extreme by disclaiming all types of obligation, to either parents or doctors or tradesmen or God. Yet he assumes that others will fulfill their obligations to him. His servant, Sganarelle, is imagined as his opposite in every point—earthy, timorous, superstitious. These two form the perfect French counterpart to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Harassment by the authorities

While engaged in his battles against the authorities, Molière continued to hold his company together single-handedly. He made up for lack of authors by writing more plays himself. He could never be sure of either actors or authors. In 1664 he put on Jean Racine’s first produced play, La Thébaïde (“The Story of Thebes”); in 1665 Racine transferred his next play, Alexandre le Grand, to a longer-established theatre while Molière’s actors were actually performing it, which turned the two men against each other. Molière was constantly harassed by the authorities, especially the ecclesiastical ones for the challenge to orthodoxy they saw in his plays. These setbacks may have been offset in part by the royal favour conferred upon Molière, but royal favour was capricious. Pensions were often promised and not paid. The court wanted more light plays than great works. The receipts of his theatre were uncertain and fluctuating. In his 14 years in Paris, Molière wrote 31 of the 95 plays that were presented on his stage. To meet the cumulative misfortunes of his own illness, the closing of the theatre for seven weeks upon the death of the Queen Mother, and the proscription of Tartuffe and Dom Juan, he wrote five plays in one season (1666–67). Of the five, only one, Le Médecin malgré lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself), was a success.

In the preceding season, however, Le Misanthrope, almost from the start, was treated as a masterpiece by discerning playgoers, if not by the entire public. It is a drawing-room comedy, without known sources, constructed from the elements of Molière’s own company and first performed in 1666. Molière himself played the role of Alceste, a fool of a new kind, with high principles and rigid standards, yet by nature a blind critic of everybody else. Alceste is in love with Célimène (played by Molière’s wife, Armande), a superb comic creation, equal to any and every occasion, the incarnate spirit of society. The structure of the play is as simple as it is poetic. Alceste storms moodily through the play, finding no “honest” men to agree with him, always ready to see the mote in another’s eye, blind to the beam in his own, as ignorant of his real nature as a Tartuffe.

The church nearly won its battle against Molière: it prevented public performance, both of Tartuffe for five years and of Dom Juan for the whole of Molière’s life. A five-act version of Tartuffe was played in 1667, but once only: it was banned by the President of Police and by the Archbishop on pain of excommunication. Molière’s reply was to lobby the king repeatedly, even in a military camp, and to publish a defense of his play called Lettre sur la comédie de l’Imposteur. He kept his company together through 1668 with Amphitryon (January 13), George Dandin (Versailles, July 18), and L’Avare (September 9). Sooner or later so original an author of comedy as Molière was bound to attempt a modern sketch of the ancient comic figure of the miser. The last of his three 1668 plays, L’Avare, is composed in prose that reads like verse; the stock situations are all recast, but the spirit is different from Molière’s other works and not to everyone’s taste. His miser is a living paradox, inhuman in his worship of money, all too human in his need of respect and affection. In breathtaking scenes his mania is made to suggest cruelty, pathological loneliness, even insanity. The play is too stark for those who expect laughter from comedy; Goethe started the dubious fashion of calling it tragic. Yet, as before, forces of mind and will are made to serve inhuman ends and are opposed by instinct and a very “human” nature. The basic comic suggestion is one of absurdity and incongruity rather than of gaiety.

His second play of 1668, George Dandin, often dismissed as a farce, may be one of Molière’s greatest creations. It centres on a fool, who admits his folly while suggesting that wisdom would not help him because, if things in fact go against us, it is pointless to be wise. As it happens, he is in the right, but he can never prove it. The subject of the play is trivial, the suggestion is limitless; it sketches a new range of comedy altogether. In 1669 permission was somehow obtained, and the long run of Tartuffe at last began. More than 60 performances were given that year alone. Of the three versions of the play, only the last has survived; the first (presented in three acts played before the king in 1664) probably portrayed a pious crook so firmly established in a bourgeois household that the master promises him his daughter and disinherits his son. At the time, it was common for lay directors of conscience to be placed in families to reprove and reform conduct. When this “holy” man is caught making amorous advances to his employer’s wife, he recovers by masterly self-reproach and persuades the master not only to pardon him but also to urge him to see as much of his wife as possible. Molière must have seen even greater comic possibilities in this theme, for he made five acts out of it. The final version contains two seduction scenes and a shift of interest to the comic paradox in Tartuffe himself, posing as an inhuman ascetic while by nature he is an all-too-human lecher. It is difficult to think of a theme more likely to offend pious minds. Like Arnolphe in L’École des femmes, Tartuffe seems to have come to grief because he trusted in wit and forgot instinct.

Last plays of Molière

The struggle over Tartuffe probably exhausted Molière to the point that he was unable to stave off repeated illness and supply new plays; he had, in fact, just four years more to live. Yet in 1669 he produced Monsieur de Pourceaugnac for the king at Chambord and in 1670 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme treated a contemporary theme—social climbing among the bourgeois, or upper middle class—but it is perhaps the least dated of all his comedies. The protagonist Jourdain, rather than being an unpleasant sycophant, is as delightful as he is fatuous, as genuine as he is naive; his folly is embedded in a bountiful disposition, which he of course despises. This is comedy in Molière’s happiest vein: the fatuity of the masculine master is offset by the common sense of wife and servant.

Continuing to write despite his illness, he produced Psyché and Les Fourberies de Scapin (The Cheats of Scapin) in 1671. Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies or The Blue-Stockings) followed in 1672; in rougher hands this subject would have been (as some have thought it) a satire on bluestockings, but Molière imagined a sensible bourgeois who goes in fear of his masterful and learned wife. Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), about a hypochondriac who fears death and doctors, was performed in 1673 and was Molière’s last work. It is a powerful play in its delineation of medical jargon and professionalism, in the fatuity of a would-be doctor with learning and no sense, in the normality of the young and sensible lovers, as opposed to the superstition, greed, and charlatanry of other characters. During the fourth performance of the play, on February 17, Molière collapsed onstage and was carried back to his house in the rue de Richelieu to die. As he had not been given the sacraments or the opportunity of formally renouncing the actor’s profession, which was considered immoral and scandalous at the time, he was buried without ceremony and after sunset on February 21.

Molière as actor and as playwright

Molière’s acting had been both his disappointment and his glory. He aspired to be a tragic actor, but contemporary taste was against him. His public seemed to favour a tragic style that was pompous, with ranting and roaring, strutting and chanting. Molière had the build, the elasticity, the india-rubber face, as it has been called, of the born comedian. Offstage he was neither a great talker nor particularly merry, but he would mime and copy speech to the life. He had the tireless energy of the actor. He was always ready to make a scene out of an incident, to put himself on a stage. He gave one of his characters his own cough and another his own moods, and he made a play out of actual rehearsals. The characters of his greatest plays are like the members of his company. It was quite appropriate that he should die while playing the part of the sick man that he really was.

The actor in him influenced his writing, since he wrote (at speed) what he could most naturally act. He gave himself choleric parts, servants’ parts, a henpecked husband, a foolish bourgeois, and a superstitious old man who cursed “that fellow Molière.” (The comparison with Charlie Chaplin recurs constantly.) Something more than animal energy and a talent for mime was at work in him, a quality that can only be called intensity of dramatic vision. Here again actors have helped to recover an aspect of his genius that the scholars had missed, his stage violence. To take his plays as arguments in favour of reason is to miss their vitality. His sense of reason leads him to animate the absurd. His characters are imagined as excitable and excited to the point of incoherence. He sacrifices plot to drama, vivacity, a sense of life. He possesses an excellent education as a writer, yet he is ready to defy all rules of writing.

Since the power of Molière’s writing seems to lie in its creative vigour of language, the traditional divisions of his works into comedies of manners, comedies of character, and farce are not helpful; he does not appear to have set out in any instance to write a certain kind of play. He starts from an occasion in Le Mariage forcé (1664; The Forced Marriage), from doubts about marriage expressed by Rabelais’s character Panurge, and in Le Médecin malgré lui he starts from a medieval fable, or fabliau, of a woodcutter who, to avoid a beating, pretends he is a doctor. On such skeleton themes Molière animates figures or arranges discussion in which one character exposes another or the roles are first expressed and then reversed. It is intellectual rhythm rather than what happens, the discussion more than the story, that conveys the charm, so that to recount the plot may be to omit the essential.

What is certain is that Molière created a new comic genre. Previously underappreciated, Molière’s comédies-ballets assumed significant importance in representations of his works in the early 21st century. In fact, 40 percent of his plays combine the arts of comedy, music, and dance. Although Les Fâcheux (1662) is technically a comédie-ballet, it was with Le Mariage forcé that Molière integrated all three arts in the formula for this genre that he invented in collaboration with the composers Jean-Baptiste Lully and, later, Marc-Antoine Charpentier. These plays gave great pleasure to Louis XIV and his court, and the libertine dramatist took equal pleasure in creating these paeans to freedom, love, and joy. The masterpieces of the genre are Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire, both first performed in the 1670s. They suggest that Molière’s last creative phase was so extraordinarily rich that, had he not died, he might have projected the comic genre into a whole new world of festivity, of artistic languages that offer a vision of society as a comic creation existing between reality and fantasy.

Molière’s unique sense of the comic

The attacks on Molière gave him the chance in his responses to state some aesthetic home truths. Thus, in La Critique de L’École des femmes, he states that tragedy might be heroic, but comedy must hold the mirror up to nature: “You haven’t achieved anything in comedy unless your portraits can be seen to be living types.…Making decent people laugh is a strange business.” And as for the rules that some were anxious to impose on writers: “I wonder if the golden rule is not to give pleasure and if a successful play is not on the right track.”

The attacks on L’École des femmes were child’s play in comparison with the storm raised by Tartuffe and Dom Juan. The attacks on them also drew from the poet a valuable statement of artistic principle. On Dom Juan he made no public reply since it was never officially condemned. The documents in defense of Tartuffe are two placets, or petitions, to the king, the preface to the first edition of 1669 (all these published over Molière’s own name), and the Lettre sur la comédie de l’Imposteur of 1667. The placets and preface are aesthetically disappointing, since Molière was forced to fight on ground chosen by his opponents and to admit that comedy must be didactic. (There is no other evidence that Molière thought this, so it is not unfair to assume that he used the argument only when forced.) The Lettre, though anonymous, is much more important. It expresses in a few pregnant lines the aesthetic basis not only of Tartuffe but of Molière’s new concept of comedy:

The comic is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see, and avoid, it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence, and we must see wherein the rational consists.…Incongruity is the heart of the comic.…It follows that all lying, disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a single source, all this is in essence comic.

Molière seems here to put his finger on what was new in his notion of what is comic: a comedy, only incidentally funny, that is based on a constant double vision of wise and foolish, right and wrong seen together, side by side. This is his invention and his glory.

A main feature of Molière’s technique is a mixing of registers, or of contexts. Characters are made to play a part, then forget it, speak out of turn, overplay their role, so that those who watch this byplay constantly have the suggestion of mixed registers. The starting point of Le Médecin malgré lui, the idea of beating a man to make him pretend he is a doctor, is certainly not subtle, but Molière plays with the idea, makes his woodcutter enjoy his new experience, master the jargon, and then not know what to do with it. He utters inanities about Hippocrates, is overjoyed to find a patient ignorant of Latin, so that he need not bother about meaning. He looks for the heart on the wrong side and, undeterred by having his error recognized, sweeps aside the protest with the immortal: “We have changed all that.” The miser robbed of his money is pathetic, but he does not arouse emotions because his language leads him to the absurd “…it’s all over…I’m dying, I’m dead, I’m buried.” He demands justice with such intemperance that his language exceeds all reason and he threatens to put the courts in the court. Molière’s Misanthrope is even more suggestive in his confusion of justice as an ideal and as a social institution: “I have justice on my side and I lose my case!” What to him is a scandal of world order is to others just proof that he is wrongheaded. Such concision does Molière’s dramatic speech achieve.

A French genius

After the French were roundly defeated in the Franco-German War (1870–71), they looked to strengthen two cultural institutions that, they believed, were the sources of their weakness: the army and the school system. The latter was of the utmost importance, since it involved all the strata of society, present and future. Seeking to restore the glory of France, the leaders of the Third Republic looked to that most French of periods, the age of Louis XIV, and to its most accessible (and entertaining) author, Molière. His theatre was thus proposed as a representation of traditional bourgeois values; at its heart, however, it espoused just the opposite. Nonetheless, the mandating of Molière’s comedies as a core part of the national curriculum served to elevate his status to that of the national symbol of French identity for generations of students.

When Voltaire described Molière as “the painter of France,” he suggested the range of French attitudes found in the plays that stress aspects of his work that others tend to overlook. Three of these are noteworthy.

First, formality permeates all his works. He never gives realism—life as it is—alone, but always within a pattern and a form that fuse light and movement, music and dance and speech. Modern productions that omit the interludes in his comédies-ballets stray far from the original effect. Characters are grouped; scenes and even speeches are arranged; comic repartee is rounded off in defiance of realism.

Second, where foreigners see psychology, the French more often stress the poetry. They take the plays not as studies of social mania but as patterns of fantasy that take up ideas only to drop them when a point has been made. Le Misanthrope is not considered as a case study or a French Hamlet but as a subtly arranged chorus of voices and attitudes that convey a critique of individualism. The play charms by its successive evocations of its central theme. The tendency to speak one’s mind is seen to be many things: idealistic or backbiting or rude or spiteful or just fatuous. It is in this fantasy playing on the mystery of self-centredness in society that Molière is in the eyes of his own people unsurpassed.

A third quality admired in France is his intellectual penetration in distinguishing the parts from the whole. Montaigne, the 16th-century essayist who deeply influenced Molière, divided qualities that are acquired, such as learning or politeness or skills, from those that are natural, such as humanity or animality, what might be called “human nature” without other attributes. Molière delighted in opposing his characters in this way; often in his plays a social veneer peels off, revealing a real human being. Many of his dialogues start with politeness and end in open insults.

Molière opposed wit to nature in many forms. His comedy embraces things within the mind and beyond it; reason and fact seldom meet. As the beaten servant in Amphitryon observes: “That conflicts with common sense. But it is so, for all that.”

Courtesy - Will G. Moore

Ronald W. Tobin

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Moliere

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