Molière

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great figures in world literature. The French playwright Molière (1622-1673) began as an actor, aiming to be a tragedian, but he was stronger in comedy, touring with a troupe for 13 years until Louis XIV summoned him to audition at the Louvre and gave him his break. It was in Paris and at Versailles that Molière wrote and performed his best known plays, among them Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope and Le Malade Imaginaire, and in time he was so celebrated that French became known as The Language of Molière. With Noel Peacock Emeritus Marshall Professor in French Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow Jan Clarke Professor of French at Durham University And Joe Harris Professor of Early Modern French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: David Bradby and Andrew Calder (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Molière (Cambridge University Press, 2006) Jan Clarke (ed.), Molière in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022) Georges Forestier, Molière (Gallimard, 2018) Michael Hawcroft, Molière: Reasoning with Fools (Oxford University Press, 2007) John D. Lyons, Women and Irony in Molière’s Comedies of Mariage (Oxford University Press, 2023) Robert McBride and Noel Peacock (eds.), Le Nouveau Moliériste (11 vols., University of Glasgow Presw, 1994- ) Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (University of Chicago Press, 1999) Noel Peacock, Molière sous les feux de la rampe (Hermann, 2012) Julia Prest, Controversy in French Drama: Molière’s Tartuffe and the Struggle for Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Virginia Scott, Molière: A Theatrical Life (Cambridge University Press, 2020) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

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• 2:24Speaker 05

  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 Moliere, 1622 to 1673, is one of the great figures in world literature. He began as an actor and would-be tradision 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 Tatouf, Les Misanthropes and The Malade Imaginaire, so celebrated

• 3:08Speaker 05

  that French became known as the language of Moliere. With me to discuss Moliere are Noel Peacock, emeritus martial 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 Jean Clark, professor of French at Durham University. Jean Clark, how did Moliere start out in life? Not with the same name, I think.

• 3:33Speaker 06

  No, his name is, or was, Jean Poculain, which became Jean-Papiste Poculain. And it wasn't until the 1640s that he took the name Moliere. 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

• 4:13Speaker 06

  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 Orleans, but again, there's no real evidence of that. And he appears to have given up his studies, according to a contemporary commentator,

• 4:58Speaker 06

  because he fell in love with an actress, and Madeleine Bejar, and followed her on to the stage. And he set up his first company with members of the Bejar family in the early 1640s in Paris.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  He set up his own troupe, really. What was it like to be an actor with a troupe of actors in those days?

• 5:19Speaker 06

  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, as soon, 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.

• 6:03Speaker 06

  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.

• 6:22Speaker 05

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

• 6:30Speaker 06

  Well, what happened?

• 6:31Speaker 05

  He took it down for about thirteen years, didn't he?

• 6:32Speaker 06

  He was in the provinces for thirteen years.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  That's a long time.

• 6:35Speaker 06

  It was, but it was 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 Beja 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 that theatre reopened, the Marey Theatre reopened, and so audiences started to fall off. And their first theatre was in Saint-Germain, Saint-Germain-des-Près, which wasn't, it was still Fields at that time. It wasn't, really didn't have the infrastructure to support a theatre.

• 7:18Speaker 06

  So they tried to move to a different location, nearer to the Marey, 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...

• 7:33Speaker 05

  Hold on, that's a quick one. What was he imprisoned for and how long for?

• 7:37Speaker 06

  For debt, 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 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.

• 8:05Speaker 05

  Thank you. Jojo, how did troupe become successful in those days?

• 8:08Speaker 07

  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 ten to twelve actors on 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 at a moment's notice. It's not like now. Is when a play will be advertised for a certain run in advance, but rather the troupe would be keeping an eye on the 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. Another skill.

• 8:53Speaker 05

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

• 8:55Speaker 07

  It does, exactly, yes. They would need to be.

• 8:57Speaker 05

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

• 9:01Speaker 07

  Exactly. And so Moliere's troupe would have known, would have had dozens of plays at their disposal. And I think that really helped Moliere as a playwright as well as an actor, because he knew the texts of a lot of the 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

• 9:46Speaker 07

  to rely on them sitting and paying attention dutifully, however compelling the plot was.

• 9:52Speaker 05

  Could you tell us what he was like as an actor? What was he best at?

• 9:56Speaker 07

  He discovered quite early on that he had a talent for comedy and for 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 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 sixteen sixties 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.

• 10:41Speaker 07

  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. There seemed to have been the case with the straight tragedies.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  Thank you. Neil Peacock, how did Molière 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 Amoureux, The Doctor in Love. And the king loved the play so much, or loved the farce in particular,

• 11:59Speaker 05

  that he was given access to the Petit Bourbon Theatre. And his first major success from his own pen was Les Precières Ridicules, The Affected Ladies, which was a one-act farce. And I think there's considerable influence from the Italians, the commedie 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 precières. 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.

• 12:44Speaker 05

  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 precières were attempting to refine manners.

• 12:57Speaker 07

  And language, but Molière was sending up these girls, his two lovers want the girls to want to marry the girls, but they are totally intoxicated with the reading of novels and how courtship should should be carried out. This play caused quite a stir, but it also.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  Why did it cause such a stir?

• 13:15Speaker 07

  Because they thought Molière was attacking the real thing.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  Who would his audience have been? We're told that Shakespeare's audience went from the groundlings to the aristocracy. Was anything similar happen?

• 13:24Speaker 07

  Well, yes, to some extent, he would have the aristocracy, the different levels of aristocracy, the different levels of boxes, particularly at the maree. But they'd also he'd also have rich merchants who would be very much part of hi- his audience. And he said in Les Colles de Familles, 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 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.

• 14:09Speaker 05

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

• 14:13Speaker 06

  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 Bejar. So theatre companies were essentially democratic and women played an equal part. They were based on a share system and so shares were rewarded 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

• 14:53Speaker 06

  theatrical enterprise. So Molière's box office manager was a woman, Madame Provost. She handled the finance and other women were employed in important positions. So, no, women were absolutely central to to theatre at the time.

• 15:11Speaker 05

  Noel, Noel Piggott.

• 15:12Speaker 07

  In one sense, it's 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 Molière only has, I think, three women.

• 15:26Speaker 05

  Women as titular heroines as such, but he has mainly women generically. They call l'ifam the school of wives or the learned ladies, you know, generically rather than as individuals. Thank you. Jean Clark, theater in Paris wasn't with a pain-hearted, was it?

• 15:45Speaker 06

  Not really, no.

• 15:46Speaker 05

  What kind of scrutiny did he undergo?

• 15:48Speaker 06

  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

• 16:32Speaker 06

  Bourbon, which he shared with the Italian troupe led by Scaramouche. And a couple of years later, they were, 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, as it happened. That was totally dilapidated. I mean, the ceiling had fallen in and so it needed a great deal of work.

• 17:14Speaker 06

  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 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.

• 17:59Speaker 06

  He, we talked about tragic acting style. In his play L'Amour du 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 Armand Bejar, who, they said, was the daughter of Madeleine Bejar, 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.

• 18:44Speaker 06

  I mean, the king, 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 Bejar. So it shows exactly how unconcerned he was about all the scandal and about the, you know, the rumor machine that was going on.

• 19:04Speaker 05

  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?

• 19:14Speaker 07

  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 the two things about the sort of parameters of satire. First of all, decent satire, the type that he practices, should not satire as individual people. It should satire as 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 Al Sestin, Les Misères. Montrop was based on Monsieur de Montesier, who was the tutor to the Dauphin. All 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.

• 19:56Speaker 07

  But rather, it could be, 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 préciosité, this, this ideal of affected or refined behaviour. He, he insists he's not making fun of true précieux, 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.

• 20:40Speaker 07

  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.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  Thank you.

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• 24:17Speaker 05

  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, the 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 Chônes de Fam, for instance, Oras, one of the young lovers, says in Act 1, Scene 4,

• 25:00Speaker 05

  "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, pre-arranged marriage, which happened to be, coincide with the lovers' wishes. But that would not happen in tragedy. In The Mison Top, 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.

• 25:26Speaker 07

  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 Courtenay, 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 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.

• 26:10Speaker 06

  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, sixteen, sixty five? I can never remember the dates. Don Juan has six different decor. 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 Mis en Trop, then it's going to be a tight, enclosed space because they're

• 26:54Speaker 06

  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.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  There are so many plays, I mean, he wrote over thirty. But can we discuss one? Let's, let's look at Tartuffe. Basics, what's the play about?

• 27:13Speaker 06

  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 Sal had actually advocated the use of directeur de conscience. So this man has come as a cuckoo in the nest to live with Orgon and his family. And the family all hate him and Orgon 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

• 27:54Speaker 06

  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 disinherits him in favour of Tartuffe. And so at the end of the play, the family are about to be disinher-- 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 El Mire,

• 28:37Speaker 06

  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.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  Joe, why was Tartuffe banned then?

• 29:01Speaker 07

  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, they 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. Wedding's 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.

• 29:46Speaker 07

  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 Molière 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, Perrie fix his name was,

• 30:28Speaker 07

  threatened anybody caught performing, reading or watching the play with excommunication.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  And did he succeed in his banning?

• 30:37Speaker 07

  Well, he did, to start with, yes, he didn't stop Molière from wanting the play to be performed, and Molière 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 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 impostor, 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.

• 31:21Speaker 05

  No, Molière keeps putting his head above the parapet, and almost inviting to be shot at. How did he protect himself?

• 31:30Speaker 04

  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, Donjon, which revived some of the controversy with-

• 31:51Speaker 05

  How did he do that?

• 31:53Speaker 04

  Well, the controversy, because, again, they thought religion was being attacked. The theme of Donjon, the adventurer, the- Well, the Donjon, who was the free thinker, our 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 Donjon, 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-

• 32:34Speaker 05

  The poor man doesn't, he keeps to his faith and Donjon 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 the representative of the divine. But what Molière is saying, theatre conquers everything, the theatre intervenes, the artifice of theatre. But Molière did suffer from that and the play was taken off after fifteen performances. So, but he kept going and he wrote probably his masterpiece, Les Mises en Top, while he was still suffering all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

• 33:07Speaker 06

  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, 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 Tartuffe put on because he'd just stopped performing.

• 33:50Speaker 06

  He, when it was finally banned, the ampere 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, 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 think, and they didn't give a Molière play. It was absolutely unheard of.

• 34:33Speaker 05

  Noel, do you want to comment on that? Molière did plead with the king and particularly in 1667, these really Placé et Let, the 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, 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 steer. And I think the time was right, really in sixteen sixty nine for it to reappear. And the the public were wanting it and obviously it was a huge sellout. So did Molière think it was enough to be right?

• 35:16Speaker 07

  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 the ridiculous character from the start. So one of the themes that crops up throughout Molière'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.

• 35:56Speaker 07

  And what Molière 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 just and revealing that they've already arranged for this girl to marry this boy or whatever. Or trickery. So you can't, you can't use reason against people who are dominated by unreason.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  Can you tell us, John, about Molière's great adaptability? He knew that the king liked dancing, for instance. What did that lead him to?

• 36:33Speaker 06

  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 Vollevi-Comte. 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.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  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 Comédie Ballet, which Molière basically invented.

• 37:28Speaker 05

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

• 37:32Speaker 07

  Well, he almost everything he wrote was in the field of comedy in a broader sense of the word. And we were talking about the Comédie 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 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 Fâcheurs, that we just mentioned, he had two weeks to do. Psyche, he ended up not being able to even finish. And so he got other playwrights, Quinault and Cornet, to write the rest of the play for him. He'd 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.

• 38:16Speaker 07

  Comédie de l'Arte, 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 Molière's latest play, which was apparently very contentious, and discussing its merits and criticizing it. And it was a totally innovative new way for Molière to express his ideas. Previously, whenever there had been literary debates about plays, they'd been conducted through letters, publications, pamphlets. But Molière decided to fight back against his critics

• 38:58Speaker 07

  on his own home terrain, which was that of comedy itself. And that was one of his real innovations, I feel.

• 39:03Speaker 06

  Um. Following on from that, I think it's important to to mention the his other contribution to the Courrée de l'École des Femmes, which is l'Ampruntu de Versailles, which is a rehearsal play. And again, was written under incredible pressure. That's why he calls it an ampruntu, like 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?

• 39:45Speaker 06

  And it's, he's kind, he's staging his own process, basically.

• 39:50Speaker 07

  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 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. Um. And likewise with l'Ampruntu, 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.

• 40:32Speaker 05

  No, is there any way we can think of him as a free thinker? Well, it depends what we mean by free thinker. Uh. Cotgrave, when he speaks of free thinking, I think it was in his dictionary sixteen eleven, he he equates it with dissolute behaviour and debauchery. Now, there were different types of free thinking in the early part of the century. Uh. There were free thinkers like Vanini and Giordani Bruno and Théophile de Vieux, uh, who went back to the Italian Renaissance. They were naturalists. But their free thinking led to a

• 41:05Speaker 07

  Very unfortunate end because they were burnt at the stake. Uh, well, not Théophile de Vaux, he was de Vieux, he was exiled. Um, but they they were strangled first for blasphemy, for their irreligious behaviour, for uh, for for their dissoluteness as well, also for their deviation from what was accepted morality. Uh, but you see, even in sixteen sixty-two, Claude Le Petit was burnt. This is the time when Molière was writing Les Colles des Femmes. But their free thought went underground. And the free thinkers tended to express their free thought in different ways.

• 41:44Speaker 07

  For instance, Cyrano de Bergerac, The States of the Moon, he in a narrative of another world in which these things happen, not in our world. Uh, far be it from that. And others, La Motte Léveille, he put a kind of pluralist perspective in his his work, defending the virtue of pagans. And so Molière, he was quite friendly with La Motte Léveille and Chapelle, some of the free thinkers of the time. So in that kind of definition, I think one would probably say he he was a free thinker, though I think as a man of the theatre. I think I would probably agree with the nineteenth century poet Théophile Gautier. Who said that his his religion was his art, it was the art of the theatre.

• 42:25Speaker 07

  And I think in his plays, I think folk have tried to see if there's a an ideology, if one can detect libertinage. But you see, as we said, in Donjon, his liberté is also sent up.

• 42:40Speaker 05

  Jan, there's a legend about the death of Molière. Can you explain it or explode it?

• 42:46Speaker 06

  There are various legends surrounding his death. Okay, well, the main one is that he died on stage, which he didn't. Uh, after the fourth performance of Le Malade Imaginaire, he fell ill. Uh, 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, uh, he had some kind of a chest infection and was taken. And home afterwards and ruptured a vein in coughing is the 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.

• 43:30Speaker 06

  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 buried at Saint Joseph. But all of the all of the kind of the legends that rose up about him actually having died onstage during the performance of Le Malade Imaginaire, I mean, the Comédie Française still preserves the armchair that he was sitting in for that supposedly for that last performance.

• 44:16Speaker 05

  Joe, what are the challenges of our opportunities of performing Molière today?

• 44:22Speaker 07

  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 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.

• 45:05Speaker 07

  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 troupes 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,

• 45:47Speaker 07

  possibly four Muslim Tartufts, for example, looking, taking the plot of Tartufts 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 Tartufts as an American evangelical MAGA sort of supporter figure, showing how easily led people's faith in their, 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 and take advantage of, I think.

• 46:25Speaker 05

  Noel, coming near the end now, how would you sum up the broader influence of 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, 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

• 47:05Speaker 05

  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...

• 47:17Speaker 07

  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 Tartufts to prosper, I think Moliere's comedy will still have audiences and I'm sure we will still queue up to see them.

• 47:37Speaker 05

  Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Jan Clark, Noel 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.

• 48:05Speaker 07

  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 Tartuf, and how it represented the evolution of thinking at the time.

• 48:45Speaker 07

  For instance, Tartuf, the 1670 version of Tartuf, the French Puritan, Matthew Medborn, it was obviously reflecting the Restoration. But in 1689, another Tartuf 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 weird 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.

• 49:28Speaker 06

  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 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

• 50:11Speaker 06

  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 the Molière's relationship with the king, I think that's really quite significant.

• 50:25Speaker 07

  Although, can I just add on to that, though? 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.

• 50:39Speaker 06

  Yep, that is a good point.

• 50:41Speaker 07

  One thing that we didn't talk about much was, one thing that I find fascinating and frustrating about Molière 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 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, Grisal, 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

• 51:26Speaker 07

  Molière's 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 Misantrop.

• 51:37Speaker 07

  As well, Al Cest 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, another session, actually. I'll have to, I'll draw it to a close there, I think.

• 52:05Speaker 06

  Um, I, following on from that, I think it's also interesting the way that he's, he misdirects the audience. And so he, 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 Dondval, which is one of the Comédie Ballet. But the main plot of Georges Dondval 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

• 52:48Speaker 06

  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 Angelique 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 Gentil, 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

• 53:33Speaker 06

  funny as well for, for having such ludicrous, you know, ideas. I think also that one can look at the dual attitude towards all his characters.

• 53:44Speaker 07

  If you look at Al Sest, there's so much, if we know, in the days of fake news and all that. Al Sest represents a certain morality 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 Selimane, who is the female lead. She's an ironist and when asking students which Malia character they would like to have tea with or beer or whatever, they say Selimane. Because she's 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, Malia leaves her at the end.

• 54:26Speaker 07

  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 two thousand nine in London where Keira Knightley played Selimane. 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 these characters, so at a deeply philosophical level, one could look at that. Not sure that Malia wrote them thinking of this philosophy in mind, but that's what comes out.

• 55:11Speaker 07

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

• 55:15Speaker 05

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

• 55:24Speaker 07

  Well, 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. Perform said amen. So I think that I think it will continue to be because these are these are great themes. And as I say, as long as we're still self preoccupied, which it to varying degrees, we can be despite all our attempts to correct it. I think, you know, we will continue to like it.

• 55:58Speaker 05

  Thank you all very much. Thank you.

• 56:00Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 56:01Speaker 05

  You need to rush off. There might be a mighty cup of tea.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Does anybody want tea or coffee? Melvin, tea?

• 56:06Speaker 05

  No, I'm fine with water, thank you. But people might want to.

• 56:08Speaker 06

  I'd love a coffee, please.

• 56:09Speaker 07

  Okay, yes, actually, a coffee.

• 56:11Speaker 05

  Making tea would be lovely. A coffee would be nice, please. Yeah, thanks.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  Tea, coffee, one tea, nothing to you, Melvin. Is that right?

• 56:15Speaker 05

  One?

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Nothing to you?

• 56:16Speaker 05

  No.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Okay, thank you very much. In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production. Screenshot. It gave me as an actress just what I was craving. They were both very mature as filmmakers. This was a film that spoke to a red state, blue state divide. I'm Mark Kermode.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  And I'm Melanie Jones, and we'll direct you through the intertwined worlds of film, television and streaming.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  In the new series, we'll look at Studio Ghibli and summer blockbusters and start with cinema's fascination with doppelgangers.

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  Helped by the one and only Richard Iawadi. I'd quite like to meet more Norwegian Nigerians. In fact, if there's a meeting,

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  I'll happily attend. Screenshot from BBC Radio 4.

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  Listen now on BBC Sounds.

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