MOLIÉRE
“Moliére was not just a playwright,” wrote scholar Ethan Mordden. “Moliére was a thespian, wholly of the theater, and his compositions breach the gulf between literature and performance, between language as its own art and language as a tool of art.”
Like Shakespeare, who was an actor first, Moliére captured the spirit of live performance in his texts.
Born of the comic stage, his plays are rich in melody and approach symphonic genius. Wordy and musical, dark and frivolous, his works are contemporary comedies with a twist.
A native Parisian, Moliére spent his childhood observing the people of the great city: the masses, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy. He portrayed the idiosyncrasies, ticks, and other symptoms of this sharply divided society in his most successful plays. Although works like “The Miser” (1668) and “The Misanthrope” (1666) dissected the petty obsessions of the middle class, the plays’ verse appealed to a wider audience of commoners and aristocrats alike.
At the beginning of his career, he had to take his show on the road to earn a living, touring provincial theaters. However, a single performance for the royal court turned King Louis XIV into his biggest fan. Royal patronage hastened the young playwright’s return to the capital, where he became the manager and star of his own theater company.
Influenced by the wit and buffoonery of Italian commedia dell’ arte, Moliére generously spiced his plays with biting words and tragicomic motifs. His sharp-edged take on human foibles such as greed, jealousy, and hypocrisy is, however, softened by the poetic melodies of rhyming couplets and repetitive 12-syllable lines. This consciously formal rhythm and rhyme scheme not only adds a light touch to stories about loathing and deceit, but also transforms regular conversations into vibrating musical exchanges.
Moliére’s favorite authorial trick was to assign his main character one terrible quality and stretch it to the absolute limit of ludicrousness. From the brutally negative misanthrope to the two-faced Tartuffe, his central characters are confused, narrowly focused creatures who mirrored the hypocrisies of French society.
"Tartuffe," written in 1664, was successfully banned from the stage for five years by the Church, which feared the repercussions of direct mockery of its moral authority. (A puritanical religious advisor, Tartuffe turns out to bear more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Swaggart.)
For Moliére, the line between reality and performance was thin. In fact, the great dramatist collapsed onstage during a production of “The Imaginary Invalid” (1673), a work that ironically satirized hypochondria and the quackery of the medical profession. He died as he had lived, earning his living by pointing out that falseness exists in real life just as much as in the theater.