Of course I've heard of Molière. He is perhaps the most famous French writer, poet, visionary, plus actor, to have ever lived. Like all fake intellectuals, I'd heard of him. But i hadn't actually read or seen any of his plays until now.
This edition, from the Modern University classics collection, has eight plays, which I will summarize individually:
1. The Precious Damsels
2. The School for Wives
3. Critique of the School for Wives
4. the Versailles impromptu
5. Tartuffe
6. The Misanthrope
7. The Physician in Spite of Himself
8. The Would-be Gentleman
Molières favorite genre was satire, and one of his favorite targets was the affectation of the aristocratic class. I think the translator who assembled this collection did so with a specific eye towards this theme. All of these plays are about absurd snobbishness: how when people think too much of themselves, their principles, their achievements - they make themselves ridiculous. In several of the plays there is an obvious author self insert, who preaches the value of moderation and discernment.
The Precious Damsels (alternately translated as The Affected Damsels) is about a pair of young women who are entirely besotted with the fashion for "wit" at the time - flattering "impromptu" verses, a dandyish obsession with fashion, and an appearance of intellectualism. They spurn two suitors who are too plain and working class for their ambitions. The men then devise a trick: to have their servants pose as gentlemen to trick the ladies into flirting with simple servants. It's not a very compelling setup, to be honest. Bishop (the translator) explains in his introductory note that Moliere's lowbrow farces were often a target of the "precious," who sought distinction and refinement. Les Preciuses ridicules was a kind of counterattack. A lot of Moliere's work is, in some way, in conversation with his critics. Authors had to fight on the stage, before they could fight on Twitter. But as Bishop (the translator) concludes, our society still has its moments where it values "preciosity" - the compulsion toward novelty at all costs - over substance and true insight.
The School for Wives was probably my favorite in the bunch, and one of the few comedies that has aged well. It's about a man, Arnolphe, who has spent his whole life mocking the way all the other men around him are being cuckholded, and so is terrified of being cucked himself, because of the mockery he would have to endure. To avoid the inevitable perfiedies of Woman, Arnolphe adopts a young girl from the countryside and has her raised in ignorance in a convent. So she will be too innocent to betray him, you see. A perfect plan. Despite what voice-of-reason character Chrysalde may say, about how "the fool is often false without intention." Hilarity ensues when, predictably, the girl in question falls in love with a strapping young man who happens to see her, and feels no love for the controlling, bloviating man twice her age who thinks he can mold her into his ideal bride. There is a classic fifth-act happy ending, of course, where it turns out the girl is actually the long lost daughter of a wealthy house, and her father has recently returned to France to see her married to his business partner's son, who is, by happy chance, the strapping young man who she is in love with. All is for the best.
Apparently this play caused the 17th century equivalent of a press firestorm: critics thought it was cruel to women, calling them all unfaithful, as it did. They thought the scene where Arnolphe alludes to the wifely duties he expects from his young bride to be were debased smut. And of course they thought the play should have some more action (an impractical consideration at the time - the play was limited to actors delivering monologues because the stage it was performed on was tiny, and surrounded by audience.) Moliere did the best possible thing in response: a 1660s equivalent of a massive subtweet thread. He wrote a play called The Critique of the School for Wives. In it, he gives each of these critics a voice, and creates a self-insert character to defend his play from the criticism. Its gloriously messy.
The Versailles Impromptu felt fascinatingly modern to me. He wrote and performed it after being commanded to perform for the King on a week's notice. In it, the theater troupe struggles to rehearse for a short-notice performance for the King. Actors bemoan that they cannot remember their lines, they are interrupted by courtiers who want to watch, and Moliere (in the play) gets distracted on a tangent about another farce he's working on, to mock the style of other acting companies. It doesn't really have a plot, or an arc. Moliere uses it as a platform to proselytize what he thinks theater should be, and to highlight the difficulties of putting on a performance. I could easily imagine it being performed in a black box theater, or being a low-budget indie film.
Tartuffe is another play that caused significant controversy. Apparently the King liked it, but banned its performance at the behest of the Church, who accused Moliere of irreligion. It's about a con man (the titular Tartuffe) who poses as deeply holy, to get in with a wealthy man (Orgon), get the rights to all his property, and bone his beautiful wife. All of Orgon's family and friends see that Tartuffe is a con man, but Orgon stubbornly refuses to listen to them until he sees Tartuffe trying to seduce his wife with his own eyes, at which point he flies into a rage. Unfortunately, he has already signed legal documents transferring all of his property to Tartuffe. His family are being turned out of their home in the streets when Royal Guard ex-machina appears, and explains that the King in his Royal Wisdom knows Tartuffe is a con man, and has rendered the legal transfer of property void, and has Tartuffe arrested. I have to admit, I didn't like this one as much. I think it probably could be hilarious if performed, but on the page it dragged a little bit, and I found Orgon's credulity and temper to be more off-putting than funny. But it is funny in a metafictional sense: the Church thought this play was blasphemous, though Tartuffe is not even a priest, and in the text of the play, is clearly just adopting the guise of a religious man to get stuff. Oh how far we haven't come.
The Misanthrope is interesting because in it we see a critique even of an excess of sincerity, almost an about face from The Precious Damsels. The Misanthrope is about a man, Alceste, who hates the pretenses of people at court. He hates, for example, the way people will ask for honest critique of their poetry and then get mad at him for saying he thinks it's bad poetry. Alceste, however, is a bit of a hypocrite: he is in love with one of the court beauties (Célimène) who is known to be a bit fickle and two-faced, entertaining the courtship of several young men without choosing between them, and indeed making fun of other people behind their backs. Alceste gets into a bit of drama with the man whose poetry he pronounced dreadful, and has to flee the court. However, when he asks Célimène to accompany him into exile from the court, she expresses the mildest possible protest before beginning to agree to the idea ("What, leave society before I'm old, and go and bury myself in your solitude?... I'm only twenty; solitude terrifies me. I fear that I am just not strong enough to take on so high a purpose. But-"). This enrages Alceste, who sees it as evidence of her inconsitency and lack of conviction. He turns around and proposes to Eliante, who has been standing around next to Alceste's friend, Philinte, for the whole play, and is like "I should have asked you" and Eliante (rightly) says "I'm no one's backup plan, I've been standing here the whole time waiting for Philinte to ask me to marry him" and then Philinte and Eliante get married, and Alceste grumpily shuffles off out the the country to live out his days in principled solitude.
Bishop called The Misanthrope Moliere's Hamlet, a work of sufficient ambiguity that different performers and audiences could sympathize with characters on different sides. I think of this collection, it definitely has the most nuanced characters, though as Bishop also points out, the original audience would have seen Alceste as a comically hyperbolic figure, and laughed at him.
The Physician in Spite of Himself is the worst one to read. It's a very slapsticky play, most of the punchlines are someone getting beaten up. I can imagine the right tone and performers could make it very funny, but of all these plays, this one you can skip.
The Would-Be Gentleman (Le Bourgois gentlehomme) is about a wealthy middle-class man who has aspirations of entering the gentry. Moliere's audience would have found this to be an absurd aspiration, and so the protagonist is a credulous buffoon. You can't buy class. No matter how many dancing classes and music classes and fencing classes and fine sets of clothes he buys, he cannot acquire good taste (especially not with the constant flattery of the people he's paying to be around him). There is truth to this kind of figure, of course, but I think the core joke has aged badly: the very idea of a commoner becoming a gentleman, that any commoner could even consider themself worthy of being an equal to the impoverished Count who is constantly asking him for money, is not something that is funny or sensible to a modern audience. I did like the wife character in this play a lot though. She criticises her husband for thinking the aristocrats are worth immitating. She points out that the Count is insolvent, that the fashions look ridiculous, and that if her daughter were to marry the Count, she might not be permitted to know her grandchildren. I like her.
And that's it. I might look up some filmed versions of my favorites and update this post, but it's already taken me way too long to write up, and I'm behind on the post I'm writing for my next book, The Vegetarian by Han Kang.
