Huhu: New encyclopedia entry (batch upload)

2026-10-06T09:28:54Z

New encyclopedia entry (batch upload)

New page

'''Molière''' a French playwright and actor (1622-1673), born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who is regarded as the greatest comic dramatist of the French classical age and one of the founders of modern comedy. His plays, including Tartuffe, The Misanthrope and The Miser, satirise hypocrisy, pretension and vice with a wit and a psychological depth that have kept them central to the world stage.

== Early Life and the Illustre Théâtre ==
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris in January 1622, the son of a prosperous upholsterer who held the post of furnisher to the royal household. He was educated at the Collège de Clermont, a Jesuit school, and may have studied law before abandoning a secure career for the theatre. His mother died when he was young, and the household in which he grew up gave him an intimate knowledge of the Parisian bourgeoisie.

In 1643 he joined with friends to found a theatrical company, the Illustre Théâtre, and took the stage name Molière, which he was to bear for the rest of his life. The venture was a failure, burdened with debt, and Molière was briefly imprisoned for it. In 1645 he left Paris with a troupe that toured the provinces for more than a decade, performing tragedy and farce in towns and great houses across France.

The years of touring gave him a hard apprenticeship in every branch of the actor's craft, and it was during this period that he began to write. His early comedies, some of them closely modelled on Italian farce, taught him the stagecraft that would later inform his masterpieces. The provinces made him an actor-manager before they made him an author.

== Return to Paris and Royal Favour ==
Molière returned to Paris in 1658 and performed before Louis XIV at the Louvre, where his company was granted the use of the Petit-Bourbon theatre and later the Palais-Royal. The king's patronage protected him from his enemies, for the devout and the powerful were often the targets of his satire. The arrangement also gave him the security to write and stage the plays that made his reputation.

His first great success in Paris came in 1659 with Les Précieuses ridicules, a one-act satire of affected ladies and their pretentious admirers that ridiculed the fashionable culture of the salons. It established the tone of social criticism that would mark his mature work, and it made him the talk of the capital. From this point he produced a stream of comedies, many of them performed at the court.

He worked constantly and voraciously, sometimes writing, staging and acting in the same play, and his company became the most admired in France. In 1662 he married Armande Béjart, a member of the family that had shared his provincial wanderings, and the union attracted scandal and malicious gossip. He continued to appear on stage until the end of his life.

== The Great Comedies ==
The great comedies that followed range from farce to the comedy of character and manners. L'École des femmes (The School for Wives, 1662) provoked a controversy over its apparent mockery of marriage and religion. Tartuffe (1664) was suppressed by the church party and only allowed in a revised form years later. Don Juan (1665) was withdrawn after a short run.

Le Misanthrope (1666) is often thought his masterpiece, a subtle study of a man who insists on honesty at the cost of his own happiness and of the society around him. L'Avare (The Miser, 1668) gave the world the unforgettable figure of Harpagon, whose love of gold deforms his family life. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) mocks the grocer who aspires to be a gentleman, and Les Femmes savantes (1672) ridicules false learning.

Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid, 1673) was written towards the end of his life and mocked the doctors whose remedies he distrusted. It was in the fourth performance of this play, while playing the role of the hypochondriac Argan, that Molière collapsed and died on 17 February 1673. His death on stage, in a comedy about imaginary illness, has become a legend of the theatre.

== Themes and Comic Art ==
Molière's comedy rests on the observation of character rather than on the mechanics of intrigue, though his plots are skillfully managed. His great creations are types driven by a single ruling passion, a miserliness or a hypocrisy or an affectation, that blinds them to the world and makes them ridiculous. Yet the types are individualised, and the laughter they provoke is often mixed with a recognition of shared weakness.

His satire is aimed not only at individuals but at institutions and pretences. He attacks false devotion in Tartuffe, quackery in the medical comedies, and the corruption of fashion in the comedies of manners. Because the objects of his ridicule were often powerful, he had to defend his art, and in such plays as La Critique de l'École des femmes he set out a defence of comedy itself as a mirror held up to society.

He believed that the purpose of comedy is to correct men while amusing them, and that the true test of wholesome comedy is its reception by people of sense. This blend of laughter and moral criticism, of farce and thought, is what distinguishes him from the mere entertainers of his age and makes his plays the model for later comic writers.

== Influence and Legacy ==
Molière fixed the form and the standing of the comedy of manners, and his influence runs through the whole subsequent history of the theatre. English Restoration comedy and the comic drama of the eighteenth century drew on his example, and writers as different as Goldsmith and Sheridan learned from him. The conventions he established, of the servant who sees through the master and the young lovers who outwit the old, became the stock in trade of the stage.

His plays have never left the repertory. The Misanthrope and the other great comedies are performed continuously in France and abroad, and the Comédie-Française, which descends from his company, is popularly known as the House of Molière. Lines from his plays have passed into the language, and the phrase a Tartuffian has become a byword for the religious hypocrite.

He is remembered as the supreme comic dramatist of the classical French theatre, the equal of his contemporaries Corneille and Racine in a different register. Where they raised tragedy to its highest pitch, he brought comedy to a seriousness that the ancients had scarcely imagined possible. In doing so he gave the modern world a portrait of society that continues to be recognised.

== See also ==
* French classical tragedy
* Comedy of manners
* Louis XIV
* Commedia dell'arte

== References ==

<ref name="r1">Molière, The Misanthrope and Other Plays, translated by John Wood, Penguin Books, 2000.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Virginia Scott, Molière: A Theatrical Life, Cambridge University Press, 2000.</ref>
<ref name="r3">Georges Forestier, Molière, Gallimard, 2018.</ref>
<ref name="r4">W. D. Howarth, Molière: A Playwright and His Audience, Cambridge University Press, 1982.</ref>

<references />

[[Category:Drama]]
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:France]]

Molière - Revision history

Huhu: New encyclopedia entry (batch upload)