The Heirs of Molière

Introduction

The figure of Molière has dominated the French comic stage since the seventeenth century, but never was his influence stronger than in the somewhat more than a century between his death and the French Revolution, which brought to an end the society which his comedies reflected and the theatrical system within which they were created.

In the aftermath of the Revolution, the French theatre developed new forms and adjusted to new structures of organization and to new audiences, reflecting a new social order. During the previous century, however, despite some occasional and modest experimentation, tradition ruled the French stage. The genres of tragedy and comedy remained distinct and highly predictable in terms of subject matter, style, and construction, and the models for each were the masters of the "great century"-Racine and Corneille in tragedy, Molière in comedy. The heirs of Molière, those comic dramatists who worked in the tradition and the shadow of the master during the century after his death, have on the whole not been treated very kindly by theatre history. Today only two French comic authors of this period are widely known, even in France, and each is a rather special case. These are Marivaux and Beaumarchais.

Marivaux's delicate style and subtle emotionality links him closely to the rococo. His dramatic world seems peopled with figures from paintings by his contemporaries Watteau or Boucher, but in the dramatic world of his own time he was a distinct anomaly. He worked primarily not for the Comédie Française, already popularly known as the "house of Molière" and dedicated to the work of the French classic dramatists and their faithful followers, but for the more marginal Comédie Italienne, created for the performance of commedia dell'arte and thus much less dominated by the Molière tradition. Today Marivaux is one of the pillars of the Comédie Française, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that his work was considered proper for that theatre, and he still remained much less highly regarded than other eighteenth-century comic authors such as Regnard and Dancourt. In more recent times his reputation has steadily grown and theirs decreased, especiallyafter Patrice Chereau and other modern directors found in him a dark psychological dimension that suited well the taste of the late twentieth century.

Beaumarchais is quite a different case. Far more widely known and admired in his own time than Marivaux, his work achieved its early high visibility not for its comic craft, among the best Europe has ever seen, but for the close association of his character Figaro, and especially the play The Marriage of Figaro to the political dynamics of the early years of the Revolution. For later generations, the familiarity of Beaumarchais's two "Figaro" plays, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, has primarily been due to the fact that they inspired popular operas by Rossini and Mozart, two of the greatest operatic composers of all time. The number of revivals of the plays that inspired these operas is today totally overshadowed by the operas themselves. The fact that Beaumarchais created other dramatic works, indeed even a third Figaro play, The Guilty Mother, is now almost totally forgotten.

In different ways, then, the dynamics of dramatic and theatre history have been relatively kind to Marivaux and Beaumarchais, but far less so to the many other French comic dramatists of their century, not a few of them more popular nationally and internationally in their own time than either of these now much more familiar authors. There are a variety of reasons for this neglect. Perhaps the most important is the overwhelming dominance of Molière in the French comic tradition, indeed in the French theatre in general. Almost any theatergoer, anywhere in the world, asked to name a single French dramatist, is most likely to name Molière, just as they would be likely to name Shakespeare for England. This dominance has naturally created serious problems for subsequent dramatists, who frequently are regarded, and frequently regarded themselves, primarily as inferior followers of the great master. This attitude has been institutionalized in critical and historical writings on the theatre, and, equally important, in subsequent production history, so that today one is far more likely to see a production of one of the least interesting works of Shakespeare or Molière than of considerably more interesting and accomplished works by their overshadowed contemporaries or followers, such as Beaumont and Fletcher or Regnard.

Nor is the dominance of the canonical figures the only reason for the relative neglect of most eighteenth-century dramatists in later periods. Time is not generally kind to comic works. Often directed toward the concerns and follies of their own society, comedies often seem quaint and faded to audiences who look back upon them when social conditions have changed, and new customs and new follies have replaced the old. Moreover, comedies of the eighteenth century tend to suffer not only from the disappearance of the entire society which they reflected but also from a change in what sort of emotional tonality audiences expect from comedy. The emotional appeals and strong sentimentality that characterize much eighteenth-century comedy throughout Europe usually seem to modern audiences mawkish and overdrawn, the appeals to emotion too obvious to be convincing. The general tradition of comedy in France, as in England, has been to emphasize laughter and wit over sentiment, and such popular eighteenth-century genres as the English "sentimental comedy" or the French "weeping comedy" seem to modern audiences, who expect a much sharper emotional edge, almost contradictions in terms.

Yet what such works may have lost in immediate social relevance they have gained by offering to later viewers or readers lively pictures of another time, engaging glimpses into another social world. The specific social rules and emotional valences may have changed, but the struggles between classes, between generations, between value systems are so much a part of human society in general that one can still appreciate the dynamics, and a good deal of the humor of these plays in recognizing familiar human relationships working themselves out in another key.

In general, French classic comedies, most of them written in rhymed verse, have been translated into English in prose, which in fact adds another barrier to their appreciation. As Richard Wilbur's delightful verse translations of Molière have demonstrated, an important part of the appeal of these plays is in the way that the rhythm and turns of the verse support the wit and the flow of the scenes. Both long individual speeches and rapid exchanges that seem rather flat in prose can often take on a surprising life when sympathetically rendered in verse. Each of the translations in this volume therefore seeks to achieve for its original something of the liveliness and flavor Wilbur has brought to their great inspirer, Molière.

The death of Molière in 1673 left his theatre for a time without a major living comic dramatist, but in the middle of the next decade two playwrights appeared who were widely regarded, in France and abroad, as legitimate heirs of the master and whose works dominated the French comic theatre into the first decades of the next century. These were Dancourt and Regnard. Since Dancourt used prose for his major comedies, he has been omitted from this collection of verse comedies, but he rivaled Regnard (and far surpassed Marivaux, Beaumarchais, and even Corneille) in productions at the Comédie Française up until modern times. Regnard, on the other hand, worked primarily in verse, as in the amusing The Absent-Minded Lover (Le Distrait) from the closing years of the century, which shows clearly how the tradition of Molière comedy is being continued a generation after his death. Indifferently received when first presented in 1697, it was withdrawn by its author and only revived in 1731, more than twenty years after his death. It then enjoyed a great success and was often revived in France and abroad for the rest of the century. Haydn composed a delightful set of incidental music for its German version.

The title of Regnard's play refers, in the manner of Molière, to a defect in the central character which drives much of the comic action. In Molière this defect is most commonly found in the older character who serves as a barrier to the union of the sympathetic young lovers (as in The Miser or The Imaginary Invalid). Regnard, by making it a defect in his romantic lead, looks more to the eighteenth- century interest in internal conflicts (the works of Marivaux provide clear examples of this), although a Molière model could be cited, if a much darker one, in The Misanthrope.

After the major works of Dancourt and Regnard at the turn of the century, another generation passed before a flurry of important new comic works appeared during the 1730s. If Regnard and Dancourt look clearly back to the previous century, these new works, while certainly within the same tradition, are very clearly eighteenth-century in tone. In this generation Marivaux has already been mentioned, but his popularity and influence in his own century was very slight. Two of his contemporaries, however, enjoyed enormous success and strongly influenced the course of comedy for the rest of the century. These were Nericault Destouches and Pierre Nivelle de La Chaussée.

Destouches, like his younger contemporary Voltaire, spent time as a young man in England and was strongly influenced by the English theatrical scene, then dominated by the Augustan authors Addison, Steele, and Cibber. In the works of Destouches, then, are found the first clear indications of the sentimentality and moralizing tone that characterized much French and English drama of the mid-eighteenth century. Oliver Goldsmith's famous essay "On Sentimental and Laughing Comedy" depicts English comic drama of the mid-eighteenth century as a kind of sentimentalized wasteland between the witty comedy of the Restoration and the revival of "laughing" comedy by such authors as himself and Sheridan. Although Goldsmith's case is overstated on at least two counts-laughing comedy never really disappeared, nor was sentimental comedy so devoid of laughter as he implies-it is certainly true that a distinctly more sentimental and moral tone dominated both English and French (and thereby European) comedy during the mid-eighteenth century. Modern readers and spectators, more in sympathy with the approach of Goldsmith than that of Steele, or of Beaumarchais than that of Destouches, must be willing in some measure to enter the emotional world of that period in order to appreciate its comic production.

In his own time Destouches was generally seen as a faithful follower of Molière (unlike Marivaux, who was generally thought to be taking comedy in a different and less attractive dimension). This was in part due to his practice of building a play around a central "ruling passion," as in his most famous and successful work, Le Glorieux (The Conceited Count). Destouches in fact saw himself as more innovative, and it is true that he did bring a variety of new elements into the Molière comedy of character, elements probably inspired by his admiration of the English theatre. In addition to a new emphasis upon morality and sentiment, Destouches is thought to have borrowed from the English the sort of romantic elements represented in this play by the hidden relationship of Lycandre and his children (although perhaps only the sentimental treatment of this relationship is really new, since Molière also used the common Plautine device of lost and reunited parents, children, and spouses, as in the conclusion of The Miser). Another mark of the new century, though by no means original with Destouches, is the tension between the newly rich but unsophisticated representatives of the bourgeoisie and the proud but nearly destitute members of the aristocracy, with marriage as the shifting and unstable point of negotiation between the two. The rising influence of the middle class brought this tension to the forefront of French comedy during this century, and the ongoing tensions between old families and new money continued to fuel French comic plots until well into the twentieth century.

French historians of the drama have long debated whether Destouches or his younger contemporary La Chaussée should be credited with inventing the comédie larmoyante, or "comedy of tears," which became a major element in the mid-eighteenth-century dramatic repertoire. Perhaps it is best to say that Destouches adds to the Molière tradition a distinctly eighteenth-century moral tone and emotionality, much more in harmony with the contemporary British stage, while La Chaussée moves much further in the direction of serious or at least sentimental comedy, truly establishing this as a new comic form. La Chaussée's first great success, The False Antipathy, appeared the year following The Conceited Count, and clearly left the traditional Molière comedy of character for the comedy of sentimentalized relationships. Le Préjugé à la Mode (The Fashionable Prejudice), attacking by emotion the prejudice that it was unbecoming and middle-class for a husband openly to express love for his wife, in both message and tone so precisely suited the taste of the times that it became a great success and one of the most influential plays not only in establishing the new "comedy of tears," but in establishing middle-class concerns and values as suitable subjects for serious drama as well.

In France, as in England, there was a reaction against the now well-established tradition of sentimental comedy in the 1770s, led in England by Goldsmith and Sheridan, and in France by Beaumarchais, with The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. During the Revolutionary years Beaumarchais returned to the sentimental tradition with his third Figaro play, The Guilty Mother, but the most famous of the many Revolutionary comedies was Jean-Louis Laya's L'Ami des lois (The Friend of the Laws), which ends this volume and comes from the final days of the political and social system in which the Molière comic tradition was created and developed. Laya began writing plays in the 1780s and in 1793 presented this, his most famous work, at the Comédie during the trial of Louis XIV. The play is fascinating simply as an historical document, but particularly interesting in the context of this collection is how Laya has adapted the techniques of the comic tradition to make his political statement. Like most eighteenth-century French comedy, The Friend of the Laws is distinctly moral in tone, the moral norm here set by the protagonist Forlis, a former nobleman who supports the Revolution but condemns its excesses. This was a position which clearly recalled the moderate raisonneurs of the Molière comedies but simultaneously aligned the play with the moderate Revolutionaries, the Girondists, now locked in what literally became a death struggle with the more extreme Revolutionary elements. Representatives of the extremist party appear in Laya's play as clear descendants of characters like Tartuffe, ruthless hypocrites interested only in advancing their own ends under the guise of a higher good. The traditional Molière comedic structure also remains in place, with a foolish member of the older generation, here the mother, infatuated with the grotesque villain and determined to marry him to a daughter who clearly is destined for the sympathetic hero. Laya's play increases its topical relevance by making his Tartuffe, the evil Nomophage, clearly suggest Robespierre, while Duricrane, the ruthless journalist who supports Nomophage, is equally clearly modeled on the Jacobin spokesman Jean-Paul Marat. Enthusiastically cheered by the moderates and violently opposed by the extremists, the play was a center of public confrontation during its brief run, shut down by the Revolutionary Commune, reopened by the Convention, and again closed after a single additional performance as a source of public disorder. It directly resulted in the re-establishment of dramatic censorship, which had been outlawed in the early days of the Revolution, and it was unquestionably one of the major reasons for the continuing hostility of Robespierre's party toward the Comédie Française, which was closed soon after they came to power and all of its actors arrested. The Friend of the Laws was revived soon after the fall of Robespierre, clearly more for political than artistic reasons, and enjoyed only a modest success. It remains still a fascinating example of the Molière dramatic structure being adjusted by the writer who was arguably Molière's last direct heir, to address the rapidly changing social circumstances as Molière's social and political world was coming to an end. As for Laya himself, he survived by going into hiding during the Terror and re-emerged during the Restoration as an important figure in the French literary and academic world. He was elected to the French Academy in 1817 and served as the royal censor for the theatres from that year until his death in 1833.