MOLIERE ‘Les comédies ne sont faites que pour être jouées’ -
In the ‘Au Lecteur’ of L’Amour Médecin, Molière says that there are ‘beaucoup de choses qui dépendent de l’action: on sait bien que les comédies ne sont faites que pour être jouées.’ When one considers how dramatic criticism has transformed into a predominantly textual analysis - and it has been said that ‘la meilleure façon d’admirer Molière, c’est encore de le lire attentivement’ (my emphasis) - it must be asked whether Molière is merely being rhetorical. What was the relative importance of Comédie and Littérature to him?
-
Jacques Sherer comments that ‘en France, l’auteur dramatique est le plus souvent un écrivain avant d’être un homme de theatre.’ However, Molière became a playwright through a career as an actor, he was not an academic or literary theorist. Despite his failed attempts to be a tragic actor, his ridiculous appearance and laughable manner of ‘déclamer’ did not hinder his performance in comedies; his skill for caricaturing people through gesture and voice could only have contributed to his success, in fact. Thus, he knew the theatre from the inside, and quickly rose to a position of responsibility over others, especially their salaries; Molière knew ultimately, whether he was garnering favour from the king or the people, that a play was a commercial enterprise and not a literary one. o At the time, tragedy was the only legitimate and literary dramatic medium; it developed over the seventeenth century according to interpretations of Aristotle’s Poetics and a key characteristic was its preoccupation with the verbal over the visual, the narrative or ‘récit’ over the action. Hence it was much less reliant on staging than comedy, and less would be lost in a mere reading of a tragic text than if a comedy was simply printed and published. o Literary critics have long argued than the material concerns of comedy (costume and set) were minimal, and this would suggest that reading is as aesthetically and intellectually stimulating as seeing a performance. Nevertheless, we have evidence of the meticulous planning of such physical elements with the comprehensive memoirs left by set-designers Laurent Mahelot and Michel Laurent, as well as ‘gravures’ of scenes and frontispieces in printed editions designed by Brissau, among others, which confirms R. W. Herzel’s remark that ‘location or territory and the stage setting that represented it served in an entirely novel way as an emblem of the internal life of characters.’ Thus not only would watching a play entertain an audience, but the physical and visual components of a piece enhanced the atmosphere created by particular characters and problems that Molière wanted to stage, making his works more popular with the cultured, ‘honnête’ audience whose ideas about comedy he wished to challenge. Mentioning illustrators necessarily leads to an exploration of the origins of Molière’s printed editions. The fact that editions were printed during his lifetime implies a degree of underlying authorial intention, but Molière was actually reluctant to have his work published; it was only when Jean Ribou, a Parisian bookseller, claimed to have memorised Les Précieuses Ridicules and threatened to print his own copy so any troupe could perform it that Molière had to decide between publishing it himself or entering into a very expensive lawsuit against Ribou. For him, as he says in the
-
preface to the play, the choice was between two evils but, ‘le dernier mal [a lawsuit] est encore pire que le premier.’ o Therefore Molière’s decision did not come from a belief that it was necessary to publish his work, but from the idea that, as the lesser of two evils, publishing was also more commercially viable. Later, perhaps he exploited the commercial possibilities of printed work and published them more willingly; however, it seems clear that his view was that the primary role of a play was not to be read, but performed, telling his reader at the beginning of L’Amour Médecin that ‘il serait à souhaiter que ces sortes d’ouvrages pussent toujours se montrer à vous avec les ornements qui les accompagnent chez le Roi.’ Reading inevitably leads to a loss of the impact created by the physical elements of comedy. -
-
-
Turning to Molière’s plays, La Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes and L’Impromptu de Versailles both consider the play as it is performed; in the former the characters have all seen and now discuss L’Ecole des Femmes, whilst in the latter the characters involved are Molière’s troupe preparing a play for the king on short notice. o One of the most important parts of La Critique that concerns the question of watching a play is in scene V, where the characters discuss ‘connoisseurs’, socalled experts who made up a large portion of Molière’s audience. Dorante claims that Le Marquis belongs to this group of men who are ‘bien fâchés d’être de l’avis des autres’, and Uranie supports this by saying that if he had been shown the play before anyone else, ‘il l’eût trouvée la plus belle du monde.’ This raises the interesting question as to why Molière, fully aware of the reputation he could gain, did not let people read his plays before they saw them. Surely L’Ecole des Femmes would have caused less scandal had Molière ‘montré sa comédie avant que de la faire voir au public’? o Nevertheless, Molière was not one to avoid controversy and began his comic career because of the very provocative nature of his caricatures, so perhaps he preferred to trap the charlatan ‘connoisseurs’ at their own game. In the following scene, Uranie goes on to say that ‘c’est se taxer hautement d’un défaut, que se scandaliser qu’on le reprenne.’ Molière knew a staging of a social satire would lead to more spontaneous reactions on the part of the audience, and guilty parties would appear even more so, for a reaction was harder to conceal in public than if the play was read in the privacy of one’s home. In L’Impromptu, Molière focuses more on the actors’ performance than on the audience reaction or the words on the page. The character Molière imitates actors from l’Hôtel de Bourgogne such as Montfleury, and the importance of this is twofold: not only is an imitation lifeless on paper, without the changing gestures and voices that would emphasise parodies onstage, but the reference to contemporary, competing actors is lost on a modern audience. Molière thus illustrates how his intention is to create comedy onstage for the immediate effect of pleasing spectators, even if this occurs through their being scandalised; he did not consider the works as ‘literature’ that could transcend time or act as historical documents in the way that someone like Stendhal did, although that has, of course, been the outcome. One of the most obvious examples of how Molière’s plays suffer in print is his ‘comédies-ballets’. Being fully aware of the financial implications of running a troupe, he could not have been any less aware that the most popular plays at court in
-
-
his time were spectacles that combined acting, singing and dancing, and the king himself even commissioned Molière to write them. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, for instance, presents a mixture of dramatic media, and an important an inevitable loss is incurred when the play is read but not seen. The ‘intermèdes’ flow naturally from the action, such as when the tailor’s boys perform a dance, celebrating M. Jourdain giving them money and offering them a drink. And of course, the Turkish Ceremony is the most elaborate ‘ornement’, essentially a comedy of gesture and sound, with the ‘Mufti’ carrying out ‘invocations burlesques’; no amount of imagination could correspond to seeing M. Jourdain being made a ‘Mamamouchi’. o Song is used to great effect as well in a ‘comédie-ballet’ such as Le Malade Imaginaire; in II,v the lovers Cléante and Angélique confess their feelings for one another through a duet, supposedly in the roles of singing teacher and student. While the irony is verbal, and would be understood in a reading of the text, only seeing and hearing the ‘double-entendre’ will make an audience laugh out loud. Molière believed the aim of comedy was not only to divert his audience but also to ‘corriger les moeurs’ by that entertainment. As his characters Comédie, Musique, and Ballet sing at the end of L’Amour Médecin: ‘Sans nous tous les hommes/ Deviendraient malsains/ Et c’est nous qui sommes/ Leurs grands médecins.’ Molière promotes the fusion, therefore, of very concrete theatrical techniques, and it comes as no surprise that he created this new genre of ‘comédie-ballet’, being such a strong believer in physical theatre. Perhaps, however, of all his plays it was the ‘farce’ which stood to lose most from being printed. As can be seen in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, plots were minimal while physical comedy was abundant, and here direction is possibly more crucial than the text. For example, a typical sketch was the drawn-out, solemn consultation with doctors, stock satirical characters of the time. It is not so much the words used that matters as the way in which they are performed; reading over two pages of solid writing can in no way amount to hearing the convoluted discourse, the pause that may come halfway through before the first doctor, stating that it is easy to guess what ‘remèdes’ are necessary, goes off on another long speech (in which he actually recommends the patient be entertained by songs and dances, highlighting the earlier comment from L’Amour Médecin). Nor can reading match seeing the protagonist’s facial expressions, which will reflect the audience’s own incomprehension and thus elicit laughter from their being able to relate to characters onstage. o In Les Fourberies de Scapin, too, laughter is much more likely to be generated from seeing Geronte being beaten while he hides in a sack. Scapin’s various accents will also strike a spectator much more than different orthography can a reader. Other examples of farce abound, such as Orgon emerging from under the table in Le Tartuffe or Arnolphe being locked out of his own house, or hit by the front door as his servants squabble in L’Ecole des Femmes. It is not only for laughter than plays benefit from staging however; the shock caused by Dom Juan’s dramatic exit, for instance, as he is taken to hell, could not be felt in the same way through reading, for the stage directions suggest a theatricality that had to be seen and heard: Le tonnerre tombe avec un grand bruit... le terre s’ouvre et l’abîme; et il sort de grands feux... It must be admitted than the ‘comédies de moeurs’, Molière’s strongest social satires, can still work in print. We certainly understand the thrust of the parody and comprehend the issues Molière deemed worthy of ridicule. Also, one must consider
