English Adaptations of Plays by Moliere

The purpose of this research is to examine English adaptations of selected plays by Moliere, with a view toward showing diffferences in social context and meaning. The plan of the research will be to position Moliere's The Misanthrope (Mis.), School for Wives, as well as Don Juan, or the Stone Guest as works that illustrate a specific social milieu, and then to show how Anglicizers of Moliere, notably Wycherley in The PlainDealer and The Country Wife and Byron in Don Juan, offer a "take" on Moliere that becomes both a tribute to Moliere and a comment on the society to which they wrote.

Moliere's plays reveal that social satire was his forte. Throughout his work, he derives laughter from the foibles, follies, and pretenses of seventeenthcentury France; in so doing, he exposes many faults of mankind in general. Social masks, deception, hypocrisiesthese are the principal issues that engage Moliere. In his comic situations and characters worthy of them, he exposes human folly with merciless farce. Moliere's comedies are at most an imitation of life; they are anything but a duplication, and after all nothing more need be required of comedy, which by its nature has an unreal quality about it. A completely accurate picture of the whole life is not comedy, and Moliere was a neoclassic comedian, not a realistic tragedian or documentarian.

By and large, Moliere's characters are not duplications of actual people but character types or more exactly archetypes of char

seclusion and imposing a sense of marital obligation (rather than marital joy) on her has negated any possibility for her to overcome her innocencecumignorance. What he fails to reckon with are Horace, who is in this sense symoblic of the outside world, and Agnes's (or the most ordinary human being's) native intelligence and reach for joy. The difference between Agnes and Arnolphe in matters of the heart is not that Arnolphe is a man and Agnes not a woman of the world, but that Agnes knows she is not sophisticated and Arnolphe does not know that he is not sophisticated, either. Agnes's judgment of emotional priorities, based wholly on his prescriptions for her life, sums up Arnolphe's folly: I've heard you preach; your lessons have sunk in: One must be married to avoid the sin. . . . Yes, but to speak quite frankly, entre nous, He suits my taste for this better than you. With you, marriage is tiresome and austere; You always represent it as severe. But he makes it so pleasureful instead He really makes me eager to be wed. . . . Do you think I fool myself and fail to see That I'm as ignorant as I can be? It's time for me to leave the idiot stage" (V.iv) So i