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This is In Our Time, from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website.
If you scroll down the page for this edition, you'll find a reading list to go with it.
I hope you enjoy the programme.
Hello, the French playwright Molière, 1622 to 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, Les Misanthropes and Les Malades Imaginaires, so celebrated that French became known as the language of Molière.
With me to discuss Molière are Noel Peacock, Emeritus Marshal, 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 Jan Clark, Professor of French at Durham University.
Jan 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.
After college, 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, Madeleine Béjar, 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 set up his own troupe, really.
What was it like to be an actor with a troupe 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 malvues.
But after that, once they 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, and this was going to create issues at the end of Moliere'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 from a very strange start, set up his own troupe and take it around?
Well, what happened was... He took it on for about 13 years, didn't he?
He was in the provinces for 13 years.
That's 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'Illustre 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 Molière was imprisoned and then they had to... Oh, that's a quick one.
LAUGHTER
What was he in prison for and how long for?
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 in prison and then obviously realised 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 Dufresne, and that's when they left and went off touring in the provinces.
Thank you.
George, how did a troupe become successful in those days?
I think one of the skills that any troupe needed at the time was, above all, a good memory.
Theatre is a very expensive thing to put on when you've got a troupe 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 troupe would be keeping an eye on the box office 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 were trying to get their work out there.
That implies great feats of memory, doesn't it?
It does, exactly, yes.
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 an actor.
Another skill I think which was really important was 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.
Could you tell us what he was like as an actor?
What was he 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 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 Moliere 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 Moliere get to appear before Louis XIV?
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 Corneille Nicomède, which was probably not really a tragedy.
It's a kind of heroic drama.
And a farce, Le Docteur 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 Precious Ridicules, The Affected Ladies, which was a one-act farce.
And I think there's considerable influence from the Italians, the Commedia dell'Arte.
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 pursuers.
And this caused quite a storm really amongst the public, because Moliere was thought to have been attacking those who were having a civilising effect on morals and language.
Because we were talking about a period after the Wars of the Front And a lot of vulgarity had crept into the language and also into behaviour.
And the real precieuses were attempting to refine manners and language.
But Maria was sending up these girls.
These two lovers want to marry the girls, but they are totally intoxicated with reading of novels and how courtship should be carried out.
This play caused quite a stir.
Why did it cause such a stir?
Because they thought Molyneux 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 happen to Molyneux?
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 Cols des Femmes, which was his next big play, he said the biggest challenge for me is to make what he called honnête gens laugh, because these people, some of them, 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.
John, 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 troop, he was actually co-leader with Madeleine Béjar.
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 based 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 Prouveau.
She handled the finance department.
And other women were employed in important positions.
So, no, women were absolutely central to theatre at the time.
Noel, Noel Peacock.
In one sense, women are not as prominent as in, for instance, the plays by Racine.
Seven out of Racine's plays have women as the titular figure, whereas Moliere only has, I think, three women as titular heroines as such.
But he has mainly women generically.
They call les femmes, the school of wives, or the learned ladies.
You know generically, rather than as individuals.
Thank you, Jan.
Jan 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 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 Royal, another theatre in a royal palace.
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 Royal 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 Moliere 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.
We talked about tragic acting style.
In his play L'Impromptu de Versailles he actually parodies, he does skits of the actors from the Hôtel 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 Hôtel de Bourgogne actors actually wrote to the king and said that Molière had married Armande Béjar, who they said was the daughter of Madeleine Béjar, 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 Moliere.
He had royal support.
And the king was actually godfather to Moliere's first child with Armand Béjar.
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 there are two things about the parameters of satire.
First of all, decent satire.
The type that he practices should not satirise individual people necessarily.
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 Misanthrope was based on Monsieur de Montosier, who was the tutor to the dauphin, or these doctors in L'Amour Médecin 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 précieuses ridicules.
He's making fun of précieusité, this ideal of affected or refined behaviour.
He insists he's not making fun of true précieuses, 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 figures, 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.
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Noel, 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, 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 Coles des Femmes, for instance, Horace, 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 lover's wishes.
But that would not happen in tragedy.
In the mise en table 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.
Sorry if I may add in I think one thing that Molière 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 places is far more plausibly and better kept, I think, by a movement indoors, which is what happens within most of Molière'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 Don Juan, which is what, 16, 16, 65?
I can never remember the dates.
Don Juan has six different decor.
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 Misanthrope then, it's going to be a tight, enclosed space, because they're battling over a territory and battling over a woman, whereas in Don Juan 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.
I mean, he wrote over 30.
But can we discuss one?
Let's look at Tartuffe.
Basics, what's the play about?
It's about a foolish man who has invited a directeur de conscience into his house, a kind of spiritual advisor or guru, which is good Catholic practice of the time.
You know, Saint François de Sales had actually advocated the use of directeur de conscience before.
So this man has come as a cuckoo in the nest to live with Organ and his family.
And the family all hate him.
And Organ is absolutely blind and only 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 Orgon's wife.
So he's fallen in love with Orgon's wife, Elmire, and tries to seduce her.
When his son says what's going on, Orgon says, 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 Elmire, who proves to her husband that Tartuffe is a fraud.
And she does it by hiding her husband under the table 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 Tattoo banned then?
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're 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.
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 Moliere 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 Tartuffe 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, Perrifix his name, was threatened anybody caught performing reading or watching the play with excommunication.
Did he succeed in his banning?
Well, he did to start with, yes.
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 directeur de conscience 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, Molière 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... about it, and he continued to put on performances.
And he wrote what is generally regarded as a masterpiece Don Juan, 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 Don Juan the adventurer.
Well, the Don Juan, who was the free thinker par excellence, who was challenging everybody, including the divine.
And so he got.
He was accused of being an atheist for writing that play.
What critics I don't think perceived that his Don Juan, 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 archetypal womanizer, but he doesn't perform as such.
And even in his profession of faith, where he tries to get the the poor man to swear.
The poor man doesn't.
He keeps to his faith, and Don Juan 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.
What Moliere is saying, theatre conquers everything.
The theatre intervenes.
The artifice of theatre.
But Moliere did suffer from that, and the play was taken off after 1500. performances.
But he kept going and he wrote, probably his masterpiece, La Mise en Top, while he was still suffering all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
I think your question, Melvin, was how did he protect himself?
And to a certain extent, he didn't have to because he 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.
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 banned.
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 Tartuffe put on, because he just stopped performing.
When it was finally banned.
The imposter version was banned.
Molière just shut his theatre down for seven weeks and didn't perform.
And then he even...
He performed plays by other authors.
By this time, Moliere was really only performing in his own plays.
And so his company, when it came back on, performed plays by other people that Moliere didn't have a role in.
And Moliere was the big attraction.
And so effectively he put pressure on the king to lift the ban because Moliere was so vital to performances at court.
Moliere even sent his troop to court... to Versailles, I think, and they didn't give a Moliere play.
It was absolutely unheard of.
Noel, do you want to comment on that?
Moliere did plead with the king and particularly in 1667, these really placé and let, 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 stair.
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 sellout.
Joe, did Monet 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 Moliere'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 Moliere often suggests within his plays is that You have to learn how to negotiate these 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 Molière'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 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 entrées, 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 comedy ballet, which Moliere 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 comedy 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 Psyche.
So Psyche and Cupid, this mythological plot.
That was one.
A lot of his ballets actually the comedy and tragedy ballet were written under intense time pressure.
Les Flasheurs that we just mentioned, he had two weeks to do.
Psyché, he ended up not being able to even finish.
And so he got other playwrights, Quinault 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'art, 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 play about a play.
It's a play which consists of a group of people sitting around in a sort of salon gathering discussing Moliere's latest play, which was apparently very contentious, and discussing its merits and criticising it.
And it was a totally innovative new way for Moliere to express his ideas.
Previously, whenever there had been literary debates about plays, they'd been conducted through letters publications, pamphlets that Moliere 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.
Following on from that, I think it's important to mention his other contribution to the Chorale de l'Ecole des Femmes, which is L'Impromptu 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 are you doing this?
Why have you not put this bit?
Oh, do I have to play this same old character again?
And he's staging his own process, basically.
Can I say 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 Moliere 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'Impromptu 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.
Now, is there any way we can think of him as a free thinker?
Well, it depends what we mean by freethinker.
Cotgrave, when he speaks of freethinking I think it was in his dictionary 1611 he equates it with dissolute behaviour and debauchery.
Now, there were different types of freethinking in the early part of the century.
There were freethinkers like Vanini and Giordano Bruno.
And Théophile de Viau, 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 Théophile de Viau.
He was exiled, but they were strangled first for blasphemy, for their irreligious behaviour, for their dissoluteness as well, and 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 Molière was writing L'École des Femmes.
But their free thought went underground.
And the freethinkers tended to express their free thought in different ways.
For instance, Cyrano de Bergerac, 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, Leveillé.
He put a kind of pluralist perspective in his work, Defending the Virtue of Pagans.
And so Mullier, he was quite friendly with Lamotte, Leveillé and Chapelle, 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 Théophile Gautier, 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 Don Juan, his libertin is also sent up.
Jan, there's a legend about the death of Molière.
Can you explain it or explode it?
Yes.
There are various legends surrounding his death.
Let's have the main one.
OK 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 realised 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 saying and asked for permission for him to be buried in hallowed ground, which was accorded, so he was buried at Saint-Joseph.
But all 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 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 Preciosité, for example, of long past, sometimes some of his attitudes towards women's learning.
In Les Femmes Savantes, 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 recognizable 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 Molière, because Molière 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 Molière.
I think it means that directors and acting and theatre troops nowadays have a certain degree of playfulness, creativity and maybe disrespect towards the Molière 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 Tartuffes, for example looking, taking the plot of Tartuffe.
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 wish I had seen set about.
Well, that came out about five years ago with Tartuffe as an American evangelical MAGA character, sort of supportive figure showing how easily led people's faith in their God and their country can be, you know, misled and appropriated.
So there are things within Molière's plays that will remain, you know 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 on Molière?
I think he has been a phenomenal figure in the history of the theatre, in French theatre.
He's 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.
I think Malia'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, Neil 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 Moliere's influence on restoration comedy.
That, as you know, the theatres were closed from 1642 to 1660 in England 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 of thinking at the time.
For instance Tartuffe, the 1670 version of Tartuffe, 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 Moliere charts, unwittingly beyond the grave.
He charts the story of the UK during that period.
What about...
I'm conscious of the fact that we didn't necessarily wrap up Tartuffe 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.
Tartuffe 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 Tartuffe gets horrified, hoisted off to prison, and the family 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, given what we were saying about Moliere'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 that the king could have stopped Tartuffe 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.
Yeah, that is a good point.
One thing that we didn't talk about much was one thing that I find fascinating and frustrating about Moliere 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 Femmes Savantes, 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, Crisal, is...
A henpecked 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 Moliere 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 Misanthrope, there as well.
Alceste is a misanthrope.
He is critical of all of society and he has very valid points, but he has 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 draw it to a close, though, 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 Dandel... which is one of the Comédie Ballet.
But the main plot of Georges Dandin 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 don't have to do what he says.
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 Gentilhomme again is somebody, a bourgeois who has non-bourgeois aspirations.
So the aristocrats in the audience can find him funny, but the bourgeois in the audience can find him funny as well for having such ludicrous ideas.
Yeah.
I think also that one can look at the dual attitude towards all his characters.
If you look at Alceste, there's so much.
In the days of fake news and all that, Alceste represents a certain morality that many would espouse.
But it's the extent to which he takes his truth-telling.
And the reason for it is that I want to be distinguished.
And similarly with Célimène, 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 Célimène, because she's ironist, she's very witty, she would entertain them, she 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 Keira Knightley played Célimène, 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 characterisation 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.
I'm not sure that Moliere 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, Keira Knightley, also Elaine Page.
She performed Say Amen.
So I think that... I think he will continue to be because these are...
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 you know we will continue to like it.
Thank you all very much.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
You needn't rush off.
There might be a mighty cup of tea.
Does anybody want tea or coffee?
Melvin, tea?
No, I'm fine with water, thank you, but people might want tea.
I'd love a coffee, please.
Actually, a coffee would be lovely.
A coffee would be nice, please.
One tea, nothing for you, Melbourne, is that all right?
Nothing for you?
No.
OK, thank you very much.
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