French Playwright Moliere & Tartuffe

Among the most significant features of MoliFre's work is that it took place by and large in the milieu of the French court. Born in 1622 into the bourgeois family licensed as upholsterers to the king, MoliFre abandoned a law career to create an acting troupe in 1643, and he spent the next thirty years as an actor-playwright-manager whose company was either under the patronage of Louis XIV or attempting to acquire royal patronage and a licensed performance venue in Paris (Gassner, Reader's 582-3).

MoliFre's first troupe failed financially in Paris after two years, and he was sent to debtor's prison. Upon release, he reconstituted a troupe that performed so successfully in the French provinces between 1645 and 1658 that when it again arrived in Paris to perform for Louis XIV, it was a success. Until his death in 1673, MoliFre continually produced his own and others' plays for both court and public, with variable success (Gassner, Reader's 582-3; Clark 110). Indeed, some productions of his plays caused

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hem but at their bourgeois imitators (Gassner, Masters 292). L'Ecole des femmes was even more controversial for MoliFre. The action involves the lecherous infatuation of an old man, Arnolph, with his young and extraordinarily naive ward Agnes. Produced in 1662, the play provoked a public outcry against MoliFre's taste and his flouting of the rules of dramatic decorum in comedy. The employment of character mask in this play meant that the characters invited ridicule by remaining stubbornly faithful to their given character traits. Arnolph learns nothing and is just as possessive of Agnes at the end of the play as at the beginning; the only difference is that he loses bodily possession of her, and she by the way is just as naive at the end of the play as at the beginning. Yet both Agnes and Arnolph are credible comedic creations because they represent extreme personalities that, as in real life, may not change in relation to their situations. The public found the play scandalous, and critics attacked "his aesthetics, his ethics, and even his private life. The prudes and the learned considered him a morally dangerous writer and a degrading actor" (Gassner, Reader's 583). MoliFre's rejoinder was the play La Critique de l'Ecole des fem
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Approximate Word count = 2767
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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