INTRODUCTION
Molière, one of the world’s greatest comic playwrights, is a shadowy figure whose physical passage through this life is confirmed by little more than a few receipts and a signature which appears on fifty or so legal documents. No manuscripts of his plays have survived nor is there any extant correspondence. It is said that some time in the nineteenth century a peasant arrived in Paris with a barrowful of Molière’s papers which he offered for sale. There were no takers and he was never heard of again. Had there really been such a peasant and such a barrow, there would have been fewer Molières.
For while the Molière of tradition is primarily a public entertainer, scholars and historians, in the absence of firm evidence, have discovered many others lurking in his shadow. Some have suggested that Molière was merely an actor-manager who lent his name to plays written by closet dramatists: Lord Derby, Corneille, even Louis XIV, the Sun-King. He has been identified as the original ‘Man in the Iron Mask’ who became, by an amazing sequence of events, the forebear of Napoleon. While the eighteenth century thought of him as a comic scourge of men and manners, the Romantics saw a distinctly tragic side to him and played Arnolphe, Alceste and Harpagon as victims of wounded sensibilities. He has been called an embittered satirist, the defender of middle-class values and a champion of the ‘golden mean’ of moderation in all things. Other admirers, unhappy with Molière simply as a man of sound common-sense, have detected in him dark and dangerous philosophical convictions though, since the 1930s, actors and producers have tended to treat him not as a philosopher but as an essentially theatrical animal, a wizard of stagecraft. His comedies have been found to be indebted to literary borrowings so numerous as to turn him into a shameless plagiarist. Even his acute understanding of human psychology has worked against him: the ‘great’ comedies turn out not to be plays at all but non-dramatic, abstract studies of character unnecessarily complicated by plot and, regrettably, farce.
In his day Molière had many enemies and they did not mince their words. He alienated a section of the Court, the devout party, doctors, the Faculty of Theology, not to mention rival actors and authors, who called him a ‘public poisoner’, spread slanderous rumours about his private life and tried to silence him. Against them, however, he could count on literary friends like La Fontaine, and Boileau, the arbiter of classical taste, and the protection of Henrietta of England, the Prince de Condé (who let him perform the controversial Tartuffe in his house) and, not least, the king. That he survived at all is an indication of his courage, determination and diplomatic adroitness. But it also suggests a steely determination to succeed which seems at odds with the impression of sturdy optimism given by his plays.
Not that the plays have been allowed to speak for themselves, for they have been made to yield hidden meanings. Working on the assumption that Molière did more than draw ‘types’ and ‘characters’ from his observation of people and manners, scholars have unearthed specific ‘models’ and historical ‘originals’ on which Don Juan, Alceste, Tartuffe and others were based. Or was he an observer of himself? If so, the plays are coded autobiography. Surely the Molière who married a young woman only months before he staged L’École des femmes (The School for Wives), must inhabit the skin of Arnolphe who is only prevented from doing the same by a flick of the plot? How much of Molière is there in Alceste, the misanthrope? How close is Argan’s hypochondria to his creator’s own ill-health? To what extent does Chrysale in Les Femmes savantes (Those Learned Ladies) articulate Molière’s own impatience with pedantry?
The few surviving portraits of Molière are unrevealing, and engravings which show him in costume bury him beneath the roles he played. There is evidence to suggest that he was of medium height, heavily round-shouldered and not handsome. Even those who knew him well left only rare glimpses of his character. They hint that he was an impatient, ambitious man with expensive tastes, perhaps even something of a domestic tyrant. But they also show him to have been generous and honourable and no bearer of grudges. He was a dutiful son and a good husband. Scarron, the burlesque playwright and novelist, thought him rather ‘too serious’ for a clown, a view confirmed by La Grange, keeper of the register of Molière’s activities, who mentions that he was considered rather introspective, even melancholic by disposition. But if Molière seems to fit the classic description of the lugubrious comedian, it is clear that he also possessed considerable personal charm. For while he was far from happy in his relations with women, he earned and kept the loyalty, respect and even affection of the actors he directed.
The historical record is meagre and shows Molière almost exclusively from the outside, in his public and professional life. He was born in Paris in 1622, the first son of Jean Poquelin, a well-to-do tradesman in the rue Saint-Honoré, who in 1631 became one of the suppliers, by royal appointment, of furniture, curtains and carpets to the king’s household. His mother died in 1631 and two years later his father remarried. Contact was maintained with his mother’s family, however, and his grandfather may have taken the young Jean-Baptiste to see the farces performed by the actors of the Théâtre Italien and the tragedies for which the Hôtel de Bourgogne was famous. He was sent to the Jesuit Collège de Clermont (later the Collège Louis-le-Grand) where his fellow pupils included the sons of the nobility and future free-thinkers like Bernier and Cyrano de Bergerac. Through the father of a school friend, Chapelle, he met the sceptical philosophers Gassendi and La Mothe le Vayer.
In 1637 he became the reversioner of his father’s court appointment which, in 1643, he would transfer to his brother, though he remained officially a ‘valet de chambre du roi’, one of many who held the title. After leaving school, he studied law, possibly at Orléans, but, though he practised for six months, he was not suited to a legal career. He had by then become an honorary member of the Béjart family which was middle class, had literary connections and performed amateur theatricals. In 1642 he informed his father that he proposed to give up law in favour of an acting career, and the following year signed an agreement with Joseph Béjart and his sister Madeleine (1618–72), to set up a drama company to be called the Illustre Théâtre. While premises were being made ready, they played tragedy at Rouen, where Jean-Baptiste met Pierre and Thomas Corneille.
The new company opened its doors on 1 January 1644 and, helped by a fire which closed the theatre at the Hôtel du Marais, made a promising start. A document dated 28 June of that year reveals that Jean-Baptiste Poquelin had taken the stage-name of ‘Molière’, which he may have borrowed from any one of thirteen hamlets of that name or perhaps from a long-forgotten novelist, Molière d’Essartines. But although the Illustre Théâtre enjoyed the rather distant patronage of Gaston d’Orléans, brother of the late Louis XIII, it was soon in financial trouble and in the summer of 1645 its creditors sent in the bailiffs. Molière was jailed briefly for debt in August and shortly afterwards left for the provinces where the Béjarts followed him.
They joined a company of strolling players, based at Bordeaux, which was financed by the Duc d’Épernon. For the next thirteen years they toured the towns of Languedoc, few of which had fixed theatres, eventually emerging as the best of the dozen companies then performing in the French provinces. Though no strangers to inconvenience and temporary stages made of trestles, they did not live the hand-to-mouth existence of the struggling touring actors described by Scarron in his novel Le Roman comique (1657), nor did they have adventures comparable to those imagined by Gautier in Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863), which is set in the 1630 and 1640s. They performed in noble houses to the notables of Languedoc and were well rewarded. Nor did they lose touch with developments in Paris: Molière visited the capital at least once, in 1651.
In 1650 the Duc d’Épernon withdrew his support and in 1653 the company acquired a new patron, the dissolute Prince de Conti, who declared Molière to be ‘the cleverest actor in France’. By this time, he had emerged as the leader of the group which, in 1655, performed his first play, L’Étourdi (The Blunderer), at Lyons and, possibly, his second, Le Dépit amoureux (The Lovers’ Quarrel), the following year, by which time Conti had turned religious and disowned them. But their reputation was growing – Madeleine was said to be the best of the touring actresses – and at last they decided they were ready for Paris, where they arrived in 1658 prepared to do battle.
The Paris stage was at that time dominated by two major companies. The Hôtel de Bourgogne, originally built in 1548 to stage mystery plays, was the home of tragedy, though when faced with competition from Molière its actors responded by adding farce and comedy to their repertoire. After 1670 they reverted to tragedy, and it was in their hands that Racine would score his greatest triumphs. In comparison, the Théâtre du Marais, founded in 1629, had seen better days. Its association with Pierre Corneille in the 1630s and 1640s had made it the rival of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, but in 1660 it was finding difficulty in recruiting and retaining actors and new playwrights. Increasingly it turned to spectacular productions in response to public demand, but closed its doors for good in 1673. A third theatrical presence – if the popular entertainments of the two permanent Paris fairs are discounted – was provided by the Théâtre Italien performing the improvised farces of the commedia dell’arte in Italian.
Between them they covered a wide range of theatrical forms, from farce to tragedy by way of intricately plotted comedies. The Hôtel de Bourgogne in particular was increasingly associated with the classical taste which was firmly rooted by the time Louis XIV assumed personal rule of his kingdom in 1661. The doctrine, developed by scholars and theorists over more than half a century, required authors in general to be ‘plausible’, to respect the niceties of the new, more refined social morality, to avoid extravagant and ‘unrealistic’ characters and situations, and to adapt to a new purity of language. Dramatic authors were further enjoined to obey the rule of the three unities of time, place and action which were designed to end the confusion of wildly proliferating plots. Originality and imagination were not highly regarded, for the route to excellence lay in the imitation of good models. Tragic authors took their subjects from ancient writers; comic playwrights looked to Spanish and Italian sources for their inspiration.
While the dogma of classicism established a set of standards by which literature should be judged, theatre audiences also responded enthusiastically to less formally constrained entertainments. Thus while the classical ideal set its sights on the universal, they welcomed plays which satirized contemporary French manners and topical events. Farce had been superseded in the capital by the sophisticated requirements of preciosity, but it was kept alive by the rumbustious improvisation of the actors of the Théâtre Italien. Play-goers were intrigued too by the new interest novelists showed in the analysis of sentiment, and took to playwrights who offered a more organized form of the comedy of character. They warmed to the fashion for spectacle which called for lavish productions involving ingenious sets and a liberal use of stage machinery. To Italian opera, they preferred the home-grown comedy-ballet which added music and dance to plays in the form of free-standing interludes and finales normally unconnected with the characters or plot of the main entertainment. Plays with music and song grew in popularity and in 1669 an Académie d’Opéras was opened, a grand theatre which first staged musical extravaganzas before giving birth in 1673 to French opera. Thus, although classical discipline was in the ascendant, public taste was sufficiently flexible to allow authors considerable freedom for manoeuvre. Molière would seize his opportunities with both hands.
In 1658 he found a new patron in Philippe d’Anjou, the king’s only brother, leased a theatre and the ten-strong company opened with a season of tragedy which was judged inferior by the standards set by the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. But in October Molière concluded a royal command performance of Corneille’s Nicomède with a ‘modest entertainment’, possibly written by himself, Le Docteur amoureux (The Amorous Doctor). The king laughed and authorized the company to share the Petit-Bourbon, a theatre then used exclusively by the Italian actors. There Molière persisted with tragedy but varied the repertoire by reviving the farces he had written during his touring days. On 18 November 1659 he staged Les Précieuses ridicules (Such Foolish Affected Ladies) which brought him acclaim both as an author and as an actor. He was said to have only a modest talent for tragedy, but as the Marquis de Mascarille, in a huge wig crowned with a tiny hat, high-heeled shoes and festooned with ribbons, he enjoyed the first of many personal acting triumphs.
He maintained good relations with his Italian co-tenants and improved his own stage technique by observing the body-language they used when miming to audiences who did not understand Italian. When the theatre he shared with them at the Petit-Bourbon was demolished in 1660, Louis XIV, who continued to be amused by Molière, allowed him to move to the Palais Royal which would serve as his base until his death. As manager of the company, he commissioned tragedies and comedies but also staged plays of his own.
At first he persisted with farce, then tried his hand unsuccessfully at a tragi-comedy in verse, Don Garcie de Navarre (1661), before discovering a way of combining farce with the more sophisticated comedy of character and manners which pleased his public. His rising popularity was resented by rival authors who did not hide their feelings, and it brought a venomous reaction from the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne who felt threatened by his success. But he also brought protests from the religious zealots with Sganarelle, ou le Cocu imaginaire (Sganarelle, or the Imaginary Cuckold, 1660) which contained the first of his many attacks on those who claimed to direct consciences but often abused their position for their own ends. The bitterness flared into a ‘comic war’ in 1663 in the aftermath of The School for Wives (1662) which pleased theatre audiences but outraged the moral majority who thought it vulgar, tasteless, badly written and an insult to the ‘holy mystery’ of marriage. Molière was subjected to abuse that was both professional and personal. He was portrayed as a vulgar showman who puffed his plays shamelessly, licked the boots of aristocratic patrons and packed his first nights with his own supporters. But he was also attacked in his private life. Early in 1662 he married Armande Béjart, Madeleine’s sister, who was young enough to be her daughter – and his too, as some said openly.
The furore lasted over a year. Molière, assured of the king’s support by the award of a royal pension, fought back in 1663 with La Critique de l’école des femmes (The School for Wives Criticized), a witty rebuttal of the writers who had attacked him, and L’Impromptu de Versailles (1663), which was his answer to the charges made by rival actors and the attacks made on his private life. But in May 1664, as the din of battle was fading, he staged for the king at Versailles three acts of a new play ‘written against the hypocrites’ which the zealots immediately denounced as an attack on religion. Though Louis XIV did not take this view, powerful influences ensured that Tartuffe was stopped. Leading the opposition was the Compagnie du Saint Sacrement, a charitable if sinister organization set up in 1627 for the relief of the poor and the promotion of strict religious observance. It used methods so inquisitorial (errant sons were denounced to their families and hardened sinners publicly shamed) that in 1660 Colbert had effectively outlawed it. The effect was to make its operations more secret than ever; backed by persons as important as the Queen Mother and the Prince de Conti, Molière’s former patron, it was a force to be reckoned with. Molière was engulfed in a new and much more dangerous controversy, for the penalties for convicted blasphemers were severe: one pamphlet called for him to be burned at the stake. Tartuffe was banned, and although he read and staged it in private houses and a toned-down version entitled L’Imposteur was given one performance in 1667, the affair grumbled on until 1669 when the play as we know it was finally staged.
Meanwhile, Molière’s company continued to perform comedies and tragedies by other hands, though his own plays formed the basis of its repertoire. In 1665 his spectacular version of the life and death of Don Juan who defies God was well received but was withdrawn after its initial run, the victim not of an official ban but of the discreet pressure of the zealots. Molière was reassured, however, when, in August, the king himself became the patron of the company which was henceforth known as ‘la troupe du Roi’. A month later, L’Amour médecin (Love’s the Best Doctor), a comedy with ballet and music by Lully, delighted the public with the first of Molière’s assaults on the doctors. He offended them further by returning to them in 1666 with a farce, Le Médecin malgré lui (The Doctor Despite Himself). By then, he had considerable experience of the medical profession. His first child (like the two that would follow) had died in infancy and he himself had been kept off the stage for several weeks at the end of 1666 with a neglected chill which was followed by severe complications. He started to cough, lost weight and by 1667, when he was too ill to appear for two months, he had become, as one contemporary observed, ‘a walking skeleton’.
Although he carried a heavy responsibility as author, actor and manager of a company which depended on his talents and management skills, he now entered his most productive period. He maintained his output of farces which proved popular with audiences, and he continued his partnership with Lully who composed the music for a number of his comedy-ballets, notably Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman, 1670), which were as successful at Court as they were with his Paris public. In 1668 he added L’Avare (The Miser) to the great comedies of obsession which had begun with The School for Wives, Tartuffe and The Misanthrope (1666).
But as he turned fifty he was dealt a series of body blows. In 1672 Madeleine Béjart died, he lost his third child and the king transferred his favour to Lully who acquired the monopoly of musical plays. Undaunted, he staged Le Malade imaginaire (The Hypochondriac) on 12 February 1673, casting himself as Argan. The glittering first night audience cheered and the play looked set for success. But the effort had drained Molière who, towards the end of the fourth performance on 17 February, coughed blood, though he remained on stage until the final curtain. La Grange’s register records what happened next:
After the play, towards 10 o’clock in the evening, Monsieur de Molière died in his house in the rue de Richelieu, having acted the role of the Hypochondriac while suffering considerably from a cold and an inflammation of the chest which caused him to cough so rackingly that in straining to clear his lungs he burst a vein in his body and did not live above half or three quarters of an hour.
Although Molière had asked for a priest, he died unconfessed and, as an actor, was at first refused a Christian burial. The Archbishop of Paris relented, however, and allowed the body to be interred in the cemetery of his parish, but without ceremony and not during the hours of daylight. His many friends and admirers wrote tributes. His many enemies rejoiced. The Palais Royal gave no performances on the following Sunday and Tuesday but opened again on Friday 24 February, with The Misanthrope. The show went on as, doubtless, Molière would have wanted.
In the fourteen years since arriving in Paris, Molière had staged over a hundred plays. Of these, he had written and directed twenty-nine and also acted in twenty-four. He began with what he knew best, farce, which had been the mainstay of his provincial successes. He never abandoned its broad strokes and was not afraid of vulgarity. But for the more discriminating Paris public he rang some sophisticated changes on the staple techniques and themes.
In 1659 audiences were accustomed to two quite distinct types of comedy: farce, unsubtle and often physical, with its traditional comic valets, pedants and boastful soldiers, and the comedy of intrigue with its over-complicated, sometimes incomprehensible plots involving disguises, intercepted letters, pirates and magic spells. The first was largely a French tradition, though the Italian actors had popularized new types, like the Harlequin, while the second drew heavily on Spanish and Italian models. During the 1650s farce had disappeared from the Paris stage, but authors who wished to amuse now began importing it into plays which, for example, might attach a comic valet to a marquis who had embarked on an amour. The result was usually a poor fit, with the already wandering plots being unhinged at any moment by an unconnected piece of burlesque business. Molière would bring these disparate comic strands together in plays which drew their unity from a more consistent concern with human behaviour. In his hands, familiar stage types become three-dimensional: comic valets accumulate other functions, pedants are linked to wider social and human foibles, tetchy fathers acquire a new depth of character and young lovers express humane and civilizing values.
Of course, Molière worked within a specific theatrical tradition and, as an experienced actor, had a memory filled with stock jokes and audience-proof stratagems. He recycled familiar ploys and stole old comic routines. He repeated plots, situations and characters from play to play – the father who wishes to give his daughter to a son-in-law who shares his obsession, the valet or maid who conspire against their master, the stagy denouements which restore sanity – because they worked well in theatrical terms. But even his broadest comedy is always used for a purpose: to highlight the folly of his monomaniacs or to show some social failing in an absurd light.
Like his contemporaries he borrowed liberally from a common pool of sources which were mainly French for farce, and Spanish and Italian for comedy of situation, character and manners. But from the start he also drew on his own observation. Les Précieuses ridicules is a social comedy which owed less to tradition than to his knowledge of people and their ways. While he remained loyal to farce and continued to recycle theatrical conventions in his plots, the ratio of borrowing to his own experience increases in favour of the latter. He may have taken up the story of Don Juan because the subject was fashionable, but his Don is a much more ambiguous character than any of his predecessors, while the Alceste of The Misanthrope has no clear literary precedent at all. Molière may have taken hints and ideas from other writers, but his ‘high’ comedies – Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, The Miser, Those Learned Ladies – are in conception highly original. No two of his bourgeois are the same, for although they may be types, they are vividly individualized. Alceste is a fool only in his absurd misanthropy, for many of his strictures about society are well-founded. Monsieur Jourdain we surely know to be gullible only in his longing to be a gentleman and not in other things, rather as Orgon is a man of courage and principle whose weakness is his infatuation with Tartuffe. This depth of characterization prevents Molière’s gallery of eccentrics from being caricatures and raises them to the level of enduring types which audiences still recognize.
As much may be said for his social satire which is expressed through characters whose actions contradict what they say. Tartuffe, the conscious hypocrite, cannot overcome the unconscious power of his own appetities, nor can Harpagon sustain his hopes of acquiring an image as a respectable man of business when he is forced to choose between his social ambitions and his money. The same technique is used against philosophers who lose their tempers, poets who trade insults like common lackeys and ladies who pride themselves on their taste and discernment but misread people and situations. It is by drawing these self-incriminating characters of précieuses, prudes, zealots, philosophers, doctors, lawyers and well-to-do obsessives that Molière attacks what they represent: preciosity, prudery, zealousness, intellectual pretension, professional dishonesty and obsession. Their discomfiture derives from the mismatch between self-image and reality, and it is through the oldest of comic traditions that Molière shows them to be what they are: when their mask falls, Tartuffe and Trissotin, Célimène and the doctors, poets and précieuses stand before us to be judged.
And clearly Molière, who several times stated his belief that theatre has a moral vocation, expected audiences to judge them and learn from their example. Exactly what he wanted his public to learn, however, has been the subject of much debate. There is least disagreement about his social attitudes which are quite clear: he reworked the old jibes about the ignorance and self-interest of doctors and lawyers, the knavery of money-lenders like Harpagon and snobbery in general, not only among the middle classes but among upper-class women and fashionable marquises who were uncritical followers of every passing fad. His literary views also seem clear. While the aim of comedy is to correct manners, the greatest rule of all is to amuse and entertain – even if this meant on occasions courting vulgarity and straying from the path of ‘regularity’ which the theorists of classicism had clearly signposted. But his own ethical values are much less clear-cut.
At first sight, the ‘raisonneur’, usually a middle-aged man, seems to put a comprehensive case for moderation and ‘le juste milieu’. It is a stance reflected in less rational and more instinctive terms by valets, maids and sometimes wives, who openly mock bourgeois pretension and the follies of monomania. Yet Molière’s plots cannot be said to underwrite traditional morality in its entirety, for they require domestics to cheek their masters, and children to defy their parents. They draw attention to the way girls are brought up, for Agnès in The School for Wives, who is kept in ignorance, is no better prepared for adulthood than the précieuses who are over-educated. Nor is there any support for marriages arranged by parents which are regularly overturned in favour of sentiment. Rather than articulating some mathematically balanced ‘golden mean’, Molière’s plays promote an elastic notion of ‘natural’ behaviour: tolerance, awareness of other people, spontaneity and the rights of exuberant youth. Molière makes no objection in principle to the social structures and moral assumptions of his society, but rather shows that without love they are oppressive. When imposed without regard to human freedoms, marriage, paternal authority and the hierarchy of established values are empty of human warmth.
Similar reservations must be made about Molière’s repeated assault on preciosity, a cultural fashion which was hardly new in 1659. Between 1620 and 1640, what was first known as ‘honnêteté’ had sought to raise the tone of literature by insisting on only the noblest sentiments, defining love as swoon and anguish, and making a virtue of outlandish similes, metaphors and allegory. By the 1650s the precious taste for bizarre emotion and contorted language had become a butt for satirists. From Such Foolish Affected Ladies to Those Learned Ladies, Molière repeated jokes which were not only familiar to audiences but even amused the new précieuses who laughed at Magdelon and Mascarille – such patent anachronisms – and at the ridiculous Trissotin and his silly poems.
For while Molière mocked the excesses of preciosity, he was not unsympathetic to its call for the improvement of literature and manners. When he allows his young lovers to express their feelings, he puts undeniably precious terms into their mouths. Nor was he at odds with the misgivings expressed by the précieuses about female education and the marriage of convenience. Where he parted company with them, however, was in their wish not simply to change literature but to coerce manners. They were all too easily offended and they actively campaigned against what they affectedly regarded as the vulgarity of theatre, poetry, even of certain words, and to physical love preferred platonic relationships and the union of souls. Molière’s target is not their call for the refinement of manners and language as such, but the sour chastity of the prudes, which is as much outside ‘nature’ as Tartuffe’s hypocrisy or Harpagon’s avarice. Just as it is unnatural for children to be made the victims of their fathers, so it is natural that daughters should wish to marry young men not greybeards. Molière’s learned ladies are wrong to despise their home-making role in exactly the same way that Alceste, the misanthrope, errs in rejecting all society: it is natural for people to be sociable. Against them, women like Elmire of Tartuffe or Henriette of Those Learned Ladies stand out. They are intelligent, unimpressed by fashion and modestly self-assertive. What they want is sane and reasonable, and they know how to set about getting it without offending others, endangering families or making the world march in step with them.
But most controversial of all is Molière’s attitude to religion. In his lifetime, he was called an enemy of the Church and an atheist. The eighteenth century regarded him as an early kind of anticlerical deist, rooting moral values in the belief in a creator-god who was neither catholic nor protestant. Since he had some acquaintance with sceptics like Gassendi, some modern scholars have further suggested that he was sympathetic to the current of free-thought, that intellectual libertinage which attempted to reconcile a spirit of rational inquiry with Catholicism. His plays reveal that, while he was not a bookish man, he was aware of the scientific and intellectual debate going on around him. He understood the principles of Descartes’s solution to the problem of base and sublime matter, followed the debate about the use of antimony as an emetic and was convinced by Harvey’s revolutionary thesis of the circulation of the blood. True, his most enigmatic play, Don Juan, features a master who believes in nothing except that two and two make four and a servant who is incapable of defending religion. Yet there is nothing to suggest that Molière shared the atheism of his hero. Don Juan, though he has certain admirable traits – not least, his heroic courage in defying the Statue – is portrayed as a hypocrite who behaves callously to his father, Dona Elvira and everyone he encounters, irrespective of social standing. In this, he is no different from Tartuffe who hides behind a façade of religious zeal as a way of serving his own interests.
The modern consensus is that while Molière had little objection to religion in principle (his three children were christened, and on his death-bed he called for a priest), he was probably sceptical in his own beliefs. But in matters of faith, he was as opposed to extremism as he was to any other kind of private or public excess. Indeed, Molière is very even-handed in his approach to religion. He is no more in favour of the laxity of the Jesuits which gave encouragement to Tartuffian directors of conscience, than to the puritanism of the Jansenists which led to intolerance and persecution. Nor does he promote atheism which leads Don Juan to deny all human values. But while Molière invites us to laugh at the gullibility of Orgon in Tartuffe or the foolishness of his pedants and learned ladies who talk reason, molecules and ‘falling worlds’, his message is at times uncompromising. If Don Juan and Tartuffe are stopped in their tracks, it is by means of stagy denouements contrived to please the public, and he leaves us with the uneasy feeling that in real life they would succeed. But whether he is humbling the predators or mocking their prey, Molière never openly attacks religion itself. His targets are the ‘impostors’ who exploit those foolish enough to be duped by them. Molière attacks the singers, not the song.
He never broke faith with the time-honoured purpose of comedy, which is to correct manners. He had no wish to reform institutional structures in any recognizable modern sense, but aimed at puncturing the pretension and dishonesty of the society in which he lived. His stage is crowded with zealots who do not believe in God, doctors who have a blinkered faith in medicine, lawyers who bend the law, critics who cannot tell good from bad, pedants who use science to acquire honour and reputation, and self-satisfied women whose professed love of literature and ideas is no more than a cover for their endless snobbery. Molière was a moral rather than a philosophical writer, though his morality is not the sum of the exhortations of his raisonneurs to follow custom, discipline desire, and practise honesty because it is not only the best policy but also the safest. His target is rather the generalized mendacity of a society based on hypocrisy, that ‘privileged vice’ as Don Juan calls it. He challenges intimidation and artifice, and encourages his audience to think clearly, so that they may tell truth from falsehood, honesty from narcissism, self-respect from self-regard, in a word to recognize egoism in others and avoid the promptings of their own baser natures.
He was not, however, a misanthropic social critic like Alceste, nor does he ever raise the spectre of vanity of all human endeavour. Had he been so minded, he would have written tragedies. He judged people and manners sternly, but his plays express his amusement at the follies he castigates. As a moralist, he chose to laugh, and he ensured that audiences laughed with him. In any case, reading moral lessons could not be the principal concern of an actor-manager with a theatre to fill. At a time when thirty performances meant success and playhouses were rowdy even dangerous places, he could not afford to lecture his public. Nor could he ignore changing tastes. He never forgot that farce was the great laughter-maker, but he civilized it, building it into situations which highlighted personal and social folly. Yet he was prepared to experiment and did not allow himself to be governed by the rules of classical theatre which are ignored or bent in at least half his plays. He tried out new genres, staging his first comedy-ballet, Les Fâcheux (The Impertinents), in 1661. He attempted the fashionable ‘spectacle play’ with Don Juan, and ‘tragi-comedy and ballet’ with Psyché (1671). In The Would-Be Gentleman and The Hypochondriac he turned the ballets and interludes into an extension of the plot, devising absurd ceremonies which are comments on the obsessions of Monsieur Jourdain and Argan. Molière blended the various strands of traditional comedy – farce, spectacle, manners, character and situation – into a new kind of integrated comedy of observation. At its heart lies the individualized type, never simple, always three-dimensional, and invariably lightened by an injection of an older, more physical style of comedy: the cuckold as a figure of fun, the misunderstanding which sets characters at cross-purposes or the carefully orchestrated plan which backfires. He allows Orgon to hide under the table, Monsieur Jourdain to take a beating and Argan to speak incessantly of his bodily functions. Farce persists even in his choice of names – if ‘Mascarille’ and ‘Jodelet’ are established theatrical fools, ‘Trissotin’ (which suggests trois fois sot, ‘thrice a fool’) is a barbed coinage and Monsieur Loyal is, as Dorine observes, hardly a good man and true.
During his lifetime the public preferred the farces to the ‘great’ comedies of monomania which are now most admired. Then, his most performed plays were not The Misanthrope or Those Learned Ladies but Sganarelle (1660) and L’École des maris (The School for Husbands, 1661), which were essentially farces, and his comedy-ballet Les Fâcheux. Changing tastes have long since altered the line-up, and the plays that have worn best are those which, behind the fun, raise questions about human nature and the permanent absurdities of social living. If Tartuffe and Harpagon still wear the face of hypocrisy and avarice, the targets of Molière’s satire remain familiar. Preciosity still exists as intellectual snobbery, his zealots represent the perennial forces of intolerance, and his doctors and pedants remain as useful reminders of the limitations of experts.
By giving his archetypes a distinctive personality and by focusing on issues which never lose their topicality, Molière escaped the limitations of the age he lived in. He has travelled effortlessly through space and time. While he was still alive he was performed in England, Holland and Germany, and his plays immediately struck a sympathetic chord with spectators unacquainted with the specific social culture of France. Since then they have continued to hold their universal appeal. They are best taken at speed and rarely leave audiences indifferent. For if Molière the actor wrote fire-proof roles for actors, Molière the director left plenty of space around the dialogue for producers to add stage business of their own. Three and a half centuries on, Molière, the observer of people and manners, remains a magician of the theatre.
