The Bourgeois Gentleman

We don't know exactly when the French playwright Moliere was born, but he was baptized on the 15th of January, 1622.

Of course, Moliere was his stage name, so he was baptized Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, not Moliere. In honor of the anniversary of his baptismal day today, I read his play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, which is generally translated as The Bourgeois Gentleman.

The play premiered in 1670, at which point Moliere was already famous for writing The Blunderer, Sganarelle, and The School for Wives, and infamous for writing Tartuffe, Don Juan, and a scandalous adaptation of Amphitryon. This time, however, he would flatter the court of Louis XIV and make fun of the rising middle class.

Moliere himself played the titular character, Monsieur Jourdain, who is merely bourgeois, but has pretensions of being a gentleman. He receives lessons from a music master, a dancing master, a fencing master, and a philosophy master. Though Moliere was a magnificent poet, the play is mostly written in prose. This leads to a comic moment, when Jourdain famously exclaims: "On my conscience, I have spoken prose above these forty years, without knowing anything of the matter...."

Armande Bejart, who was married to Moliere, played Jourdain's daughter Lucile. As often happens in Moliere's plays, the protagonist's daughter is in love with one man, but he wants to marry her off to someone else. In this case, the social climbing Jourdain fixates on the idea of marrying his daughter to a son of the Ottoman Emperor. The year before, an Ottoman ambassador had refused to bow before the king, creating quite a scandal, so the play's aristocratic audiences probably enjoyed the idea of making fun of the Turks as well.

In the play, Lucile's lover dresses up as a Turk and pretends to be the son of the Ottoman Emperor. There's a lot of goofy fake Turkish, as he and his servant fool Jourdain into thinking that they're actually from the court of the Ottomans. The plan works, and all ends happily.

The composer Jean-Baptiste Lully composed music for the piece. The score survives, and what I've heard of it sounds fun. I'd love to see a production someday using the original music!

Herr Tartüff

Molière's comedy Tartuffe has produced numerous adaptations, but perhaps few as original as F.W. Murnau's silent film Herr Tartüff.

Murnau is one of those directors who has always fascinated me. After serving in the German army during the First World War, he made the terrifying horror film Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker's Dracula. He later filmed the innovative comedy The Last Laugh as well as his re-imagining of Tartuffe, before adapting for film what is probably an even more famous play, Goethe's Faust.

Herr Tartüff really is a reimagining, as it departs significantly from Molière's play. The film uses a framing device in which an old man is being slowly poisoned by his housekeeper. The old man's grandson comes for a visit, but gets thrown out for being a good-for-nothing actor. Being an actor, however, he is able to disguise himself and visit the house with a traveling cinema. He then shows a film based on Tartuffe and exposes the housekeeper's hypocrisy.

Because the silent film can't use Molière's witty dialogue, it has to find other ways to tell the story. I was mainly watching to see the scene in Act IV of the play where Orgon hides under a table while the hypocrite Tartuffe tries to seduce his wife. In the film, Orgon hides behind a curtain, and just when the hypocrite is about to make his move, he sees the husband's face in a reflection. Immediately, he resumes his pious act, and Orgon becomes more convinced of his friend's saintliness than ever before.

That just stretches the action out longer, though, as the film has another scene that takes place that night, where Orgon's wife Elmire goes even further with Herr Tartüff, this time in a room that contains a bed! The faithful maid Dorine forces Orgon to watch through a keyhole, though, and the impostor is unmasked.

Lil Dagover, who played the heroine in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, takes on the part of Elmire, and is stunning in the role. If you're interested, you can watch the whole film here.

The Original Tartuffe

 Moliere's classic attack on religious hypocrisy, Tartuffe, originally premiered as a three-act play on May 12, 1664. The playwright's enemies were not impressed.

Immediately, the very people Moliere had criticized began to attack the play. The original script is now lost, so we don't know how much this early version resembles the text we have today. What we do know is that after it was performed at the Palace of Versailles, it was immediately condemned.

Tartuffe criticizes people who pretend to be pious, but actually are just after sex, money, and power. Religious conservatives urged King Louis XIV to ban the play, which he did, though he added that he did not doubt the good intentions of the author. Undeterred, Moliere not only revised the piece but actually expanded it into five acts.

This new version of the play premiered in November at the Chateau de Raincy outside of Paris. The King seems to have encouraged Moliere in his revising of the play, and in 1665 he even extended his patronage directly to Moliere's company. This did not stop calls to ban the piece, though, and the writer struggled to mount productions, often as private performances due to the extreme hostility toward the piece.

While Moliere was concerned with the social conditions surrounding the play, he was also concerned with providing a vehicle for the actors of his company, and they seem to have each left a mark on the piece. The writer himself played Orgon, the obsessed dupe who cares about nothing so much as his pseudo-holy  houseguest Tartuffe. Philibert Gassot, known by the stage name of Du Croisy, played the title character.

Armande Bejart, who was by then known as Mademoiselle Moliere, played Orgon's wife, Elmire, while Madeleine Bejart played the sassy maid, Dorine. Madeleine had co-founded the Illustre Theatre troupe with Moliere in 1643. Though the two were romantically involved on and off in the past, Moliere had ended up marrying Armande. And while Armande was supposedly the younger sister of Madeleine, in actuality she was her illegitimate daughter. (No, not by Moliere, though his enemies later insinuated this.)

With a cast like that, one can imagine some offstage drama rivaling what occurred onstage!

Thoughts on Moliere

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known by his stage name, Moliere, began as an actor. In 1643 he co-founded with Madeleine Bejart the Illustre Theatre troupe. Two years later, the troupe went bankrupt and Moliere was briefly imprisoned for debt. After his release, he and Bejart got together again and eventually formed a new company known as The Troupe of Moliere. It was then that Moliere began writing short plays heavily influenced by commedia dell'arte. In 1658, the company performed for the first time before the new king, Louis XIV. They obtained the patronage of the powerful Duke of Orleans, and prospects were looking very bright.

The flowing year, Moliere premiered his first important play, The Affected Young Ladies, which poked fun at the pretensions of social climbers. In 1662, Moliere married Armande Bejart, a woman 18 years his junior who was supposedly the younger sister of Madeleine, but was in actuality her illegitimate daughter. The union does not seem to have troubled Madeleine, who remained on intimate terms with Moliere both before and after the marriage. However, opponents of Moliere would later use suspicions of incest as a tool to besmirch the playwright's name and drive away patrons.

The same year as his marriage, Moliere premiered The School for Wives. The hilarious comedy makes fun of men who--like Moliere himself--try to marry younger women. Critics attacked the play as scandalous, and in response Moliere wrote Rehearsal at Versailles, in which he defended not only himself, but also the theatrical profession in general. The controversy eventually died down after the king granted Moliere an annual pension, granting him tacit royal approval. However, the controversy over The School for Wives would soon be far surpassed by the coming furor over Tartuffe.

Originally performed in 1664 and rewritten repeatedly, Tartuffe tells the story of a religious hypocrite who insinuates his way into the home of the protagonist, Orgone, only to wreck havoc and threaten to ruin everyone. Moliere makes it clear that Tartuffe is an imposter and not a genuine priest, but conservatives saw the play as an attack on the clergy and perhaps on all religion in general. The Archbishop of Paris threatened to excommunicate anyone who performed, watched, or even read the play. Louis XIV intervened again in 1665, granting Moliere's company an annual subsidy and the title of The King's Troupe. Still, the play could not be publicly performed until 1669.

Moliere took on all forms of hypocrisy in his 1666 comedy The Misanthrope. The play's protagonist, Alceste, rails against every form of double-dealing in society and remains steadfast in telling the truth, no matter what anyone thinks of him. Ultimately, however, Alceste loses the woman he loves to a friend who is more flexible in his ideals. The play ends with Alceste enraged and at odds with both his friends and society. Though a failure at the time, it is now considered one of Moliere's greatest works.

In later years, Moliere adapted the works of Plautus in Amphitryon and The Miser. He collaborated with the court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully in pieces of musical theatre including The Bourgeois Gentleman. When Lully went his own way, taking with him all the best singers, Moliere went back to focusing on spoken drama and wrote The Learned Ladies. Though the play attacks the pretensions of women who focus on science and learning rather than on romance, the play is so delightful it has won over even feminist critics.

Moliere's health gradually worsened. His last play, The Imaginary Invalid, tells the story of a hypochondriac who, like the protagonist of The School for Wives, might have been a caricature version of Moliere himself. An actor to the end, Moliere collapsed onstage while performing the title role. He died without receiving last rites after two different priests refused to visit him.