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In Our Time
Molière
00:51:24
The great French playwright and comic actor who flourished at the court of Louis XIV.
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- [00:00]
Melvin Bragg
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- [00:06]
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- [00:39]
Melvin Bragg
You were made to be rechargeable. We were made to package flights, hotels.
- [00:45]
Jan Clarke
And hammocks for less.
- [00:47]
Melvin Bragg
Expedia Made to travel BBC Sounds Music.
- [00:56]
Noel Peacock
Radio Podcasts 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 find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. The French playwright Moliere, 1622-1673, is one of the great figures in world literature. He began as an actor and 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, Le Misantrope and the Malade Imaginaire. So celebrated that French became known as the Language of Moliere. With me to discuss Moliere are Noel Peacock, Emeritus Marshall professor in French Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, Jo Harris, professor of Early Modern French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Jan Clarke, professor of French at Durham University. Jan Clarke, how did Molire start out in life? Not with the same name, I think.
- [02:07]
Jan Clarke
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 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 College de Clermont, which later became better known as the Lyce 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 Orleans. 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 Beija, and followed her onto the stage. And he set up his first company with members of the Baja family in the early 1640s in Paris.
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Noel Peacock
He set up his own troupe. Really, what was it like to be an actor with a troupe of actors in those days?
- [03:53]
Jan Clarke
It was changing in the 1640s. Previously actors had been very poor, thought of, particularly before there were established troops in Paris. So before the 1630s, when they were just kind of bands of travelling players, they were rather kind of Malou Vue. 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 saying. 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.
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Noel Peacock
And how did he probably were from very strange start, set up his own troop and take it around.
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Jan Clarke
Well, what happened was he took it.
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Noel Peacock
Up for about 13 years, didn't he?
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Jan Clarke
He was in the provinces for 13 years, 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 Leslustre Theatre with the Bajard 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 Presles, which wasn't. It was still fields at that time. It wasn't really didn't have the infrastructure to support a theater. 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 Moliere was imprisoned and then they had to.
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Noel Peacock
That's a quick one. What was he imprisoned for and how long before?
- [06:11]
Jan Clarke
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. 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.
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Noel Peacock
Thank you. Giorgio. Has how did a troop become successful in those days?
- [06:42]
Melvin Bragg
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 troop 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 are trying to get their work out there.
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Noel Peacock
Another skill that implies great feats of memory, doesn't it?
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Melvin Bragg
It does, exactly. Yes. They would need.
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Noel Peacock
You have a lot of plays, so if one doesn't work the next night you put another one on.
- [07:34]
Melvin Bragg
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 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, 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 to rely on them, sitting and paying attention dutifully, however compelling the plot was.
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Noel Peacock
Could you tell us what he was like as an actor? What was your best at?
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Melvin Bragg
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 that 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 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 of 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.
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Noel Peacock
Thank you, Noel Peacock. How did Moliere get to appear before Louis xiv? Why do you think he made such an impression?
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Jo Harris
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 Nicomed, which was probably not really a tragedy, it's a kind of heroic drama and a farce. Le Doctor 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 theater. And his first major success from his own pen was Les Presiers Ridicule the Affected Ladies, which was a one act farce. And I think there's considerable influence from the Italians, the Comedia 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 postures. And this caused quite a storm really amongst the public because Moliere was thought to have been attacking those who were having a civilizing effect on morals and language. Because we were talking about a period after the wars of the Fronde and a lot of vulgarity had crept into the language and also into behavior. And the real preseurs were attempting to refine manners and language. But Moliere 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.
- [11:48]
Noel Peacock
Why did it cause such a stir?
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Jo Harris
Because they thought Muddy was attacking the real thing.
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Noel Peacock
Who would his audience have been? We're told that Shakespeare's audience went from the groundlings to the aristocracy. Was anything similar happen?
- [11:58]
Jo Harris
Yes, to some extent. He would have the aristocracy, the different levels of aristocracy, the different levels of boxers, particularly at the Marais, but they'd also have rich merchants who would be very much part of his audience. And he said in Les Col d' fams, which was his next big play, he said, the biggest challenge for me is to make what he called Honette Jean 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.
- [12:43]
Noel Peacock
Jan, how far were women engaged in the business of theatre at that time?
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Jan Clarke
Oh, very much so. There's evidence to suggest that when Moliere 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 awarded 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 theatrical enterprise. So Moliere's box 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 theatre at the time.
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Noel Peacock
Noel. Noel Peacock.
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Jo Harris
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 the school of wives or the learned ladies, you know, generically rather than as individuals.
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Noel Peacock
Thank you, Jan. Jan Clark Theatre in Paris wasn't. Wasn't for the faint hearted, was it?
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Jan Clarke
Not really, no.
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Noel Peacock
What kind of scrutiny did he undergo?
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Jan Clarke
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 Moliere having been sent by the King to the Petit Bourbon, which he shared with the Italian troupe 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 theat without the actors having been told they were about to build the Louvre colonnade. So Moliere 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. 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 see stay with him, no matter how precarious the situation appeared to be. And also it could get quite nasty at times. So, I mean, Moliere wasn't above getting involved himself. We talked about tragic acting style in his play l' Impramptu de Versailles. He actually parodies, he does skits of the actors from the Hotel de Bourgogne company. And it was only a few weeks after that Moliere had just got married and there was a degree of scandal about his marriage. And one of the Hotel de Bourguan actors actually wrote to the king and said that Moliere had married Armand Beja, who they said was the daughter of Madeleine Baja, 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 king. 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 Bejard. So it shows exactly how unconcerned he was about all the scandal and about the, you know, the rumor machine that was going on.
- [17:38]
Noel Peacock
Chair 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?
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Melvin Bragg
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 the two things about the sort of parameters of satire, first of all, decent satire, the type that he practices, should not satirize individual people. It should satirize 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 Alcest in Le Mise en Trope was based on Monsieur de Montausier, who was the tutor to the Dauphin, or these doctors in La Mort Medecin 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 pressieuses ridicule, he's making fun of preciosit, this ideal of affected or refined behaviour. He insists he's not making fun of true pressures, 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. 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.
- [19:26]
Noel Peacock
Thank Goon.
- [19:30]
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- [20:02]
Noel Peacock
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?
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Jo Harris
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 mentioned. In Les colde Femmes, for instance, Oras one of the young lovers says in Act 124, 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 be coincide with the lover's wishes. But that would not happen in tragedy. In the Misentrop, you would find it probably respects the unities more than any. In a sense, there's a coherence, a linearity, that the ending is resolved through the means of the characters.
- [21:12]
Melvin Bragg
Sorry. If I may add in. I think one thing that Moliere 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 far more plausibly and better kept, I think, by a movement indoors, which is what happens within most of Moliere'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.
- [21:55]
Jan Clarke
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, 67? 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 Moliere 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 Mise en Trop, 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 cracking him down.
- [22:51]
Noel Peacock
There are so many places, I mean, wrote over 30. But can we discuss one? Let's look at Tartuffe basics. What's the play about?
- [22:59]
Jan Clarke
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, St Francois de Sales had actually advocated the use of directeur de conscience. So this man has come as a cuckoo in the nest to live with Augand 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 Augand's wife Elimire and tries to seduce her. When his son says, what's going on? Augand disinherits him in favour of Tartuffe. And so at the end of the play, the family are about to be disinherited. Elmir is probably one of the. Tartuffe has two of the strongest female characters in the whole of Moliere. It has a strong female servant who tries to defend the interests of. Of the daughter. And it has a very, very sophisticated, elegant, intelligent woman in the person of Elmir, 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 Tartufe on so that she can demonstrate to her husband that he wants to. To seduce her. It's probably the most famous scene in the whole of French theatre.
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Noel Peacock
Jo why was Tartu banned then?
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Melvin Bragg
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. The 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 Mollier 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, Perefix, his name was threatened anybody caught performing, reading or watching the play with excommunication.
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Noel Peacock
Did he succeed in his banning?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, he did to start with, yes. He didn't stopped Molire from wanting the play to be performed. And Moliere 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 Jeanne 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.
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Noel Peacock
Noel Molier keeps putting his head above the parapet and almost inviting to be shot at. How did he protect himself?
- [27:15]
Jo Harris
He obviously had a difficult time in trying to get his tahtooth 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.
- [27:37]
Noel Peacock
How did it do that?
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Jo Harris
Well, the controversy because the. Again they thought the religion was being attacked. The theme of Don Juan, the. The adventurer, the. Well, the Donjon, who was the. The free thinker par excellence, who is challenging everybody, including the divine. And so he got. He was. 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 arch 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. The statue as a representative of the divine. But what Molly is saying, theater conquers everything. The theater intervenes. The artifice of theatre. But Mulya did suffer from that and. And the play was taken off after 15 performances. So. But he kept going and he wrote probably his masterpiece, Le Mise en Top, while he was still suffering all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
- [28:53]
Jan Clarke
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 in an. When the time was banned, 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. What Moliere did was because the king wanted to see Moliere. Moliere 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 imposteur version was banned. Moliette 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. Molier even sent his troupe to court, to Versailles, I think, and they didn't give a Moliere play. It was absolutely unheard of.
- [30:19]
Noel Peacock
Noel, do you want to comment on that?
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Jo Harris
Moliere did plead with the King, and particularly in 1667, these really plase 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. 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 austere. 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.
- [30:59]
Noel Peacock
Joe, did Moliere think it was enough to be right?
- [31:01]
Melvin Bragg
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. 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 unreasonable.
- [32:10]
Noel Peacock
Can you tell us, Jan, about Moliere's great adaptability? He knew that the King liked dancing, for instance. What did that lead him to?
- [32:18]
Jan Clarke
Yes, well, Mollier, 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, Voule 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 Moliere had the idea of interspersing the entree ballet entrances with acts of a play. And so it gave so that 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.
- [33:14]
Noel Peacock
Jo, are there any of these other works that stand out?
- [33:17]
Melvin Bragg
Well, he. 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. Tend to move much beyond that. One of his last plays was a co written tragedy ballet on so Psyche and Cupid, this mythological plot that was one. A lot of his ballets, actually the Comedie and Tragedie ballet were written under intense time pressure. Le Facheur that we just mentioned, he had two weeks to do Sichet. He ended up not being able to even finish. And so he got other playwrights, Kino 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. Commelier dell Arte, traditional French farce. He also innovated. One of my favorite plays of his that we've mentioned, I think briefly, is La Critique de l' ecole 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. 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. But 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.
- [34:49]
Jan Clarke
Following on from that, I think it's important to mention his other contribution to the Courrel de l' Ecole des Femmes, which is l' empromptu 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 Moliere 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? And it's. He's kind, he's staging his own process, basically.
- [35:36]
Melvin Bragg
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 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 La Promptu, 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.
- [36:17]
Noel Peacock
Now, is there any way we can think of him as a free thinker?
- [36:21]
Jo Harris
Well, it depends what we mean by free thinker. Cotgrave, when he speaks of free thinking, I think it was in his dictionary, 1611. He equates it with dissolute behavior and debauchery. Now, there were different types of free thinking. The early part of the century, there were free thinkers like Vanini and Giordani, Bruno and Theophil Davio, 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 Teophyll Devoe, he was deviot. He was exiled. But they. They were strangled first for blasphemy, for their irreligious behavior, for. For. For their dissoluteness as well, and also for their deviation from what was accepted morality. But you see, even in 1662, Claude Liberty was burnt. This is the time when Moliere was writing Les Cole des Femmes. But the free, free thought went underground and the freethinkers tended to express their free thought in different ways. For instance, Cyrando de Bergerac, the States of the Moon. He, in a Narrative of another world in which these things happen. Not in our world, far be it from that and others. La Motte Leveille, he put a kind of pluralist perspective in his. His work defending the virtue of pagans. And so Molier, he was quite friendly with La Motte Leve 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 theater, I think I would probably agree with the 19th century poet Theophile Gautier, who said that his. 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 a. An ideology, if one can detect libertinage. But you see, as we said in Donjon, his libertin is also sent up.
- [38:25]
Noel Peacock
John, there's a legend about the death of Moliere. Can you explain it or explode it?
- [38:32]
Jan Clarke
There are various legends surrounding.
- [38:34]
Melvin Bragg
Let's have the main one.
- [38:35]
Jan Clarke
Okay, 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 sent for. He realized 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 and ask for permission for him to be buried in hallowed ground, which was accorded. So he was buried at St. Joseph. But all of the kind of the legends that rose up about him actually having died on stage during the performance of Le Malade Imaginenaire, I mean, the Comedie Francaise still preserves the armchair that he was sitting in for that, supposedly for that last performance.
- [40:01]
Noel Peacock
Jo, what are the challenges or opportunities of performing Moliere today?
- [40:07]
Melvin Bragg
There are certain elements of Moliere's plays that have dated or are no longer appropriate. For example, some of his original targets, like Preciosite, for example, of long past, sometimes some of his attitudes towards women's learning. In Les Femmes Savants, 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 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. Now, maybe I'm being unfair, but from my personal anecdotal experience, I think that people in the UK and maybe anywhere out there, France, have a slight advantage when staging Moliere, because Moliere 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 Moliere. I think it means that directors and acting and theatre troupes nowadays have a certain degree of playfulness, creativity and maybe disrespect towards the Moliere texts 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, 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 that came out about five years ago with Tartuffe as an American evangelical maga, sort of supporter 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 Moliere's plays that will remain, you know, timeless, that directors are able to sort of seize on and take advantage of.
- [42:10]
Noel Peacock
I think Noel coming near the end. Now, how would you sum up the broader influence on Moliya?
- [42:16]
Jo Harris
But I think he has been a phenomenal figure in the history of the theater, in French theater. He's still. For instance, one time I went to Paris and saw a play. Thirteen different productions were on in Paris. Now, I don't think if I went, I. I don't think I went to London, there would be 13 performances of Shakespeare, however good. And I. I do think Shakespeare, because he could do both tragedy and comedy. He. He might have the. 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 realize, wait a minute, we are capable 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 tartuffs to prosper, I think Montlier's comedy will still have audiences and I'm sure we will still queue up to see them.
- [43:24]
Noel Peacock
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 a Korean empire. Thanks for listening.
- [43:38]
Jan Clarke
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:45]
Noel Peacock
What did you not say that you wish you'd had time to say? Start with you, Noel.
- [43:51]
Jo Harris
Probably Moliere's influence on Restoration comedy, that as you know, the theatres were closed from 1642 to 1660 in England. Different 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 and 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 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 Puritan Puritanism. So I think it's a. 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.
- [45:14]
Jan Clarke
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 are 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.
- [46:11]
Melvin Bragg
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. The king could have stopped Tartu 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.
- [46:24]
Jan Clarke
Yep. Yeah, that is a good point.
- [46:26]
Melvin Bragg
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 Savants, 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 favor of the more traditional, conservative perspective. In fact, the father figure in that play, Krizal, 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 Misantrop, there as well. Alcestre is a misanthrope. He is critical of all of society and he has very valid points, but he is 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, though.
- [47:50]
Jan Clarke
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. 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. For example, if you take a play like Georges Dandin, which is one of the Comedie ballets, but the main plot of Georges Dandin is about a rich Peasant who marries the daughter of members of the country aristocracy. This was first performed at court and then was performed in. 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 Angelique saying, I didn't ask to be married to him. 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 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, you know, ideas.
- [49:23]
Jo Harris
I think also that one can look at the dual attitude towards all his characters. If you look at Alcest, there's so much, if we know in the days of fake news and all, that Alcest 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 Celie Men, who is the female lead, she's an ironist. And when asking students which Mollya character they would like to have tea with or beer or whatever, they say, Celi men, 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, Moliere 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 Sally Men, 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 Moliere wrote them thinking of this philosophy in mind, but that's what comes out. And it accords with some of the. The great thought in the 17th century.
- [51:01]
Noel Peacock
Yes. And. And do you think that he will continue to be as popular as he was when you found 13 productions on.
- [51:09]
Jo Harris
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 Set Amen. So I think that. I think he will continue to be. Because the, 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.
- [51:43]
Noel Peacock
Thank you all very much. Thank you very much.
- [51:45]
Jan Clarke
Thank you.
- [51:46]
Noel Peacock
You need to rush off. There might be a magic cup of tea.
- [51:48]
Melvin Bragg
Does anybody want tea or coffee?
- [51:51]
Noel Peacock
No, I'm fine with water, thank you. But people might want.
- [51:54]
Jan Clarke
Would you grab a coffee please?
- [51:55]
Melvin Bragg
Okay. Yes, actually a coffee making tea would be lovely. Coffee would be nice, please. Yeah. Thank you. One tea and nothing for you, Melvin.
- [52:00]
Jan Clarke
Is that right?
- [52:00]
Jo Harris
One nothing for you?
- [52:01]
Noel Peacock
No. Okay.
- [52:02]
Jo Harris
Thank you very much.
- [52:04]
Melvin Bragg
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a.
- [52:07]
Jan Clarke
BBC Studios audio production screenshot.
- [52:11]
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- [52:14]
Jo Harris
They were both very mature as filmmakers.
- [52:16]
Melvin Bragg
This was a film that spoke to a red state, blue state divide. I'm Mark Kermode. And I'm Ellen E. Jones. And we'll direct you through the intertwined worlds of film, television and streaming. In the new series, we'll look at.
- [52:29]
Jo Harris
Studio Ghibli and summer blockbusters and start.
- [52:32]
Melvin Bragg
With cinema's fascination with doppelgangers helped by the one and only Richard Ioadi.
- [52:38]
Jo Harris
I'd quite like to meet more Norwegian Nigerians. In fact, if there's a meeting, I'll happily attend.
- [52:45]
Melvin Bragg
Screenshot from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.
- [52:54]
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