MOLIèRE (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin; 1622–1673)

MOLIèRE (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin; 1622–1673), French playwright, actor, and troupe director. Born into a successful merchant family, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin received an education from the Jesuits and was studying law when, at the age of twenty-one, he renounced his career to join a troupe of itinerant actors. In 1643 he signed a contract with the actress Madeleine Béjart and other members of her family to establish a troupe which they called the "Illustrious Theater," but they were soon unable to pay their bills and Poquelin, who had assumed the stage name Molière, was jailed for debt in 1645. Once released, he and his troupe departed to tour the provinces. From 1646 to 1658 they staged plays throughout the French countryside, with Molière gradually assuming a role as the troupe's leader, principal actor, and creator of scenarios for the farces that the group performed along with their centerpiece tragedies. In 1653 the prince de Conti, royal governor of Languedoc, engaged the actors as his personal troupe, granting them status and financial stability until Conti's abrupt "conversion" to a life of religious austerity led him to withdraw his patronage. In 1658 the Illustrious Theater returned to Paris and were granted another opportunity to please the more difficult audiences of city and court, where they played first at the Louvre palace. The king's brother Philip, duke of Orleans, became their sponsor.

Beginning in 1659, Molière focused on performing his own plays, though he professed ambivalence about his new status of published author in the preface to his play Les précieuses ridicules (1660; The affected young ladies). His attention to performance and staging and to the improvisational traditions of the commedia dell'arte remained paramount in his comedies, even as he developed an increasingly sophisticated vision of the comic genre. His greatest achievement as an author was to have invented a "comedy of character" that introduced psychological depth to stock comic situations, in the process drawing on traditions from popular farce and more serious drama. Beginning with L'école des femmes (1662; The school for wives), he wrote fiveact comedies in verse, as well as comédies-ballets combining music, dance, and poetry with the clownish elements of commedia dell'arte. His comic characters often have a single dominant trait or "mask," suggested in many of the titles of his plays, as in L'étourdi (1655, The bungler) and L'avare (1668, The miser). They also portray the social obsessions of Molière's elite audiences, as in his satirical portrait of educated women, Les femmes savantes (1672, The learned ladies) or in his penetrating portrayal of salon society, Le misanthrope (1666).

Having secured the favor of the young King Louis XIV, Molière undertook to fight, from the stage, the attacks on the theater being mounted by radical religious parties of the Catholic reform movement. A first version of his play Tartuffe, portraying a religious hypocrite who deceives his gullible and devout host and attempts to seduce his wife, was staged in 1664. It was immediately banned by the church's censors and attacked in print by Molière's former patron Conti, among others. Molière withdrew the play, but continued to press for its revival, at great personal risk, until a final version, which included a flattering panegyric to the king, was produced under royal protection in 1669. Meanwhile, in 1665, he composed and produced Dom Juan, a disquieting and innovative version of the story of the legendary seducer of women, who in Molière's version is a libertine and an atheist, a modern, educated nobleman who has lost his moral bearings.

Throughout the first decade of the reign of Louis XIV, Molière produced plays commissioned for court spectacles, many of them on short notice, in which he also played the principal role. His L'impromptu de Versailles (1663) gives us an amusing inside look at his own troupe at work attempting to rehearse a play that Molière has not had the time to finish. George Dandin (1668) was first performed at Versailles with ballet and musical intermèdes written by the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac was commissioned for a court spectacle at the château de Chambord in 1669. Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The would-be gentleman), a comédie-ballet also produced in collaboration with Lully, premiered at Chambord in 1670.

Molière died 17 February 1673, after collapsing during a production of his play Le malade imaginaire (The imaginary invalid), in which he was playing the title role. Denied burial on sacred ground because of his profession, he was finally interred, secretly and at night, in his parish cemetery by special permission of the king. The manner of his death has become part of his legacy; students of the theater regard him as an iconic figure, devoted to the stage, whose work bridges the gap that so often divides the play as text and performance. The chair in which Molière was seated during his last production is preserved in the halls of the Comédie Française, an institution founded by several of the members of his troupe six years after his death, and today the world's oldest theater company.

MOLIèRE (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin; 1622–1673)

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