Molière and Le Malade imaginaire (1673) (The Imaginary Invalid, also known as The

Molière (1622-1673) is a pen- or stage-name; the actor, director, theatrical entrepreneur and playwright, producing and directing approximately forty comedies, acting in twenty-four, and staging over a hundred was called Jean Baptiste Poquelin. There are several Molières, the public entertainer, thoroughly the man of the theatre and a shameless plagiarist; the defender of middle-class values and of the ‘golden mean’, a comic scourge of manners and tastes; and the embittered satirist, the dark comedian, who is able to show the tragic side of every exaggerated human characteristic. It is this latter Molière – created mostly by the Romantics – to whom, it seems, it is the most exciting to subscribe.

Molière was born in Paris, where his father was an upholsterer in the service of the king. He had a good education: he attended the Jesuit Collège de Clermont in Paris, studying humanities and around 1640 he went into law. Yet the family lived near the theatres and with his grandfather or father he often admired the “magic world” on stage. It was in 1642 (the year the theatres were closed in England) that Molière encountered a group of actors directed by the Béjart family. In 1643, he signed a contract with Madeline Béjart, founding a company called the Illustre Théâtre (Illustrious Theatre), and in 1644 he re-baptised himself for the stage as Molière (the name probably coming from the name of a village or is taken after a long-forgotten novelist, Molière d’Essartines). Madeline (born in 1618) became his mistress and later Madeleine’s sister, Armande Béjart became his wife in 1662, though Armande (born in 1643) could well have been his daughter (as some of Molière’s ill-wishers later rumoured, she was his daughter). From 1642 till his death, his whole life was a steadfast and often unsuccessful struggle for fame and financial recognition, first and foremost for his company.

And for love, which he did not often find. He was medium-sized, heavily-round shouldered Back to the Contents



and unhandsome. Sometimes he was impatient and wanted to dominate, yet he was generous, and could forget grudges. He is often represented in – more or less reliable – memoirs of his contemporaries as having a rather melancholic, introspective temper, not really fit for

“clowning” but rather for serious roles. At any rate, he was a dutiful son and a good husband, although his personal life was not very successful: his marriage to Armande was soon crumbling, and all their three children died in infancy. Besides, he was suffering from a serious lung-ailment, which eventually caused his death right after the fourth performance of The Imaginary Invalid in which, as often in his plays, he played the main role (Argan).

In 1645 the company faced so serious troubles that Molière was even briefly imprisoned for debt and they were forced to leave Paris. Between 1645 and 1658 the Illustre Théâtre was touring the provinces, mainly the Rhone valley and Languedoc. But they did not suffer the hand-to-mouth existence of several other touring companies: they performed in the houses of the nobility and they were well rewarded. By 1655 Molière became the director of the company, and with the support of the nobility (until 1650, the Duke d’Épernon, from 1653 to 1655, the Prince de Conti) slowly started to make a name for himself as a highly talented actor and as a writer of farces and comedies. He became so well-known that the best actors of the other road companies were willing to join his troupe and he did not lose his ties with Paris, either.

In 1658 they found a new patron in Philipe d’Anjou, the king’s brother and they tried their luck in Paris again: on October 24, in the guard room of the old Louvre, they performed, for Louis XIV, Pierre Corneille’s tragedy (Nicomède) and a farce of Molière’s own called The Amorous Doctor (now lost). Louis liked the farce and he granted the troupe the right to remain in Paris and to play in the Théâtre du Petit Bourbon, which they had to share with a professional Italian company called the Scaramouche, directed by Tiberio Fiorelli. Fiorelli of course kept the best days of the week for performance (Tuesday, Friday and Sunday), yet when the Petit Bourbon was destroyed to make way for the facade of the Louvre, Molière could take over – after three idle months – the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, which he still had to share with the Italians, yet this time it was Molière who kept the best days. The co-existence with the Italians was not without benefit: the commedia dell’arte had a deep influence on Molière and he was a great admirer of their body-language, which they developed for the lack of linguistic communication with the audience.

The first real triumph came with Le Précieuses ridicules (The Fashionable Damsels, 1659), a one-act comedy in prose, about two young girls coming to Paris from the provinces, having read fashionable romances. Yet several members of the fashionable public found the indirect criticism also levelled against them too much. Similarly, in 1662 (when there are permanent theatres in England again) Le’École des femmes (The School for Wives) caused a scandal and Molière was attacked on aesthetic, moral and even personal grounds. The play – a re-enactment of the old theme of a young man stealing, with cunning and good looks a pure and instinctive girl from a possessive and tyrannical old man – made Molière a morally dangerous writer in the eyes of many. And when, in 1664, the first three acts of Tartuffe, levelled against religious hypocrisy, was presented in front of the king, even his majesty intervened; he was entertained but he forbade the play to be shown in public; it was presented in the form we know it now only in 1669. Even further, Don Juan ou Le Festin de Pierre (Don Juan or the Stone Guest, 1665) was taken to be the play of an incorrigible atheist; a pamphlet even demanded that Molière should be burned. In Don Juan the protagonist, who is repulsive and attractive at the same time, abandons his wife, tries to seduce peasant girls (two simultaneously) and humiliates beggars and is led into the flames of hell only at the end of the play by a stone-statue coming to life; it is easy to see that Molière was indeed challenging his audience to an extent which had been unknown before.

157

1665 was a turning-point in his career: Jean Racine, to whom Molière had acted as a kind of tutor for a long time, even helping him with the writing of his tragedies, forsook him.

From that time one, Racine staged his plays in the Hôtel de Bourgogne, later also enticing Mademoiselle du Parc, one of Molière’s greatest actress away to the rival theatre. Yet it was in the same year that Molière’s troupe became The King’s Company, and from that time they were often called upon to present a new comedy at Versailles, or where the court happened to be. Of course, they performed comedies and tragedies by other authors, too, yet Molière’s own plays formed the basis of their repertoire. In 1672, however, the king withdrew royal favour from Molière, granting it rather to Jean Baptiste Lully, and Madeleine Béjart died in the same year. Disappointed and exhausted, Molière had convulsions during the performance of The Imaginary Invalid, almost dying during the performance, yet heroically hiding his fits of coughing into hysterical laughter and playing, while being very ill, a hypochondriac. It seems that reality and illusion really changed places during the last performance and he died in his home the same night. No Catholic priest was willing to administer him the extreme unction before his death, or to give him a Christian burial. Eventually, at the king’s intervention, he was buried at night. Armande relocated the company to the rue Guénigaud, because Lully acquired the Plais Royal as the home of the French opera. In 1680, Louis XIV merged Molière’s former company with the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and founded the Comédie Française.

Molière’s originality largely lies in moving away from Romanesque comedy (or:

comedy of intrigue, using highly complicated plot-lines, lost and found children, pirates, disguises, magic spells, etc.) and making farce an accepted genre. Yet he does not only start out with certain fixed masks and does not only create human types by adding them characteristics observed in everyday life. Molière goes beyond “satirical” or “character comedy” in his greatest pieces, such as Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope (The Misanthrope, 1666), L’Avare (The Miser, 1668) – although The Miser does contain Romanesque elements, when generous Anselme discovers that Mariane and Valère are his children who he once lost in a shipwreck. Molière presents inner forces, tensions and convictions in outward, truly dramatic gestures, yet the passion behind these exaggerated outer features is not only ridiculous but also fatal; in fact, Molière’s heroes, dominating or protecting themselves to an unnatural degree, undo themselves just in the way Racine’s tragic characters get consumed in their own flames of emotion, and that the result is comic rather than tragic largely has to do with two main reasons. One is that the values the egoistic main heroes create to satisfy their appetites are illusionary (imaginary) ones, the other is that it is precisely through the self-centred protagonists making themselves their own prisoners that some young couples, with the help of some clever servants, are granted the possibility of freedom and of unity in marriage. Yet it is no wonder that Molière’s enemies found him dangerous: he showed, time after time, that any human trait can turn into its opposite if it exceeds the normal boundaries and, hence, no characteristic has an a priori, pre-given value but is relative to the very person who is its representative. For Molière, the human being is a hopeless egotist, who is able to reduce any impulse to an illusion which will successfully hide his tyrannical nature and thus even the values and interests we consider to be the most sacred may become tools we are able to torture one another with. In most cases, the protagonist is not reformed or cured of his obsession: he falls into madness and it is thus that he withdraws himself form social circulation. Molière’s best comedies may be called “comedies of observation”, where there is careful study of how a three-dimensional (and never simple) individualised type mixes up common sense and reality with illusion and how he brings about his own ruin..

The Imaginary Invalid is a play in which Molière turns ballets and interludes into an extension of the plot. It starts with the ballet and songs of shepherds and shepherdesses, whose singing the praise of spring will be echoed in the Second Interlude at the end of Act II

(Scene ix), when Béralde, Argan’s brother brings “a company of gypsy men and girls in Moorish costume” dancing and singing “Rejoice, rejoice in the spring”. The very first scene, announcing love as a kind of sickness of the heart (as the old commonplace goes) will also be partly re-enacted in the “little improvised opera” Cléante and Angélique sing in Act II, Scene v (Cléante pretending to be a replacement for a sick (!) music-master). There are two further musical interpolations: one is the First Interlude, when Punchinello’s serenade to his love is interrupted by violins and he is eventually beaten up by some Archers, the other is the final scene, in which Argan is conferred a doctor’s degree in a mock-ceremony, using burlesque dog-Latin, mixed with Italian, Spanish and French (in the translation: English) words. Thus, although especially Punchinello’s interlude is not an integral part of the play (Toinette says at the end of Act I, Scene viii that she will send out to the old money-lender, Punchinello and that she is “walking out with him” but he never appears in the main plot), the five musical pieces are in relative symmetry.

The main plot is Argan’s marriage-plot and, to some extent, Béline’s (Argan’s second wife’s) plot to disinherit Argan’s two daughters, Angélique and Louison, and to get all of Argan’s money. There is a counter-plot arranged, i.e. directed and played mostly by Toinette and by the lovers (in the opera-scene) and there is a strange, even in part anti-theatrical plot of the intellect, with Béralde, Argan’s brother in the main role, who tries to persuade Argan to get rid of his “doctoritis” (his hypochondria) using reasonable arguments at the end of the play. Béralde represent common sense and, to some extent even an implied criticism of the Cartesian system (i.e. that of René Descartes – Molière was rather in contact with Gassendi, who was a sceptical critique of some of Descartes’ main ideas.)

The plot is fairly simple: Argan, who believes himself to be very ill and surrounds himself with doctors and apothecaries, wants to marry her elder daughter, Angélique to Thomas Diafoirus, a new doctor of the Faculty of Medicine just because he wishes to have a medical doctor about the house, who would be curing him free of charge. Thus he has two obsessions: one is that he is very sick; the other is that he is the absolute ruler in his house: “I am master in my own house and can do whatever I think fit” (III; iii). He thinks he has the right to send his daughter to a nunnery, if she resists (the commonplace-threat to daughters opposing their fathers), and to beat his younger daughter, Louison, who did not want to report on the secret meeting she witnessed to between Angélique and Cléante. There are two ways in which hypocrites reveal their true natures, i.e. not only that they are not what they pretend to be but strictly the opposite of their feigned characteristics: one is that they undo themselves by themselves (as Punchinello remarks, “affairs take care of themselves” [First Interlude]), the other is that they go through a little “theatrical purging”, i.e. the tricks and show Toinette arranges for them. In the first group we find Thomas Diafoirus, who greets his future father-in-law with an eloquent speech (telling Argan that he is more precious than his “founding father”, Monsieur Diafoirus, because his biological father only begot him but Argan has

“chosen him”) and for a while we may even think he is a nice man. But when his first present to Angélique is an article he wrote against the “Circulationists” (the followers of William Harvey [1578-1657], who in 1628 put forward his thesis about the circulation of the blood), when he promises Angélique to take her to the dissection of a woman, and especially when he falters in his speech which he learned to greet Béline, he makes a true monkey of himself. Yet Béline is a more dangerous hypocrite: she pretends to love and care about Argan and her greed and hatred towards him is only revealed when in the last, climatic scene Argan, at Toilette’s suggestion, pretends to be dead and Béline rejoices over it and wants Argan’s money immediately (while Angélique truly grieves her father). It is somewhat frightening that one has to bring in death, the metaphor of tragedy, to learn what is truly inside the other and Molière plays a dangerous game with truth in the sense of ‘reality’ as well: Monsieur Purgon, the doctor who gets offended and leaves Argan tells the hypochondriac that “And I predict

159

that within four day you’ll be beyond all help” (Molière, playing Argan, died after the fourth performance of the play); Toinette, disguised as a doctor, tells Argan that he does not have liver-problems (as the other doctors claimed) but “Your trouble is lungs”, when Molière really died of “serious pleurisies with inflammation of the lungs” (Act III; Scene x), and Molière even makes Argan ask, before Béline would be put to the test: “I suppose pretending to be dead isn’t dangerous?” (III; xi). All this could be merely a back-reading from biographical data but that this back-reading was lurking in Molière’s mind is corroborated by the fact that – through a truly meta-theatrical gesture – Béralde, while reasoning with his brother, tells him that he should go and see one of Molière’s plays, poking fun “not at doctors but at the absurdities of medicine” (III; iii). The mortally ill Argan-Molière then says about Molière:

“When he was ill I’d leave him to die without lifting a finger […] and I’d say to him: ‘Die and be damned, that’ll teach you to make fun of the Faculty of Medicine!’” (III; iii).

Did Molière, who is now immortal in the theatres of the world, think that he would only die on the stage but would survive in ‘reality’? Or did the two, the theatre and ‘reality’

really change places for him and was he happy to die a real death (almost) on the stage, “in his boots on”, doing the profession he loved most? At any rate, it is symbolic of how he gave his life to the theatre, a theatre in which, as far as I can see, he did not want to settle the question whether Argan is really sick or not, and who believes, in the circle around him, that he is only pretending to be ill. Toinette, as early as Act I, Scene iv says, first in the context of love that “Real love and pretending are very hard to tell apart” but the relationship between reality and pretence is one of the age-old questions of the theatre as well. It is clear that according to Molière, believing one to be sick is an ailment in itself but it is also hard to see whether Toinette’s theatre-within-theatre (disguising herself as a doctor of ninety) and Béralde’s reasoning and his idea that Argan himself should become a medical doctor, will cure the imaginary invalid or not. It is not by accident perhaps that Argan in the first scene is giving an account of his illness in terms of the money he has paid to the apothecary: in Descartes’ system quality was given an account in terms of quantity, and numbers, being neutral and universal, were the best language into which qualities could be translated; for example, when Toinette has upset Argan he claims that “It will take eight doses of medicine and a dozen irrigations to set me right again” (I, vi), as if emotions, such as anger could be measured against precise amounts of medicine. Descartes haunts the play at several places anyway: e.g. when Cléante talks about the lover who “tries by every means to catch another glimpse of the vision of which he retains, sleeping and waking; so clear an image” (II; v), he might be echoing Descartes’ quest for “clear and distinct” ideas and his argument that the senses cannot be trusted because we may have vivid sensations in our dreams, too. Angélique will refer to general laws (such as “Marriage is a bond which should never be imposed by force”, I; vi) when she is arguing for her own rights to choose a husband, yet she will also warn that a daughter’s duty “neither in reason, nor in justice can […] be made to apply to

really change places for him and was he happy to die a real death (almost) on the stage, “in his boots on”, doing the profession he loved most? At any rate, it is symbolic of how he gave his life to the theatre, a theatre in which, as far as I can see, he did not want to settle the question whether Argan is really sick or not, and who believes, in the circle around him, that he is only pretending to be ill. Toinette, as early as Act I, Scene iv says, first in the context of love that “Real love and pretending are very hard to tell apart” but the relationship between reality and pretence is one of the age-old questions of the theatre as well. It is clear that according to Molière, believing one to be sick is an ailment in itself but it is also hard to see whether Toinette’s theatre-within-theatre (disguising herself as a doctor of ninety) and Béralde’s reasoning and his idea that Argan himself should become a medical doctor, will cure the imaginary invalid or not. It is not by accident perhaps that Argan in the first scene is giving an account of his illness in terms of the money he has paid to the apothecary: in Descartes’ system quality was given an account in terms of quantity, and numbers, being neutral and universal, were the best language into which qualities could be translated; for example, when Toinette has upset Argan he claims that “It will take eight doses of medicine and a dozen irrigations to set me right again” (I, vi), as if emotions, such as anger could be measured against precise amounts of medicine. Descartes haunts the play at several places anyway: e.g. when Cléante talks about the lover who “tries by every means to catch another glimpse of the vision of which he retains, sleeping and waking; so clear an image” (II; v), he might be echoing Descartes’ quest for “clear and distinct” ideas and his argument that the senses cannot be trusted because we may have vivid sensations in our dreams, too. Angélique will refer to general laws (such as “Marriage is a bond which should never be imposed by force”, I; vi) when she is arguing for her own rights to choose a husband, yet she will also warn that a daughter’s duty “neither in reason, nor in justice can […] be made to apply to