Jean Baptiste Moliere essays

Jean Baptiste Moliere essays JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN MOLIÈRE16221673From The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces Vol. 2, 7th edition, ed. Maynard Mack, et. al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) Son of a prosperous Paris merchant, Jean-Baptiste Molire (originally named Poquelin) devoted his entire adult life to the creation of stage illusion, as playwright and as actor. At about the age of twenty-five, he joined a company of traveling players established by the Bjart family; with them he toured the provinces for about twelve years. In 1658 the company was ordered to perform for Louis XIV in Paris; a year later, Molires first great success, The High-Brow Ladies (Les Prcieuses ridicules), was produced. The theatrical company to which he belonged, patronized by the king, became increasingly successful, developing finally (1680) into the Comdie Franà §aise. In 1662, Molire married Armande Bjart. He died a few hours after performing in the lead role of his own play The Imaginary Invalid. Molire wrote both broad far ce and comedies of character, in which he caricatured some form of vice or folly by embodying it in a single figure. His targets included the miser, the aspiring but vulgar middle class, female would-be intellectuals, the hypochondriac, and in Tartuffe, the religious hypocrite. In Tartuffe (1664), as in his other plays, Molire employs classic comic devices of plot and characterhere, a foolish, stubborn father blocking the course of young love; an impudent servant commenting on her superiors actions; a happy ending involving a marriage facilitated by implausible means. He often uses such devices, however, to comment on his own immediate social scene, imagining how universal patterns play themselves out in a specific historical context. Tartuffe had contemporary relevance so transparent that the Catholic Church forced the king to ban it, although Molire managed to have it publishe...