Molière

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Hello, the French playwright playwright Molière, 1622-1673, is one of the great figures in world literature.

He began as an actor, a would-be tradition, with a face for comedy, touring with his troupe for 13 years until Louis XIV summoned him to audition and gave him his break.

And it was in Paris and Versailles that he wrote and performed his best-known plays, among them Tartuffe, Le Misetrop, and the Malade Imaginaire, so celebrated that French became known as the language of Molière.

With me to discuss Molière are Nel Peacock, Emeritus Marshall Professor in French Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, Joe Harris, Professor of Early Modern French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway University of London, and John Clarke, professor of French at Durham University.

John Clark, how did Molière start out in life?

Not with the same name, I think.

No, his name is or was Jean Poquelin, which became Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, and it wasn't until the 1640s that he took the name Molière.

He was born into the bourgeoisie, the Parisian bourgeoisie.

His family were cloth merchants, tapestry makers, and cloth merchants on both sides.

So he was resolutely Parisian.

We don't know an awful lot about his education.

He went to the Collège de Clermont, which later became better known as the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.

There is a kind of legend that his grandfather took him to see farce actors on the Pont Neuf, and that's how he got his love of theatre.

And his father is kind of conversely cast as the person who wanted to discourage him from becoming an actor, but these are just kind of accretions and legends.

There's no real evidence to support that.

Although his father probably got a bit annoyed at having to pay off his debts when he did become an actor, he after college, he went where he studied philosophy and the humanities.

He is supposed to have gone to study law at Orléans, but again, there's no real evidence of that.

And he appears to have given up his studies, according to a contemporary commentator, because he fell in love with an actress and Madeleine Béjard and followed her onto the stage.

And he set up his first company with members of the Béjar family in the early 1640s in Paris.

He said of his own troop really, what was it like to be an actor with a troop of actors in those days?

It was changing in the 1640s.

Previously, actors had been very poorly thought of,

particularly before there were established troops in Paris.

So before the 1630s, when there were just kind of bands of travelling players, they were rather kind of male vu.

But after that,

once there started to be settled, established troops in Paris, they became a bit more decent.

And in 1641, Louis XIII actually issued a decree stating that actors who kind of lived well and didn't do anything reprehensible or perform anything reprehensible should not be persecuted.

But even so, it was still the case that actors were considered to be excommunicate.

So, and this was going to create issues at the end of Molière's life because they were not allowed to receive the sacraments and so had to renounce their profession in order to receive the last rites.

And how did he probably were from a very strange start set up his own troop and take it around?

Well, what happened?

He was going up for about 13 years, didn't he?

He was in the provinces for 13 years.

It was a long time.

It was, but it was mostly to do with the failure of his.

He set up a company.

You can see the ambition because it was called the Illustrious Theatre, L'Loustre Théâtre, with the Béjar family, as I just mentioned.

And they did quite well in the first year,

largely because one of the two rival theatres had burned down, so there was a gap in the market.

But then that theatre reopened, the Marais Theatre reopened, and so audiences started to fall off.

And their first theatre was in Saint-Germain, Saint-Germain des Prés, which wasn't, it was still fields at that time, it wasn't, really didn't have the infrastructure to support a theatre.

So they tried to move to a different location nearer to the Marais, but by that time they were so much in debt that basically they couldn't perform their way out of it.

And so Molier was imprisoned and then they had to lock it.

What was he in prison for and how

for debt?

But very briefly.

So they would basically lock him up his dad would turn up pay off the creditors and then he'd come straight out so he was he was in prison and then obviously realized that there was no future for them in Paris so pretty much all of the members of the illustrious theatre company joined another company led by somebody called Charles Dufran and that's when they left and went off touring in the provinces.

Thank you.

George Johas, how did a troupe become successful in those days?

I think one of the skills that any troop needed at the time was, above all, a good memory.

Theatre is a very expensive thing to put on when you've got a troop of...

10 to 12 actors on average.

And that meant that every theatre troupe needed to have a large array of plays within their repertoire that they'd be able to put on at a moment's notice.

It's not like nowadays when a play will be advertised for a certain run in advance, but rather the troop would be keeping an eye on the box office numbers, numbers, the income and the takings.

And if they weren't very good, a play could be abandoned within a couple of performances.

And so it was quite a cutthroat world, especially for playwrights who are trying to get their work out there.

Another skill.

That implies great feats of memory, doesn't it?

It does, exactly, yes.

They would need to...

You have a lot of plays, so if one doesn't work the next night, you put another one on.

Exactly.

And so Molière's troupe would have known, would have had dozens of plays at their disposal.

And I think that really helped Molière as a playwright as well as an actor because he knew the texts of a lot of the key works from the previous couple of decades, let's say, really well.

He knew what worked and he was able to borrow from them within his own playwriting as well as as an actor.

Another skill I think which was really important was, well, theatre spectators at the time were quite disruptive.

They weren't as well behaved as they are today.

There weren't any real purpose-built theatres until really the end of the century.

And so acoustics were very bad.

You needed to have a very good, loud voice in order to be an actor and you needed to command the stage and get people's attention because you wouldn't necessarily be able to rely on them sitting and paying attention dutifully however compelling the plot was could you tell us what he was like as an actor

what was your best at

He discovered quite early on that he had a talent for comedy and for farce although I think it's worth bearing in mind he did as you said in your introduction have aspirations towards tragedy.

Tragedy was seen as the noble genre at the time.

It's easy to overstate how bad a tragic actor he was and definitely people at the time would pick up on some of his failings.

One of his enemies in the early 1660s says in one of his plays with well rather satirical praise, says, oh, he's such a great actor because you laugh at the tragedies just as much as at the comedies.

But he must have had something going for him as a tragic actor because it was with a tragedy, well, a double bill of a tragedy and a farce that he got the attention of Louis XIV in the first place.

He tried to introduce a more naturalistic way of speaking in tragedy.

He thought that most tragic actors were too pompous, too bombastic, and wanted them to sound more realistic, but I don't think audiences

seem to appreciate that.

So he makes fun of them instead.

And actually in his plays as well, sometimes his own characters, his comic characters, have large set-piece monologues in a pseudo-tragic vein where Molière, he would often play these characters himself, was able to overdo that for deliberate comic effect rather than for inadvertent comic effect, as seemed to have been the case with the straight tragedies.

Thank you.

Neil Peacock, how did Molière get to appear before Louis XIV?

And why do you think he made such an impression?

It was 1658 when he went back to Paris, having reassured himself that he would be well received.

The audience included the king's brother, the king, and a very select audience.

It was at the Louvre, which was quite a big space that he was performing in.

And he chose to perform a play by Corneille, a three-act play by Cornet-Nicoméde, which was probably not really a tragedy, it's a kind of heroic drama, and a farce, Le Doctor Amour, the Doctor in Love.

And the king loved the play so much, or loved the farce in particular, that he was given access to the Petit Bourbon theatre.

And his first major success from his own pen was Les Précères Rédicules, The Affected Ladies, which was a one-act farce.

And I think there's considerable influence from the Italians, the Commede dell'Arte actors.

And it was very, very well received.

Now, this was really a parody of girls, country girls, imitating the affected ladies from Paris.

In fact, they were imitators, not necessarily the real pressure.

And this caused quite a storm, really, amongst the public, because Molière was thought to have been attacking those who were having a civilizing effect on morals and language, because we were talking about a period after the Wars of the Fronde, and a lot of vulgarity had crept into the language and also into behaviour.

And the real preissieurs were attempting to refine manners and language.

But Mullier was sending up these girls.

There's two lovers want the girls to marry the girls, but they are totally intoxicated with the reading of novels and how courtship should be carried out.

This play caused quite a stir, but it also went.

Why did it cause such a stir?

Because they thought Molly was attacking the real thing.

Who would his audience have been?

We're told that Shakespeare's audience went from the groundlings to the aristocracy.

Was anything similar happening?

Yes,

to some extent, he would have the aristocracy, the different levels of aristocracy, the different levels of boxers, particularly at the Marais.

But he'd also have rich merchants who would be very much part of his audience.

And he said in Les Col de Femme, which was his next big play, he said, the biggest challenge for me is to make what he called honet jeans laugh, because these people, some of the, particularly the aristocracy and the upper middle, wouldn't want to be seen laughing in public.

So he said, this is my task.

And he did it really by bringing together literary comedy, the refined comedy, with farce.

Even in his great plays, there are elements of farce.

Joan, how far were women engaged in the business of theatre at that time?

Oh, very much so.

There's evidence to suggest that when Molière went to the provinces and gradually emerged as the leader of a troupe, he was actually co-leader with Madeleine Béjard.

So, theatre companies were essentially democratic and women played an equal part.

They were based on a share system, and so shares were awarded on merit.

Women were shareholders, all decisions were taken at meetings of the entire company.

So, actresses were vitally important to a company, but more than that, women were engaged in all aspects of the theatrical enterprise.

So, Molière's box office manager was a woman, Madame Prouvaux.

She handled the finance, and other women were employed in important positions.

So, no, women were absolutely central to theatre at the time.

No, noel Peacock.

In one sense,

women are not as prominent as, in, for instance, the plays by Macine.

Seven out of Racine's plays have women as a titular figure, whereas Molier only has, I think, three women as titular heroines

as such.

But he has mainly women generically, they call Les Fammes, the school of wives, or the learned ladies, you know, generically rather than as individuals.

Thank you.

Jean, Jean-Clark, theatre in Paris

wasn't for the faint-hearted, was it?

Not really, no.

What kind of scrutiny did he undergo?

I think it's not so much the level of scrutiny, I think it's the degree of competition that makes it particularly challenging.

Because there were, as I mentioned previously, there were very few companies in Paris at the time.

There were never more than three or four theatres, five later in the century.

So they were competing with each other, and also because there wasn't this large popular audience, it was a fairly restricted audience as well.

So they were challenging each other and fighting with each other.

A good example of that, we talked about Molière having been sent by the king to the Petit Bourbon, which he shared with the Italian troop led by Scaramouche.

And a couple of years later, both troops were performing performing on alternate days perfectly happily, and somebody turned up to demolish the theatre without the actors having been told.

They were about to build the Louvre colonnade.

So Molière and the Italians couldn't actually continue performing because they didn't have a theatre to go to.

And so they were told that they would have to go to the Palais Royale, another theatre in a royal palace, as it happened.

That was totally dilapidated.

I mean, the ceiling had fallen in and so it needed a great deal of work.

While they were waiting for the Palais Royale to be refurbished they could only survive by giving private performances in the homes of aristocracy.

And while they were doing that, they were vulnerable because the other troops were trying to poach his actors.

Because

actors were free to move from one company to another at Easter of each year.

But they all said that they loved Molière so much because he had such qualities, such great personal qualities, that they would rather stay with him no matter how precarious the situation appeared to be.

And also, it could get quite nasty at times.

So, I mean, Molière wasn't above getting involved himself.

He we talked about tragic acting style in his play, L'Ampromptu de Versailles.

He actually parodies, he does skits of the actors from the Hotel de Bourgogne Company.

And it was only a few weeks after that.

Molière had just got married, and there was a degree of scandal about his marriage.

And one of the Hotel de Bourgogne actors actually wrote to the king and said that Molière had married Armand Béjard, who they said was the daughter of Madeleine Béjard, who had been the woman that he'd first followed to go on the stage, which was probably true.

But the king really wasn't bothered.

I mean, the thing is that people could say what they liked about Molière.

He had royal support.

And the king was actually godfather to Molière's first child with Armand Béjard.

So it shows exactly how unconcerned he was about all the scandal and about the rumour machine that was going on.

Joe Harris,

his plays are full of mockery and ridicule, rather dangerous weapons at the time.

Can you tell us a bit about that and give us one or two examples?

Yes, I think it's worth remembering to start with.

He insists, at least in what he says about the theatre, which isn't very much, that the two things about the sort of parameters of satire.

First of all, decent satire, the type that he practices, should not satirise individual people.

It should satirise types of people, characteristics, personality types and so forth.

Now, that hasn't stopped people now and back in his day from saying, ah, no, I think Alceste in Le Mise Entrope was based on Monsieur de Montausier, who was the tutor to the Dauphin, or these doctors in La Mour Médicines were based on particular doctors, and it's possible to make those connections.

But his ideal was that satire should be more general.

It shouldn't be making fun of individual people, because that could be dangerous, but rather

it should be making fun of particular types of person.

But also, and Noel picked up on this point a little bit with Les Pressures Rédicule.

He's making fun of pressure cité, this ideal of affected or refined behaviour.

He insists he's not making fun of true pressieurs, but just people who can't incarnate it properly.

And the same logic can be applied to a lot of his other characters.

He has lots of ridiculous father figures in his plays.

He has lots of affected society fops and court types known as the petit marquis or marquis ridicule.

But he's not suggesting that all of the aristocracy or all fathers are ridiculous.

Rather, he's making fun of people for not embodying those ideals properly.

So in a sense, his comedy is actually on one level quite conservative.

He doesn't seek to challenge the system as a whole, but rather makes fun of people who can't quite live up to the expectations of the position within their society.

Thank you.

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No, Noel Peacock, I think it's a good time to talk about the unities.

How important were they to his work and what did they mean at that time?

Well, I think the unities were very important in tragedy.

The unities, unities, the three unities, unity of place, unity of time, everything had to happen in 24 hours, and unity of action, which really meant unification of plot.

But in comedy, it was less important because you don't have the same linearity of structure.

For instance, the ending of comedy is something which you wouldn't see in tragedy, with people appearing who haven't been mentioned or hardly mentioned.

In Les Corps des Fammes, for instance, Horas, one of the young lovers, says in Act 1, Scene 4, I'm looking for my parents who they're going to come back from the Americas.

And of course, they appear in the end to resolve what the lovers couldn't do, prearranged marriage, which happened to coincide with the lovers' wishes.

But that would not happen in tragedy.

In the Mise-Enthropes, you would find it probably respects the unities more than any, in a sense, as a coherence, a linearity that the ending is resolved.

through the means of the characters.

I'm sorry, if I may add in, I think one thing that Molier did which was quite innovative is that he shifted the location of his plays as well.

To start with, his comedies tend to be set in an open public place, like a crossroads, which had been the traditional location for the comedies by Corneille, for example, in the 1630s.

Whereas the unity of place is far more plausibly and better kept, I think, by a movement indoors, which is what happens within most of Molier's later plays, which are sort of set more within a family unit.

You don't have those random chance meetings of people that you would in other plays.

And so it allows the plot to be concentrated more around the problems of a family, and often a family dominated by some patriarch, some obsessive patriarchal figure.

But when spectacle comes to be more of a thing and he's moving more into court theatre and spectacle theatre, then obviously you need multiple locations because most of your spectacle is going to come from the decor.

And so Donjoin, which is what, 1665?

I can never remember the dates.

Donjoin has six different decor,

so so, and it's kind of different locations around the same town.

So, I think the thing about Molière is that he can allow himself a certain degree of freedom, which obviously a tragic playwright isn't going to be, and he's very much more driven by what he wants to say.

So, in Le Misentrop, then it's going to be a tight, enclosed space because they're battling over a territory and battling over a woman.

Whereas in Donjois, he's trying to escape his fate and so he has to move from place to place and the fate is tracking him down.

There are so many plays and he wrote over 30 but can we discuss one?

Let's let's look at Tartuf.

Basics, what's the play about?

It's about a foolish man who has invited a director de concience into his house, a kind of spiritual advisor or guru, which is good Catholic practice of the time.

You know Saint-François de Salle had actually advocated the use of director de concience.

So this man has come as a cuckoo in the nest to live with August and his family, and the family all hate him, and August is absolutely blind and only thi thinks that Tartuffe is absolutely wonderful, to the extent that when his son well, first of all, he says that he's going to marry Tartuffe to his daughter, whereas Tartuffe actually prefers Augon's wife.

So he's fallen in love with Auguste's wife Elimire and tries to seduce her.

When his son says what's going on, Augon disinherits him in favour of Tartuffe.

And so at the end of the play, the family are about to be disinherited.

Oh, Elmire is probably one of the...

Tartuffe has two of the strongest female characters in the whole of Molière.

It has a strong female servant who tries to defend the interests of the daughter, and it has a very very

sophisticated elegant intelligent woman in the person of Elmir who proves to her husband that Tartuffe is a fraud and she does it by hiding her husband under the table in and seducing or leading Tartuffe on so that she can demonstrate to her husband that he wants to seduce her.

It's probably the most famous scene in the whole of French theatre.

Joe, why was Tartu abandoned?

Well, for a bit of context, it's worth remembering that the theatre as an institution had been condemned by the church for a long time.

So, officially, at least, the church had been against the theatre.

As we mentioned earlier, we were talking about excommunication.

Because the theatre was so popular, there had developed a sort of uneasy truce between the church and the stage.

What that meant in practice is that comedies, in particular, would avoid dealing with anything remotely religious.

Even words like God in the singular were forbidden.

The characters would say heaven or gods in the plural.

Weddings, a key theme

within comedies, but people would always talk about them in a secular way, talking about the notary rather than about a priest coming to administer them.

So they remained in a very secular space.

And as long as theatre remained within that space, everything was more or less fine.

The problem is, because Mullier was dealing with a hot topic in terms of religion and religious imposture, it got the church involved very early on.

In 1664, an early version of Tartieuf was performed.

We don't have this early version, it's been lost, although some people have tried to reconstruct it fairly plausibly.

It was a three-act play originally.

And it was performed before the king.

He seemed to have enjoyed it, but his own confessor, who was the Archbishop of Paris, put him under great pressure to have the play banned.

And this Archbishop of Paris, Péré Fix, his name was, threatened anybody caught performing, reading or watching the play with excommunication.

So Mullière...

And did he succeed in his banning?

Well, he did to start with.

Yes, he didn't stop Mullière from wanting the play to be performed, and Mollière spent a long time rewriting it.

And in 1667, he overhauled the play.

I think by this point into a five-act play, he changed Tartuffe from being what originally seems to have been some man of the cloth, some clerical figure, into being this lay figure, this director de concience that Jan was just talking about, in order to show that this character was not a hypocrite, that was the original subtitle of the play, as in someone who belongs to the church but doesn't really follow its rules, but to being an imposter, as in someone from outside the church who is using the mantle, the guise of piety.

And yet that version was also banned as well.

Noel, Moliat keeps putting his head above the parapet and almost inviting to be shot at.

How did he protect himself?

He obviously had a difficult time in trying to get his Tartuffe back.

But at the same time, he had such a vast repertoire that he kept going.

He was very pragmatic about it, and he continued to put on performances.

And he wrote what is generally regarded as a masterpiece, Donjo, which revived some of the controversy.

How did it do that?

Well, the controversy, because, again, they thought religion was being attacked.

The theme of Donjoin, the the adventurer, the well, the donjoin, who was the f a free thinker, our excellence, who was challenging everybody, including the divine.

And so he got he was he was accused of being an atheist for writing that play.

What critics I don't think perceived that his Donjoin, he doesn't succeed in anything that he does.

He tries to seduce the peasants, he doesn't get he compares himself to Alexander the Great, the arch archetypal womanizer, but he doesn't perform as such.

And even in his profession of faith, where he tries to get the poor man to swear, the poor man doesn't.

He keeps to his faith and Dongjean just gives him the money, he says, for the love of humanity.

And in the end, he is worsted in his challenge with the statue as a representative of the divine.

Well, Mollier is saying, theatre conquers everything.

The theatre intervenes.

The artifice of theatre.

But Mullier did suffer from that, and the play was taken off after 15 performances.

But he kept going, and he wrote probably his masterpiece, Lemise on Top, while he was still suffering all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I think it's your question, Melvin, was how did he protect himself?

And to a certain extent, he didn't have to because he had always had the king on his side.

And so, again,

when the Tartuffe was banned, I mean, it was very clearly stated that it was banned, or the king did it because he was such a pious person, he felt obliged to do it, and it was against his own interests because, personally, he would have liked to see the play.

And so, what Molière did was because the king wanted to see Molière, Molière basically went on strike, and that was how he eventually got Tartuf put on because he just stopped performing.

He, when it was finally banned, the imposteur version was banned, Molière just shut his theatre down for seven weeks and didn't perform.

And then he even

performed plays by other authors.

By this time, Molière was really only performing in his own plays.

And so his company, when it came back on, performed plays by other people that Molière didn't have a role in.

And Molière was the big attraction.

And so, effectively, he put pressure on the king to lift the ban because Molière was so vital to performances at court.

Molière even sent his troupe to court, to Versailles, I I think, and they didn't give a Molière play.

It was absolutely unheard of.

Noel, do you want to comment on that?

Molier did plead with the king, and particularly in 1667, these really plasse and lettres, these things he wrote to the king about.

But the king was also, he was not immune from attack from the church himself.

And I think the king was caught between the two.

And I think that was, he had a very difficult, because the king at the time was, I think he was following a more sort of liberal religious regime.

Later he became much more austere.

And I think the time was right, really, in 1669 for it to reappear.

And the public were wanting it.

And obviously, it was a huge sell-out.

Joe, did Molier think it was enough to be right?

He's often regarded as the advocate of reason and common sense, but one of the things that comes across so much in his plays is that simply being in the right isn't enough.

You can't talk reason into someone who is irrational.

Of course, if you could, then there wouldn't be any plays, because the person who is in charge of voicing and articulating a more sensible perspective on things would be able to talk sense into the ridiculous character from the start.

So one of the themes that crops up throughout Mollière's play is his characters are dominated, lots of them, by a particular obsession, whether it is misanthropy or miserliness or an obsession with learning or whatever.

And what Mollière often suggests within his plays is that you have to learn how to negotiate these people.

The people, the happy ending, is brought about either through pure chance, something happens from the outside, like a Deus Ex Machina sort of conclusion, people turning up from the Americas and revealing that they've already arranged for this girl to marry this boy or whatever, or trickery.

So

you can't use reason against people who are dominated by unreason.

Can you tell us, Jan, about Molyau's great adaptability?

He knew that the king liked dancing, for instance.

What did that lead him to?

Yes, well, Molière ballet, court ballet, was the major art form of the court.

And it all really started not

in a performance for the king, a production for Fouquet, the king's minister of finance at Vaux le Vicomte,

because he was Fouquet wanted to put on a huge festivity for the king and they didn't have that many good dancers and so Molière had the idea of interspersing the entree ballet entrances with acts of a play and so it gave so that the in between times the dancers would have time to change their costumes get their breath back and then come back on in as different characters and so that gave rise to a new genre which was called comedie ballet which Molière basically invented.

Joe, are there any of his other works that stand out?

Well, almost everything he wrote was in the field of comedy in a broader sense of the word.

We were talking about the comedie ballet, which are interspersing comedies with ballets.

He didn't tend to move much beyond that.

One of his last plays was a co-written tragedy ballet on Sichet, so Psyche and Cupid, this mythological plot.

That was one.

A lot of his ballets, actually, the Comedy and Tragedie Ballet, were written under intense time pressure.

Le Facheur that we just mentioned he had two weeks to do.

Sichet he ended up not being able to even finish and so he got other playwrights, Quinot and Corneille, to write the rest of the play for him.

He sort of drafted the whole thing.

It's less that he worked within different genres but he was able to blend different types of comedy.

Comédie de l'arté, traditional French farce.

He also innovated one of my favourite plays of his that we've mentioned I think briefly is La Critique de l'École des Femmes.

It's a play, not a play within a play, but a a play about a play.

It's a play which consists of a group of people sitting around in a sort of salon gathering discussing Mullière's latest play, which was apparently very contentious, and discussing its merits and criticising it.

And it was a totally innovative new way for Mullier to express his ideas.

Previously, whenever there had been literary debates about plays, they'd been conducted through letters, publications, pamphlets.

But Mullier decided to fight back against his critics on his own home terrain, which was that of comedy itself.

And that was one of his real innovations, I feel.

And following on from that, I think it's important to mention his other contribution to the Correl de l'École des Femmes, which is L'Impromptue de Versailles, which is a rehearsal play, and again was written under incredible pressure.

That's why he calls it an impromptu, kind of made up on the spot.

And again, Versailles, because he's bragging about his associations with the king.

But it shows Molière stages himself directing a play.

and it's in this play that he parodies the actor so he's really he's showing himself at work discussing and the actors are challenging him and saying why why are you doing this why why have you not put this bit oh do I have to play this same old character again and it's he's kind of he's staging his own process basically can I say one of the one of the consequences of this new genre as well in both of these plays is that it didn't have a fixed ending normally comedies would end with a reunion and a marriage and some sort of happy ending, whereas when it's just people talking or people rehearsing, there isn't an easy solution.

And they even say that within the critique.

One of the characters says, this is a nice little chat we've had.

Maybe we should send it to Molière to write it up.

And someone else says, but we don't have a conclusion here.

And then someone, a servant, turns up saying, food is ready.

And they say, oh, that's a brilliant way to end the play.

And likewise with L'Empromptieux, someone from the king comes in and says, actually, you don't need to do this performance after all.

The pressure's off.

And everyone can be very relieved.

And there's a happy but plausible ending as well.

No, is there any way we can think of him as a free thinker?

Well, it depends what we mean by free thinker.

Cotgrave, when he speaks of free thinking, I think it was in his dictionary 1611, he equates it with dissolute behaviour and debauchery.

Now, there were different types of free thinking.

In the early part of the century,

there were free thinkers like Vanini and Giordani Bruno and Theophil de Viot,

who went back to the Italian Renaissance.

They were naturalists, but their free thinking led to a very unfortunate end because they were burnt at the stake.

Well, not Theofield de Vaux, he was de Vieux, he was exiled.

But they were strangled first for blasphemy, for their irreligious behavior,

for their dissoluteness as well, also for their deviation from what was accepted morality.

But you see, even in 1662, Claude Le Petit was burnt.

This is the time when Mollier was writing L'École des Fammes.

But the free thought went underground, and the freethinkers tended to express their free thought in different ways.

For instance, Sir Andrew de Belgerac, The States of the Moon, in a narrative of another world in which these things happen, not in our world, far be it from that, and others, Lamotte Le Veillé, he put a quantum pluralist perspective in his work, Defending the Virtue of Pagans.

And so Meulier, he was quite friendly with Levier and Charpelle, some of the free thinkers of the time.

So in that kind of definition, I think one would probably say he was a free thinker, though I think as a man of the theatre, I think I would probably agree with the 19th-century poet Theophile Gauthier, who said that his religion was his art.

It was the art of the theatre.

And I think in his plays, I think folks have tried to see if there's an ideology, if one can detect libertinage.

But you see, as we said, in Denjoan, his Libertin

is also sent up.

John, there's a legend about the death of Mollier.

Can you explain it or explode it?

There are various legends surrounding his death.

Okay, well, the main one is that he died on stage, which he didn't.

After the fourth performance of Le Malade Imaginaire, he fell ill.

He had been very perfectly well when the play started, but at the third performance, he was recorded as having been very tired afterwards.

After the fourth performance, he had some kind of a chest infection and was taken home afterwards and ruptured a vein in coughing, is what actually happened.

The problem was that he sent for, he realised, you know, that the end was near, sent for two priests who refused to come and when one did come it was too late and he'd already died without having had time to renounce his profession and receive the last rites so the following day his wife had to write to the archbishop of paris and ask for permission for him to be buried in hallowed ground which was accorded so he was uh buried at saint joseph but all of the all of the kind of the legends that rose up about him actually having died on stage during the performance of Le Malade Imaginaire, I mean, the Comédie Française still preserves the armchair that he was sitting in for that, or supposedly, for that last performance.

Joe, what are the challenges

or opportunities of performing Molière today?

There are certain elements of Molière's plays that have dated or are no longer appropriate.

For example, some of his original targets like Précio Cité, for example, of Long Past, sometimes some of his attitudes towards women's learning in Les Femme Savant, the learned ladies, now seem, you know, we've moved past them, thankfully.

But a lot of what he makes fun of on a deeper level, once you go beyond the particularities of the individual plays, is something which is far more accessible, far more recognisable to the present day as well, because he is very interested in just the follies of human interaction, I suppose and so it means that people have been able to take his works and adapt them in various different ways.

Now maybe I'm being unfair but from my personal anecdotal experience I think that people in the UK and maybe anywhere outside France have a slight advantage when staging Mullière because Mullière is not caked into our heritage and into our identity and the way that he is in France.

As you were saying at the beginning, French is seen as the language of Mullière.

I think it means that directors and acting and theatre troupes nowadays have a certain degree of playfulness, creativity, and maybe disrespect towards the mullière text that maybe people in France feel a little bit, you know, that they don't necessarily have.

And so, I've seen, for example, various, I've seen three, possibly four Muslim Tartufs, for example, taking the plot of Tartuf, but transplanting it into a contemporary Muslim household setting.

There's been, I know I haven't seen it, but there's an American version I I wish I had seen

that came out about five years ago with Tartuf as an American evangelical MAGA sort of supporter figure showing how easily led people's faith in their God and their country can be misled and appropriated.

So there are things within Molière's plays that will remain timeless that directors are able to sort of seize on and take advantage of, I think.

Noel, coming near the end now.

How would you sum up the broader influence of Moliat?

Well, I think he has been a phenomenal figure in the history of the theatre, in French theatre.

He is still, for instance, the one time I went to Paris and saw a play.

13 different productions were on in Paris.

Now,

I don't think if I went to London, there would be 13 performances of Shakespeare.

However, good, and I do think Shakespeare, because he could do both tragedy and comedy, he might have the edge.

But I think really that what strikes me about his work is that his comedy is a bridge and not a wall.

We're all implicated, and we see ourselves laughing with him at the follies of his lead figure, then realise, wait a minute,

we are capable of the same kind of folly.

And I think as long as there is human vanity and pretentiousness and hypocrisy and gullibility that allows these Tartuffs to to prosper.

I think Montlier's comedy will still have audiences and I'm sure we will still queue up to see them.

Well thank you all very much.

Thanks to Jan Clark, Lil Peacock and Joe Harris.

Next week, How Korea Shook Off Colonial Powers at the End of the 19th Century to Emerge as a Nation.

That's the Korean Empire.

Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What did you not say that you wish you'd had time to say?

Start with you, Noel.

Probably Mollier's influence on restoration comedy.

That, as you know, the theatres were closed from 1642 to 1660 in England, different for different reasons, mainly because they were vehicles of propaganda, a political decision there.

But

I think that he had an immediate impact.

He offered ready-made plots for people to translate because obviously there'd been 18 years when dramatists weren't able to get anything on stage.

And he made, for instance, his Tartuffe and how it represented the evolution of thinking at the time.

For instance, Tartuffe, the 1670 version of Tartuff, the French Puritan, Matthew Medbourne, it was obviously reflecting the Restoration, but in 1689, another Tartuffe by John Crown, it reflected the change that William and Mary had brought in.

So the attack was on Catholicism, whereas the previous attack was on Puritanism.

So I think it's a real window on even the history of that period in England and very well worth taking an interest in pursuing and looking at how Molière charts, unwittingly, beyond the grave, he charts the story of the UK during that period.

I'm conscious of the fact that we didn't necessarily wrap up Tartuf quite as fully as we could have done, because I think one of the interesting things is the fact that the last act of the play is actually thanks to the king for having allowed him to perform it.

So the family are about to be ejected from the house, Tartuf appears to be triumphant, and a court official turns up and says, The king knows everything, the king knows who is good and who is evil, and so Tartouf gets hoisted off to prison and the family are left in possession of their home.

And I think that's quite interesting, the fact that it's like a rex ex machina, when everything appears to be wrong, the king can actually sort it all out.

And I think that's, given what we were saying about the Mollier's relationship with the king, I think that's really quite significant.

Although, can I just add on to that there?

I think there's also a more cynical way of reading that, which is is that the king could have stopped Tartu ages before, and he didn't.

He is stage-managing everything, and it turns out that he has put this family through this terrible situation.

Yep,

that is a good point.

One thing that we didn't talk about much was one thing that I find fascinating and frustrating about Molio is he's very hard to pin down to a particular position.

He's very good at making fun of one perspective, but that doesn't mean he's therefore embracing the opposite.

So, with Les Femme-Savant, the learned ladies, he's clearly on one level misogynistically mocking women's aspirations to intellectual enlightenment and education.

But that doesn't mean that he is therefore in favour of the more traditional conservative perspective.

In fact, the father figure in that play, Chrisal, is a hen-pecked husband.

He's weak, he's pathetic, and he has these fantasies of being the patriarchal lawgiver in his family.

And he crumbles every time his wife turns up on stage.

And so just because Molier is making fun of one thing, it doesn't mean that he's therefore advocating the opposite.

The other thing that we didn't talk about is his other, well, we hardly mentioned his other classic masterpiece, Le Misentrope, there as well.

Alceste is a misanthrope.

He is critical of all of society and he has very valid points, but he is also mocked himself.

He stands out against society and he is the butt of all of the humour.

And again, it's impossible to fully laugh at him because he welcomes that.

In fact, he explicitly says that he likes being laughed at.

It's a wonderfully complicated play.

Maybe that's one for another session, actually.

I'll have to draw it to a close there, I think.

Following on from that, I think it's also interesting the way that he misdirects the audience.

And so he has the targets of his satire, but the most obvious target is somebody who is not going to be present.

So he's evading the worst of the criticism.

So, for example, if you take a play like Georges Dondin,

which is one of the Comédie ballets, but the main plot of Georges Dondin is about a rich peasant who marries the daughter of members of the country aristocracy.

Well this was first performed at court and then was performed in town so the only people who you could pretty much guarantee would not be present in the audience are rich peasants and country aristocracy.

So people can kind of make the applications.

It represents a very, very unhappy marriage.

and there's a huge plea from angélique saying i didn't ask to be married to him i you know i don't have to do what he says this is this is absolutely dreadful he married my parents and not me but people can take the message without actually feeling personally targeted and he does that over and over again you know le bourgeois gentium again is somebody a bourgeois who has non-bourgeois aspirations so the aristocrats in the audience can find find him funny, but the bourgeois in the audience can find him funny as well for having such ludicrous

ideas.

I think also that one can look at the dual attitude towards all his characters.

If you look at Alcest, there's so much.

In the days of fake news and all that, Alcest represents a certain morality many would espouse.

But it's the extent to which he takes his truth-telling.

And the the reason for it is that I want to be distinguished.

And similarly, with Célimaine, who is the female lead, she's an ironist.

And when asking students which Molière character they would like to have tea with or a beer or whatever, they say Célimaine, because she's an ironist, she's very witty, she would entertain them, he would give portraits of everyone who's not there, not people who are there.

But at the same time, Molière leaves her at the end.

And she,

almost like Shylock, she disappears.

She has to leave the salon culture, the salon which she has set up and which she loves.

And it's quite interesting, in 2009 in London, where Cleara Knightley played Selimen, they brought her back on the stage for before the curtain call as a kind of tragic victim.

And so our attitude again has changed to some of these, but at least it is showing us the duality of characterization, which is part of the greatness of man's misery, man's greatness, and seen in these characters.

So at a deeply philosophical level, one could look at that.

Not sure that Meulier wrote them thinking of this philosophy in mind, but that's what comes out.

And it accords with some of the great thought in the 17th century.

Yes.

And do you think that he will continue to be as popular as he was when you found 13 productions on at the same time?

It could be even more so.

I think it depends also on the kind of production.

Obviously, sometimes some of the productions get star actors like, for instance, Kiera Knightley or sort of Elaine Page.

She performs Serie Men.

So I think that

I think he will continue to be because

these are great themes.

And as I say, as long as we're still self-preoccupied, which to varying degrees we can be, despite all our attempts to correct it, I think

we will continue to like it.

Thank you all very much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

You need to rush off.

There might be a mighty cup of tea.

Does anybody want tea or coffee?

Melvin?

Tea?

No, I'm fine with the water, thank you.

But people might want to teach you.

Do you have a cup of coffee, please?

Actually, a coffee would be.

Making tea would be lovely.

Coffee would be nice to you.

Nothing to you, Melvin.

Is that all right?

One?

Nothing to you?

No.

Okay, thank you, Bera.

Thank you.

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