Molière and His Theatre

By David G. Muller

Molière was the professional stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who was born in 1622 to a prosperous bourgeois upholsterer in Paris. After a good education by the Jesuits at the College de Clermont, the young Poquelin seemed destined either to succeed his father in his royal appointment as official upholsterer to the court of Louis XIII or to embark on a legal career. Instead, at age twenty-one, he chose to abandon the professional security of his bourgeois family and to join the newly founded Illustre Théâtre under the provisional management of Madeleine Béjart. Although Béjart was the only member of the troupe ever to have acted on the stage, the new company opened in Paris on New Year's Day 1641 and Poquelin, assuming the stage name of Molière, became its actor-manager by year's end.

The Illustre Théâtre did not succeed in Paris. Competition with the other well-established theatres, the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Théâtre du Marais, left the new company playing tragedies to empty houses. The troupe borrowed extensively to pay for costumes and sets, the authors' rights to play, and rent on the converted tennis courts that served as Parisian playhouses. More than once, Molière had to spend time in prison for defaulting on loans used to keep his company afloat. In financial ruin, the troupe left Paris in 1645 and toured the provinces for the next thirteen years. It was during these years that the young members of the Illustre Théâtre learned their craft and Molière began to write his first farces.

In 1658, Molière's company returned to Paris to try its theatrical fortunes once again. This time, having obtained the patronage of Philipe d'Orleans, Louis XIV's brother, they performed regularly in the Théâtre de Petit-Bourbon (at the Louvre) and later at the Palais Royal. Although tragedy had been the company's earlier mainstay, the Troupe de Monsieur, as it was now called, began to expand its repertory to include comedies and farces, including those written by Molière. According to noted Molière historian Georges Mongredian, the key to the company's subsequent success was that Molière revived a farce tradition that had been virtually forgotten in Paris for some twenty-five years and successfully inter-mixed farce with comedy manners and comedy-ballet. The result was a long series of successful plays including L'Ecole des Maris (The School for Husbands, 1660), L'Ecole des Femmes (The School for Wives, 1662), Le Misanthrope (1666), L'Avare (The Miser, 1668), Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman, 1670), Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies, 1672) and Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid, 1673).

But the company's accomplishment can also be seen in its dedication to its talented playwright-actor-manager. The success of the Troupe de Monsieur threatened the established theatres that were in direct competition with Molière's--the same theatres whose success contributed to the failure of the Illustre Théâtre's venture in the 1640s. In the short play L'Impromptu de Versailles (The Rehearsal at Versailles, 1663), in which the actors of Molière's troupe appear to rehearse a new play, Molière (playing himself) describes this threat:

During a period of transition, as the troupe was making its way from the Petit-Bourbon to the Palais Royal, the other theatres tried to lure some of Molière's actors away from him. But Lagrange, one of the company's principal actors, whose diary serves as a day-to-day history of the troupe, describes both the continued dedication of the actors and Molière's ability to manage a successful theatre through difficult times:

The Company, tossed by all those gales, had also to resist the division which the players of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais were trying to bring upon them, through various offers to draw them into this or that group. But Monsieur's company kept together; all the actors loved M. de Molière, their director, who besides his great merit and skill had such courtesy and engaging manners that they all promised to stay with him whatever proposals were made to them and whatever the benefits that could be found elsewhere.

This long-term commitment paid off in allowing Molière to write characters expressly for the talents and attributes of particular members of the company, a benefit that can be seen in the quality of his thirty-one plays.

Many of Molière's plays attempt to challenge the social customs prevalent during his day as well as the ongoing--one might still say, universal--foibles of humankind. Some of these challenges did not go unpunished. In 1664, his Tartuffe, an examination of religious hypocrisy, was banned from subsequent performance for five years. Similarly, the Roman Catholic authorities also forced Molière to withdraw Dom Juan (1665) after its first performances. Unlike Tartuffe, the play would not be performed again during Molière's lifetime.

In 1665, Molière's company came under the direct patronage of Louis XIV and was renamed the Troupe de Roi, whereupon it spent much of its energy participating in elaborate court spectacles and developing a new genre, the comédie-ballet. Still, Molière continued to expand the boundaries of the comic genre in all directions, and it was at this time that he wrote what many consider to be his masterpiece, the quintessential comedy of manners, Le Misanthrope (1666).

Molière died shortly after falling ill during a performance of his Le Malade imaginaire in February 1673.