In Our Time - Molière

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great figures in world literature. The French playwright Molière (1622-1673) began as an actor, aiming to be a tragedian, but he was stronger in comedy, touring with a troupe for 13 years until Louis XIV summoned him to audition at the Louvre and gave him his break. It was in Paris and at Versailles that Molière wrote and performed his best known plays, among them Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope and Le Malade Imaginaire, and in time he was so celebrated that French became known as The Language of Molière.With Noel Peacock Emeritus Marshall Professor in French Language and Literature at the University of GlasgowJan Clarke Professor of French at Durham UniversityAnd Joe Harris Professor of Early Modern French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:David Bradby and Andrew Calder (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Molière (Cambridge University Press, 2006)Jan Clarke (ed.), Molière in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022)Georges Forestier, Molière (Gallimard, 2018)Michael Hawcroft, Molière: Reasoning with Fools (Oxford University Press, 2007)John D. Lyons, Women and Irony in Molière’s Comedies of Mariage (Oxford University Press, 2023)Robert McBride and Noel Peacock (eds.), Le Nouveau Moliériste (11 vols., University of Glasgow Presw, 1994- )Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (University of Chicago Press, 1999)Noel Peacock, Molière sous les feux de la rampe (Hermann, 2012)Julia Prest, Controversy in French Drama: Molière’s Tartuffe and the Struggle for Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)Virginia Scott, Molière: A Theatrical Life (Cambridge University Press, 2020)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, the French playwright, Moliere, 1622 to 1673,

is one of the great figures in world literature. He began as an actor, a would-be-trader. with a face for comedy, touring with his troupe for 13 years until Louis XIV, summoned him to audition and gave him his break. And it was in Paris and Versailles that he wrote and performed his best-known plays, among them Tatouf, the Miserables and the Mald Imaginaire, so celebrated that French became known as the language of Molière. With me to discuss Molière, Arnaud Picoke,

Emeritus Marshal Professor in French Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, Joe Harris, Professor of Early Modern French in Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway University of London, and John Clark, Professor of French at Durham University. John Clare, how did Molyer start out in life? Not with the same name, I think. No, his name is, or was, Jean Pocoulin, which became Jean-Paptiste-Pocelain,

and it wasn't until the 1640s that he took the name Molière. He was born into the bourgeoisie, the Parisian. bourgeoisie. His family were cloth merchants, tapestry makers and cloth merchants on both sides. So he was resolutely Parisian. We don't know an awful lot about his education. He went to the College of Claremont, which later became better known as the Lisee Louis Le Grand. There is a kind of legend that his grandfather took him to see farce actors on the Ponneuve, and that's how he got his love of theatre. And his father is kind of conversely cast as the person who wanted to discourage him from becoming an actor, but these are just kind of accretions and legends. There's no real evidence

to support that, although his father probably got a bit annoyed at having to pay off his debts when he did become an actor. He, after college, he went where he studied philosophy and the humanities. He is supposed to have gone to study law at all on, but again, there's no real evidence of that. And he appears to have given up his studies according to a contemporary commentator because he fell in love with an actress and Madeleine Bejarre

and followed her onto the stage. And he set up his first company with members of the Bejaar family in the early 1640s in Paris. He set of his own troop, really. What was it like to be an actor? were the troop of actors in those days? It was changing in the 1640s.

Previously, actors had been very poorly thought of, particularly before there were established troops in Paris. So before the 1630s, when there were just kind of bands of travelling players, they were rather kind of mal-vue. But after that, once they started to be settled, established troops in Paris, They became a bit more decent, and in 1641, Louis X13th actually issued a decree stating that actors who kind of lived well and didn't do anything reprehensible or perform anything reprehensible should not be persecuted. But even so, it was still the case that actors were considered to be excommunicate. and this was going to create issues at the end of Moliere's life

because they were not allowed to receive the sacraments and so had to renounce their profession in order to receive the last rights. And how did he probably work from a very strange start set up his own troop and take it around? Well, what happened was... He took him about 13 years, didn't he? He was in the provinces for 13 years.

That's a long time. It was, but it was mostly to... do with the failure of his, he set up a company. You can see the ambition because it was called the illustrious theatre, the l'Eustre theatre, with the Bejard family, as I just mentioned. And they did quite well in the first year, largely because one of the two rival theatres had burned down, so there was a gap in the market. But then that theatre reopened, the Marais theatre reopened, and so audiences started to fall off. And their first theatre was in Saint-Germain, Saint-Germain-Dé,

which wasn't, it was still fields at that time. It really didn't have the infrastructure to support a theatre. So they tried to move to a different location, nearer to the mare, but by that time they were so much in debt that basically they couldn't perform their way out of it. And so Moliere was imprisoned, and then they had to... Oh, that's a quick one. What was he imprisoned for and how long for? For debt.

but very briefly. So they would basically lock him up. His dad would turn up, pay off the creditors, and then he'd come straight out. So he was in prison and then obviously realized that there was no future for them in Paris. So pretty much all of the members

of the illustrious theatre company joined another company led by somebody called Charles Dufrin and that's when they left and went off touring in the provinces. Thank you. Jojo Harris. How did a true become successful

in those days. I think one of the skills that any troop needed at the time was above all a good memory. Theatre is a very expensive thing to put on when you've got a troop of 10 to 12 actors on average and that meant that every theatre troop

needed to have a large array of plays within their repertoire that they'd be able to put on at a moment's notice. It's not like nowadays when a play will be advertised for a certain run in advance but rather the troop would be keeping an eye on the box office numbers, the income and the takings. And if they weren't very good,

a play could be abandoned within a couple of performances. And so it was quite a cutthroat world, especially for playwrights who are trying to get their work out there. Another skill... That implies great feature of memory, doesn't it? It does, exactly, yes. You have a lot of plays, so if one doesn't work the next night, you put another one on. Exactly. And so Moliere's troop would have known, would have had dozens of plays at their disposal. And I think that really helped Malia as a playwright as well as an actor because he knew the texts of a lot of the key works from the previous couple of decades, let's say, really well. He knew what worked and he was able to borrow from them within his own playwriting as well as an actor. Another skill, I think, which was really important, was, well, theatre spectators at the time were quite disruptive.

They weren't as well behaved as they are today. There weren't any real purpose-built theatres until really the end of the century. and so acoustics were very bad. You needed to have a very good loud voice in order to be an actor and you needed to command the stage and get people's attention because you wouldn't necessarily be able to rely on them

sitting and paying attention dutifully however compelling the plot was. Could you tell us what he was like as an actor of that? What was your best at? He discovered quite early on that he had a talent for comedy and for farce, although I think it's worth bearing in mind. He did, as you said in your introduction,

have aspirations to, towards tragedy. Tragedy was seen as the noble genre at the time. It's easy to overstate how bad a tragic actor he was. And definitely people at the time would pick up on some of his failings that one of his enemies in the early 1660s says in one of his plays with, well, rather satirical praise says, oh, he's such a great actor because you laugh at the tragedies just as much as at the comedies. But he must have had something going for him as a tragic actor because it was with a tragedy, well, a double bill of a tragedy and a farce

that he got the attention of Louis the 14th in the first place. He tried to introduce a more naturalistic way of speaking in tragedy. He thought that most tragic actors were too pompous, too bombastic and wanted them to sound more realistic. But I don't think audiences

seem to appreciate that. So he makes fun of them instead. And actually in his plays as well, sometimes his own characters, his comic characters, have large setpiece monologues in a pseudo-tragic vein where Moliere, he would often play these characters himself, was able to overdo that for deliberate comic effect rather than for inadvertent comic effect

that seemed to have been the case with the straight tragedies. Thank you, Neil Pekock, how did Moliard get to appear before Louis XIV? Why do you think he made such an impression? It was 1658 when he went back to Paris, having reassured himself that he would be well received. the audience included the King's brother, the King, and a very select audience. It was at the Louvre, which was quite a big space that he was performing in,

and he chose to perform a play by Corne, a three-act play by Corne, Nicomede, which was probably not really a tragedy. It's a kind of heroic drama. And a farce, Le Doctor Amour, the Doctor in Love. And the King loved the play so much, or loved the farce in particular, that he was given access to the Petit Bourbon theatre. And his first major success from his own pen was Les Precires deucles, the affected ladies,

which was a one-act farce. And I think there's considerable influence from the Italians, the Comedé de la Arte actors. And it was very, very well received. Now, this was really a parody of girls, country girls, imitating the affected ladies on Paris. In fact, they were imitators, not necessarily the real Preciers. And this caused quite a storm, really, amongst the public,

because Mulya was thought to have been attacking those who were having a civilising effect on morals and language. Because we were talking about a period after the wars of the front, and a lot of vulgarity had crept into the language and also into behaviour. And the real Preciers were attempting to refine manners and language. But Mulya was sending up these girls As two lovers Want to marry the girls But they are totally intoxicated

With reading of novels And how courtship should be carried out This play caused quite a stir But it also Why did it cause such a stir? Because they thought Muddia was attacking the real thing Who would his audience have been? We told that Shakespeare's audience

went from the groundlings Or the aristocracy Was anything similar happen To Moliard? Yes, to some extent he would have the aristocracy, the different levels of aristocracy, the different levels of boxers, particularly at the marais. But they'd also have rich merchants who would be very much part of his audience.

And he said in Le Col de Fam, which was his next big play, he said the biggest challenge for me is to make what he called Honest Jean laugh, because these people, some of the particularly the aristocracy and the upper middle, wouldn't want to be seen laughing in public. So he said, this is my task. And he did it really by bringing together literary comedy, the refined comedy, with farce. Even in his great plays, there are elements of farce. John, how power women engage in the business of theatre at that time?

Oh, very much so. There's evidence to suggest that when Moliere went to the provinces and gradually emerged as the leader of a troop, he was actually co-leader with Madeline Bejaar. So theatre companies were essentially democratic and women played an equal part. They were based on a share system and so shares were awarded on merit. Women were shareholders. All decisions were taken at meetings of the entire company. So actresses were vitally important to a company.

But more than that, women were engaged in all aspects of the theatrical enterprise. So Molière's box office manager was a woman, Madame Prouvre. She handled the finance and other women were employed in important positions. So no, women were absolutely central to theatre at the time. Noel, Noel Pigog. In one sense, women are not as prominent as in, for instance, the plays by Racine, seven out of Racine's plays have women as the titular figure. whereas Moliere only has, I think, three women as titular heroines as such,

but he has mainly women generically, they call Lefam, the School of Wives, or the learned ladies, you know, generically rather than as individuals. Thank you, Jan Clark. Peter in Paris wasn't for the pain-hearted, was it? Not really, no. What kind of scrutiny did he undergo? I think it's not so much the level of scrutiny.

I think it's the degree of competition that makes it particularly challenging because there were, as I mentioned previously, there were very few companies in Paris at the time. There were never more than three or four theatres, five later in the century. So they were competing with each other. And also, because there wasn't this large popular audience,

it was a fairly restricted audience as well. So they were challenging each other. other and fighting with each other. A good example of that, we talked about Molière having been sent by the king to the petit Bourbon, which he shared with the Italian troop led by Scaramoush. And a couple of years later, both troops were performing an alternate days perfectly happily, and somebody turned up to demolish the theatre without the actors having been told. They were about to build the Louvre Colonnade. So Molière and the Italians couldn't actually continue performing

because they didn't have a theatre to go to. And so they were told that they would have to go to the Palaisal, another theatre in a royal palace as it happened. That was totally dilapidated. I mean, the ceiling had fallen in, and so it needed a great deal of work. While they were waiting for the Palaisal to be refurbished, they could only survive by giving private performances

in the homes of aristocracy. And while they were doing that, they were vulnerable because the other troops were trying to poach his actors. Because actors were free to move from one company to another at Easter of each year. But they all said that they loved Molière so much because he had such qualities, such great personal qualities, that they would rather stay with him no matter how precarious the situation appeared to be. And also it could get quite nasty at times. So, I mean, Molière wasn't above getting involved himself. We talked about tragic acting style.

In his play, Lampre de Versailles, he actually parodies. He does skits of the actors from the Hotel de Bourgogne Company. And it was only a few weeks after that. Molière had just got married and there was a degree of scandal about his marriage. and one of the Hotel de Bourguyen actors actually wrote to the king and said that Molière had married Armand Bejjar,

who they said was the daughter of Madeline Bejjar, who had been the woman that he'd first followed to go on the stage, which was probably true. But the king really wasn't bothered. I mean, the thing is that people could say what they liked about Molière. He had royal support. and the king was actually godfather to Moliere's first child with Amond Bejar. So it shows exactly how unconcerned he was about all the scandal

and about the rumour machine that was going on. Joe Harris, his plays are full of mockery and ridicule, rather dangerous weapons at the time. Can you tell us a bit about that and give us one of two examples? Yes, I think it's worth remembering to start with. He insists, at least in what he said. about the theatre, which isn't very much, that the two things about the sort of parameters of satire. First of all, decent satire, the type that he practices,

should not satirise individual people. It should satirise types of people, characteristics, personality types and so forth. Now that hasn't stopped people now and back in his day from saying, ah, no, I think Alceste in Le Miserrape was based on Monsieur de Montaussier, who was the tutor to the dauphin, or these doctors in Lamour Medesan were based on particular doctors, and it's possible to make those.

connections. But his ideal was that satire should be more general. It shouldn't be making fun of individual people, because that could be dangerous, but rather it should be making fun of particular types of person. But also, and Noel picked up on this point a little bit with Les Precious ridicule. He's making fun of Preciousity, this ideal of affected or refined behaviour. He insists he's not making fun of true Precious, but just people who can't incarnate it properly. And the same logic can be applied to a lot of his other characters. He has lots of ridiculous father figures in his plays. He has lots of affected society, fops and court types known as the Petit Marquis or Marquis Ridicule. But he's not suggesting that all of the

aristocracy or all fathers are ridiculous. Rather, he's making fun of people for not embodying those ideals properly. So in a sense, his comedy is actually, on one level, quite conservative. He doesn't seek to challenge the system as a whole, but rather makes fun of people who can't quite live up to the expectations of the position within their society. Thank you. Noel, Noel Peacock, I think it's a good time to talk about the unities. How important were they to his work and what did they mean at that time? Well, I think the unities were very important in tragedy. The unities, the three unities, unity of place, unity of time, everything had to happen in 24 hours and unity of action, which really meant unification of plot. But in

Comedy, it was less important because you don't have the same linearity of structure. For instance, the ending of comedy is something which you wouldn't see in tragedy with people appearing who haven't been mentioned or hardly mentioned. In Le Col de Fam, for instance, Oras, one of the young lovers says in Act 1, Scene 4, I'm looking for my parents who, they're going to come back from the Americas. And of course, they appear in the end to resolve what the lovers couldn't do. prearranged marriage, which happened to be coincide with the lovers' wishes. But that would not happen in tragedy.

In the Mizont Hop, you would find it probably respects the unities more than any, in a sense as a coherent, a linearity that the ending is resolved through the means of the characters. I'm sorry, if I may add in, I think one thing that Moliad did, which was quite innovative, is that he shifted the location of his plays as well. To start with, his comedies tend to be set in an open public play. like a crossroads, which had been the traditional location for the comedies by Corne, for example, in the 1630s, whereas the unity of places far more plausibly and better kept, I think, by a movement indoors, which is what happens within most of Moli's later plays, which are sort of set more within a family unit.

You don't have those random chance meetings of people that you would in other plays. And so it allows the plot to be concentrated more around the problems of a family, and often a family dominated by some patriarch, some obsessive patriarchal figure. But when spectacle comes to be more of a thing and he's moving more into court theatre and spectacle theatre, then obviously you need multiple locations because most of your spectacle is going to come from the decor.

And so D'Anjouin, which is what, 16, 65? I can never remember the dates. Dengueuant has six different decor. And it's kind of different locations. around the same town. So I think the thing about Moliere is that he can allow himself a certain degree of freedom,

which obviously a tragic playwright isn't going to be, and he's very much more driven by what he wants to say. So in Le Mizantre, then it's going to be a tight, enclosed space because they're battling over a territory

and battling over a woman. Whereas in D'Anjouard, he's trying to escape his fate, and so he has to move from place to place, and the fate is tracking him down. There are so many plays, I mean, wrote over 30, but can we discuss one? Let's look at tart tooth. Basics, what's the play about?

It's about a foolish man who has invited a director de conscience into his house, a kind of spiritual advisor or guru, which is good Catholic practice of the time. You know, St. Francois de Salle had actually advocated the use of director de conscience. So this man has come as a cuckoo in the nest to live with Organs and his family. And the family all hate him and Organs is absolutely blind and only thinks that Tartouf is absolutely wonderful. To the extent that when his son, well, first of all, he says that he's going to marry Tartouf to his daughter, whereas Tartuff actually prefers Organs' wife. So he's fallen in love with Organs' wife El-Limier and tries to see.

seduce her. When his son says what's going on, Organt disinherits him in favour of Tartouf. And so at the end of the play, the family are about to be disinher. Elmere is probably one of the... Tartouf has two of the strongest female characters in the whole of Molière. It has a strong female servant who tries to defend the interests of the daughter. And it has a very, very sophisticated, elegant, intelligent woman in the person of Elmere, who proves to her husband that Tartouf is a fraud. And she does it by hiding her husband under the table and seducing or leading Tartouf on so that she can demonstrate to her husband that he wants to seduce her. It's probably the most famous scene in the whole of French theatre.

Jo, why was Tartoub ban then? Well, for a bit of context, it's worth remembering that the theatre as an institution had been condemned by the church for a long time. So officially at least the church had been against the theatre, as we mentioned earlier, we were talking about excommunication. Because the theatre was so popular, they had developed a sort of uneasy truce between the church and the stage. What that meant in practice is that comedies in particular would avoid dealing with anything remotely religious, even words like God in the singular were forbidden. The characters would say heaven or gods in the plural. Weddings are a key theme within comedies,

but people would always talk about them in a secular way, talking about the notary rather than about a priest coming to administer them. So they remained in a very secular space. And as long as theatre remained within that space, everything was more or less fine. The problem is because Mulya was dealing with a hot topic in terms of religion and religious imposture. It got the church involved very early on.

In 1664, an early version of Tartuuf was performed. We don't have this early version. It's been lost, although some people have tried to reconstruct it fairly plausibly. It was a three-act play originally, and it was performed before the king. He seemed to have enjoyed it, but his own confessor, who was the Archbishop of Paris, put him under great pressure to have the play banned.

And this Archbishop of Paris, Peréphix, name was, threatened anybody caught performing, reading, or watching the play with excommunication. So, Moliath... Did he succeed in his banning? Well, he did, to start with, yes, he didn't stop Moliere from wanting the

play to be performed, and Moliere spent a long time rewriting it, and in 1667, he overhauled the play. I think by this point into a five-act play, he changed Tartou from being what originally seems to have been some man of the cloth, some clerical figure, into being this lay

figure this director de conscience that Jan was just talking about in order to show that this character was not a hypocrite. That was the original subtitle of the play, as in someone who belongs to the church but doesn't really follow its rules, but to being an imposter as in someone from outside the church who is using the mantle, the guise of piety. And yet that version was also banned as well. Noel, Moliath keeps putting his head above the parapet and almost inviting to be shot at. How did he protect himself? He obviously had a difficult time in trying to get his tart tooth back. But at the same time, he had such a vast repertoire that he kept going.

He was very pragmatic about it, and he continued to put on performances, and he wrote what is generally regarding it as a masterpiece, D'Angain, which revived some of the controversy. How did it do that? Well, the controversy, because the, again, they thought it reliance. religion was being attacked. The theme of Dengue, the adventurer, the, well, the Dengue, who was the freethinker, power excellence, who is challenging everybody, including

the divine. And so he got, he was accused of being an atheist for writing that play. What critics, I don't think, perceived that his Dengue, he doesn't succeed in anything that he does. He tries to seduce the peasants he doesn't get. He compares himself to Alexander the Great, the arch archetypal womanizer. But he doesn't perform as such. And even in his profession of faith,

where he tries to get the poor man to swear, the poor man doesn't. He keeps to his faith, and Don Juan just gives him the money, he says, for the love of humanity. And in the end, he is worsted in his challenge with the statue as a representative of the divine. But what Moli is saying,

theatre conquers everything. The theatre intervenes, the artifice of theatre. But Moli did suffer from that, and the play was taken off. after 15 performances. But he kept going, and he wrote probably his masterpiece, Lemise on top, while he was still suffering all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I think it's your question, Melvin, was how did he protect himself? And to a certain extent he didn't have to, because he always had the king on his side. And so, again, when the Tartouf was banned, I mean, it was very clearly stated that it was banned the king would did it because he was such a pious person, he felt obliged to do it, and it was against his own interests, because personally he would have liked to see the play. And so what Molière did was because the king wanted to see Molière,

Molière basically went on strike. And that was how he eventually got Tartu put on, because he just stopped performing. He, when it was finally banned, the Amposter version was banned, Molière just shut his theatre down for seven weeks and didn't perform. And then he even, he performed plays by other authors. By this time, Moliere was really only performing in his own plays.

And so his company, when it came back on, performed plays by other people that Moliere didn't have a role in. And Moliere was the big attraction. And so, effectively, he put pressure on the king to lift the ban because Moliere was so vital to performances at Quar. court. Molier even sent his troop to court, to Versailles, I think, and they didn't give a

Molier play. It was absolutely unheard of. Noel, do you want to comment on that? Moliere did plead with the king, and particularly in 1667, these really placé and letter, these things he wrote to the king about. But the king was also,

he was not immune from attack from the church himself, and I think the king was caught between the two. And I think that was, he had a very difficult because the king at the time was, I think he was following a more sort of liberal religious regime. Later he became much more stare. And I think the time was right, really, in 1669, for it to reappear.

And the public were wanting it. And obviously it was a huge sellout. So did morning I think it was enough to be right. He's often regarded as the advocate of reason and common sense. But one of the things that comes across so much in his plays is that simply, being in the right isn't enough. You can't talk reason into someone who is irrational. Of course, if you could, then there wouldn't be any plays because the person who is in charge of voicing and articulating a more sensible perspective on things would be able to talk sense

into the ridiculous character from the start. So one of the themes that crops up throughout Malia's play is his characters are dominated, lots of them, by a particular obsession, whether it is misanthropy or miserliness or an obsession with learning or whatever. And what Moliere often suggests within his plays is that you have to learn how to negotiate these people. The happy ending is brought about either through pure chance. Something happens from the outside like a deosex machina sort of conclusion, people turning up from the Americas and revealing that they've already arranged for this girl to marry this boy or whatever. Or trickery.

So you can't use reason against people who are dominated by unreason. Can you tell us, Jan, about Moliere's great adaptability? He knew that the king liked dancing, for instance. What did that lead him to? Yes. Well, Moliere Ballet, Court Ballet, was the major art form of the court. And it all really started not in a performance for the king, a production for Fouquet, the king's.

Minister of Finance at Vouloule Viscont because he was Fouquet wanted to put on a huge festivity for the king and they didn't have that many good dancers and so Molière had the idea of interspersing the entre, ballet entrances with acts of a play and so it gave so that the in between times the dancers would have time to change their costumes get their breath back and then come back on as different characters. And so that gave rise to a new genre, which was called Comedy Ballet, which Moliere basically invented. Joe, are there any of these other works that stand out?

Well, almost everything he wrote was in the field of comedy in a broader sense of the word. We were talking about the Comedy Ballet, which are interspersing comedies with ballets. He didn't tend to move much beyond that. One of his last plays was a co-written tragedy ballet on Psi-Sche, so Science. and Cupid, this mythological plot. That was one. A lot of his ballets, actually, the comedy and tragedy ballet,

were written under intense time pressure. Le Flescheur that we just mentioned, he had two weeks to do. Psié, he ended up not being able to even finish, and so he got other playwrights, Kino and Corne, to write the rest of the play for him. He sort of drafted the whole thing. It's less that he worked within different genres,

but he was able to blend different types of comedy, comély de arté, traditional French farce. He also innovated, one of my favorite plays of his that we've mentioned, I think briefly, is La Critique de L'Ecole de Femme. It's a play, not a play within a play, but a play about a play.

It's a play which consists of a group of people sitting around in a sort of salon gathering, discussing Molière's latest play, which was apparently very contentious, and discussing its merits and criticizing it. And there's a totally innovative new way for Molière to express his idea

years. Previously, whenever there had been literary debates about plays, they'd been conducted through letters, publications, pamphlets, that Moliath decided to fight back against his critics on his own home terrain, which was that of comedy itself. And that was one of his real innovations, I feel. Following on from that, I think it's important to mention his other contribution to the Couragelle de la Comte de Vé, which is L'Amporteur de Versailles, which is a rehearsal play, and again was written under incredible pressure. That's why he calls it an Ampont tune, kind of made up on the spot. And again, Versailles, because he's bragging about his associations with the king.

But it shows Moliere stages himself directing a play. And it's in this play that he parodies the actors. So he's really showing himself at work, discussing. And the actors are challenging him and saying, why are you doing this? Why have you not put this bit? Oh, do I have to play this same old character again? and he's staging his own process, basically. Can I say one of the consequences of this new genre as well in both of these plays

is that it didn't have a fixed ending. Normally comedies would end with a reunion and a marriage and some sort of happy ending, whereas when it's just people talking or people rehearsing, there isn't an easy solution. And they even say that within the critique. One of the characters says, this is a nice little chat we've had. Maybe we should send it to Moliere to write it up. And someone else says, but we don't have a conclusion here.

and then someone, a servant turns up saying, food is ready, and they say, oh, that's a brilliant way to end the play. And likewise with Lamponteau, someone from the King comes in and says, actually, you don't need to do this performance after all, the pressure's off, and everyone can be very relieved, and there's a happy but plausible ending as well. No, is there any way we can think of him as a free thinker?

Well, it depends what we mean by freethinker. Cotgrave, when he speaks of free thinking, I think it was in his dictionary, 1611, and he equates it with dissolute behaviour and debauchery. Now, there were different types of free-thinking. The early part of the century, there were freethinkers like Vanini and Giordani Bruno and Teufield de Vieu, who went back to the Italian Renaissance.

They were naturalists, but their free thinking led to a very unfortunate end because they were burnt at the stake. Well, not Teofield de Vaux, he was de Vieu, he was exiled. but they were strangled first, for blasphemy, for their irreligious behaviour, for their disilluteness as well, also for their deviation from what was accepted morality. But you see, even in 1662, Claude Lepete was burnt. This is the time when Moliere was writing Le Col de Fam.

But their free thought went underground, and the freethinkers tended to express their free thought in different ways. For instance, Siron-Ber de Bergerac, the states of the moon, in a narrative of another world in which these things happen, not in our world, far be it from that. And others, Lamot-Liveye, he put a con de pluralist perspective

in his work, defending the virtue of pagans. And so Mulya, he was quite friendly with Lamot-Livea and Chappelle, some of the free thinkers of the time. So in that kind of definition, I think one would probably say he was a free thinker, though I think as a man of the theatre,

I think I would probably agree with the 19th century poet, Teofield Gautier, who said that his religion was his art. It was the art of the theatre. And I think in his plays, I think folks have tried to see

if there's an ideology, if one can detect libertinage. But you see, as we said, in D'Anjouin, his libertin is also sent up. Jan, there's a legend, about the death of Molière. Can you explain it or exploded?

There are various legends surrounding his death. Let's have the main one. Okay, well the main one is that he died on stage, which he didn't. After the fourth performance of Le Malad de Maginère, he fell ill. He had been very perfectly well when the play started, but at the third performance he was recorded as having been very tired afterwards.

after the fourth performance, he had some kind of a chest infection and was taken home afterwards and ruptured a vein in coughing is what actually happened. The problem was that he realised that the end was near, sent for two priests who refused to come, and when one did come it was too late and he'd already died without having had time to renounce his professes. and received the last rights.

So the following day, his wife had to write to the Archbishop of Paris and ask for permission for him to be buried in hallowed ground, which was accorded, so he was buried at Saint-Josef. But all of the kind of the legends that rose up about him actually having died on stage during the performance of Le Mala D'Imaginaire. I mean, the comedy Francaise still preserves the armchair that he was sitting in for that, supposedly, for that last performance. Joe, what are the challenges of our opportunities

of performing Molière today? There are certain elements of Molière's plays that have dated or are no longer appropriate. For example, some of his original targets like Preciousity, for example, of long past, sometimes some of his attitudes towards women's learning in Le Fam Savants, the Learned Lady, now seem, you know, we've moved past them, thankfully.

But a lot of what he makes fun of on a deeper level, once you go beyond the particularities of the individual plays, is something which is far more accessible, far more recognisable to the present day as well, because he is very interested in just the follies of human interaction, I suppose. And so it means that people have been able to take his works and adapt them in various different ways. Now, maybe I'm being unfair,

but from my personal anecdotal experience, I think that people in the UK and maybe anywhere outside France have a slight advantage when staging Molière because Molière is not caked into our heritage and into our identity and the way that he is in France, as you were saying at the beginning,

French is seen as the language of Molière. I think it means that directors and acting and the theatre troops nowadays have a certain degree of playfulness, creativity and maybe disrespect towards the Molière text that maybe people in France feel a little bit that they don't necessarily have. And so I've seen, for example, various,

I've seen three, possibly four Muslim Tartouf's, for example, taking the plot of Tartouf, but transplanting it into a contemporary Muslim household setting. There's been, I know I haven't seen it, but there's an American version, I wish I had seen, set about, well, that came out about five years ago with Tartouf as an American. an evangelical MAGA sort of supporter figure

showing how easily led people's faith in their god and their country can be misled and appropriated. So there are things within Moliere's plays that will remain timeless that directors are able to sort of seize on and take advantage of, I think. Noel, coming near the end now, how would you sum up the broader influence on Moliath?

I think he has been a phenomenal figure in the history of the theatre in French theatre. He still, for instance, the one time I went to Paris and saw a play, 13 different productions were on in Paris. Now, I don't think if I went...

I don't think if I went to London, there would be 13 performances of Shakespeare. However good, and I do think Shakespeare, because he could do both tragedy and comedy, he might have the edge. But I think really that what strikes me about his work is that his comedy is a bridge

and not a wall. We're all implicated. And we see ourselves laughing with him at the follies of his lead figure. Then realize, wait a minute, we are capable of the same kind of folly. And I think as long as there is human vanity and pretentiousness and hypocrisy and gullibility that allows these tartuffes to prosper, I think Malia's comedy will still have audiences. and I'm sure we would still queue up to see them.

Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Jan Clark, Little Peacock and Joe Harris. Next week, how Korea shook off colonial powers at the end of the 19th century to emerge as a nation. That's the Korean Empire. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What did you not say that you wish you'd had time to say? Start with you, Noel. Probably Moliere's influence on restoration comedy. That, as you know, the theatres were closed from 1642 to 1660 in England, for different reasons, mainly because there were vehicles of propaganda, a political decision there. But I think that he had an immediate impact. He offered ready-made plots for people to translate,

because obviously there had been. 18 years when dramatists weren't able to get anything on stage. And he made, for instance, his tartuff, and how it represented the evolution of thinking at the time. For instance, Tartouf, the 1670 version of Tartouf, the French Puritan, Matthew Medborn. It was obviously reflecting the restoration. But in 1689, another Tartouf by John Crown,

it reflected the change that William and Mere had brought in. So the attack was on. Catholicism, whereas the previous attack was on Puritanism. So I think it's a weird window on even the history of that period in England and very well worth taking an interest in pursuing and looking at how Molière charts unwittingly beyond the grave, he charts the story of the UK during that period. What about? I'm conscious of the fact that we didn't necessarily wrap up Tartouf quite as fully as we could have done. Because I think one of the interesting things is the fact that the last act of the play

is actually thanks to the king for having allowed him to perform it. So the family are about to be ejected from the house. Tartouf appears to be triumphant and a court official turns up and says, the king knows everything, the king knows who is good and who is evil. and so Tartuv gets hoisted off to prison and the family left in possession of their home. And I think that's quite interesting the fact that it's like a rex-ex machina

when everything appears to be wrong, the king can actually sort it all out. And I think that's, given what we were saying about the Moliere's relationship with the king, I think that's really quite significant. Although, can I just add on to that there? I think there's also a more cynical way of reading that, which is that the king could have stopped Tartouf ages

before and he didn't. He is stage managing everything and it turns out that he has put this family through this terrible situation. Yep. Yeah, that is a good point. One thing that we didn't talk about much was one thing that I find fascinating and frustrating about Molière is

he's very hard to pin down to a particular position. He's very good at making fun of one perspective but that doesn't mean he's therefore embracing the opposite. So with Le FAM savant, the learned ladies, he's clearly on one level misogynistically mocking women's aspirations to intellectual enlightenment and education.

But that doesn't mean that he is therefore in favour of the more traditional conservative perspective. In fact, the father figure in that play, Chrysal, is a henpecked husband. He's weak, he's pathetic, and he has these fantasies of being the patriarchal lawgiver in his family, and he crumbles every time his wife turns up on stage.

And so just because Moli is making fun of one thing, it doesn't mean that he's therefore advocating the opposite. The other thing that we didn't talk about is his other, well, we hardly mentioned his other classic masterpiece, Le Misanthrop, there as well. Alcest is a misanthrope. He is critical of all of society and he has very valid points, but he has also mocked himself. He stands out against society and he is the butt of all of the humour. And again, it's impossible to fully laugh at him because he welcomes that.

In fact, he explicitly says that he likes being laughed at. it's a wonderfully complicated play. Maybe that's one for another session, actually. I'll draw it to a close though, I think. Following on from that, I think it's also interesting the way that he misdirects

the audience. And so he has the targets of his satire, but the most obvious target is somebody who is not going to be present. So he's evading the worst of the criticism. So, for example, if you take a play like Georges Dandel, which is one of the comedy ballet,

but the main plot of Georges Dandat is about a rich peasant who marries the daughter of members of the country aristocracy. Well, this was first performed at court and then was performed in town, so the only people who you could pretty much guarantee would not be present in the audience

are rich peasants and country aristocracy. So people can kind of make the applications. It represents a very, very unhappy marriage. And there's a huge plea from Angelique saying, I didn't have to be married to him. I don't have to do what he says. This is absolutely dreadful. He married my parents and not me.

But people can take the message without actually feeling personally targeted. And he does that over and over again. You know, Le Bourgeois Gentium, again, is somebody a bourgeois who has non-Bourgeoisieux, aspirations so the aristocrats in the audience can find him funny, but the bourgeois in the audience can find him funny as well for having such ludicrous ideas. I think also that one can look at the dual attitude towards all his characters.

If you look at Alcest, there's so much, in the days of fake news and all that, Alsaceous represents a certain morality many would espouse, but it's the extent to which he takes his truth-telling. And the reason for it is that I want to be distinguished. And similarly with Selimé, who is the female lead, she's an ironist. And when asking students which Molière character they would like to have tea with or a beer or whatever, they say Seliméin, because she's iron, she's very witty, she would entertain them, he would give portraits of everyone who's not there, not people who are there.

But at the same time, Molière leaves her. at the end. And she, almost like Shylock, she disappears. She has to leave the salon culture, the salon which she has set up and which she loves. And it's quite interesting in 2009 in London where Kira Knightley played Selimé, they brought her back on the stage for before the curtain call as a kind of tragic victim. And so our attitude again has changed to some of these, but at least it is showing us the duality of characterization, which is part of the greatness of man's misery, man's greatness, and seen in these characters.

So at a deeply philosophical level one could look at that. I'm not sure that Moliere wrote them thinking of this philosophy in mind, but that's what comes out. And it accords with some of the great thought in the 17th century. Yes. And do you think that he will continue to be as popular as it was when you found 13 productions on at the same time? It could be even more so.

I think it depends also on the kind of production. Obviously, sometimes some of the productions get star actors like, for instance, Kira Knightley, also Elaine Page. She performed, said amen. So I think that, I think he will continue to be because these are great themes. And as I say, as long as we're still self-reoccupied, which to varying degrees we can be.

despite all our attempts to correct it, I think, you know, we will continue to like it. Thank you all very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. You need to rush off. There might be a mighty cup of tea. Does anybody want tea or coffee?

Melvin, tea? No, I'm fine with water, thank you. But people might want to... I'd love a coffee, please. Coffee, please. Actually, a coffee. You're making tea. Coffee would be nice, please.

Yeah, thanks. One, two, nothing for you, Melvin. Is that right? One? Nothing for you? No. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you very much.

In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillots. and it's a BBC Studios audio production. Screenshot. It gave me as an actress just what I was craving. They were both very mature as filmmakers. This was a film that spoke to a red state, blue state divide. I'm Mark Kermode. And I'm Melanie Jones and we'll direct you

through the intertwined worlds of film, television and streaming. In the new series, we'll look at Studio Ghibli and summer blockbusters and start with cinema's fascination with doppelgangers. Helped by the one and only Richard Iowardy. I'd quite like to meet more Norwegian Nigerians. In fact, if there's a meeting, I'll happily attend. Screenshot from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.