To be sure, what period playwrights and audiences took “nature” to be reflected moral as well as dramatic conventions peculiar to the culture of the time. The famous “quarrel” or literary controversy surrounding Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid (1637) provides a test case. In addition to criticizing Corneille for mounting a series of events (two duels, two trials, a Moorish invasion, and the ensuing pitched battle) that could not conceivably fit within a single natural day, the poet’s adversaries lambasted him for creating a heroine whose undying passion for her father’s killer was seen to bespeak a whorish hypocrisy no tragic heroine could display and retain that name. The problem, though, was less her passion’s “natural” unthinkableness than the way it violated the aesthetic bienséance, or “seemliness,” involved. After all, everyone was perfectly aware that the actual historical woman on whom Corneille based his heroine did in fact marry her father’s murderer. The issue accordingly concerned what convention demanded of convincing tragic heroines if the play was to produce the expected impact.
Still, as evinced by the potentially scandalous character of the historical, legendary, and even biblical events on which playwrights drew for plots, the sense of nature associated with the principle of immanence governing dramatic vraisemblance raised metaphysical as well as literary stakes. A commonplace of contemporary theatrical theory and practice was the rigorous avoidance of the deus ex machina, or “god from a machine,” as a device for resolving dramatic denouements. If the key to a successful action is its internal logical consistency, such that nothing happens that cannot be understood to form a natural effect of equally natural causes, miraculous interventions have to be rigorously proscribed. But what does this entail if not a fundamentally naturalistic picture of the course of events and of the world those events characterize? In this sense seventeenth-century tragedy participated in the same revolutionary disenchantment of sublunary experience witnessed in the contemporary triumphs of early modern natural science, politics, historiography, and philosophy. The poetic principle of immanence was thus a direct literary counterpart of the metaphysics of immanence alluded to a moment ago. The common denominator of Cartesian mechanism, positing a strictly material explanation of physical phenomena independent of divine intervention; of Spinoza’s historical critique of holy writ, which interpreted the Bible as the work of human authors struggling to solve equally human problems; or of Hobbes’s systematization of Machiavellian political science, portraying government as the rational manipulation of amoral social forces is the elimination of even indirect resort to God in any form. Insofar as dramatists imposed exactly similar constraints on a well-wrought plot, they helped lay the groundwork for our modern world.
Nevertheless, if, in inventing the modern stage, French classical tragedy helped pave the way to the modern world, it fell to the great comic poet Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known to us by his stage name, Molière, to have created the first truly convincing portrayal of modernity itself. Molière’s preeminence in this regard is due in the first place to the fact that he was an actor and director as well as poet—unlike any other leading playwright of the day, he worked onstage even as he wrote for it. The illusionistic vraisemblance that was, for his rivals, a matter of poetics was his bread and butter. Beyond composing “regular” comedies whose unfolding plots supplied the basic information audiences needed to understand what was happening, he professionalized every aspect of theatrical performance.
Contemporary observers commented on the unprecedented discipline his company achieved, remarking not only on the elements of Molière’s personal performances, and in particular his astonishing démontages, changing facial expression in the blink of an eye, but also on his troupe’s work as an ensemble. Spectators noted, for instance, the precise timing of exchanges of glances between Molière’s actors, and the skillful blocking and painstakingly counted steps that choreographed their physical movements to maximum effect. Above all, there was the growing naturalism of his company’s acting style, abandoning the bombastic declamatory mode adopted especially in tragedy in favor of something approaching the tones and postures of everyday life. Molière himself made the point in a series of virtuoso parodies of the day’s leading tragic actors in L’impromptu de Versailles (The Versailles Impromptu) (1663), a one-act comedy that, despite its title, taught a carefully scripted lesson on the art of acting in which, pretending to rehearse a play commissioned by the reigning monarch, Louis XIV, for performance at court, the troupe takes the audience backstage to reveal the mechanics of their trade. Molière’s parodies of rival actors lampooned everything from the unrestrained eating habits that made them too fat for their roles to the way the narcissistic meals they made of their lines in pursuit of the “brouhaha” of public approbation impeded dramatic flow.
Molière was aided in all this by the fact that, as author as well as actor and director, he imposed the discipline of a playbook on his company. Molièresque comedy was deeply indebted to the improvisational style of the commedia dell’arte: Molière’s earliest plays, now lost to us for this very reason, were Italianate scenarios—bare plot lines that left it to the actors to improvise their parts in the course of performance, making up their lines and physical business in accordance with the prefabricated character types in which each specialized. Nevertheless, by the late 1640s, everything Molière’s actors said and did was written down for them in a predetermined script, and then rehearsed under the poet’s exacting directorial eye. Nothing was left to chance, even though the product was the seeming artlessness of live action.
However, the deepest source of Molière’s modernity was his genre, comedy itself. As numberless period theorists asserted in Aristotle’s wake, comic drama is rooted in the terms and conditions of ordinary life. Where the heroes and heroines of tragedy are greater than we are in degree if not in kind, being more noble, valorous, and accomplished than the normal run of mortals, their comic counterparts perform at the same level as we do—only, if anything, worse—in that they are as a rule more extravagantly ludicrous than we are quite comfortable in acknowledging of ourselves. Where heroic patterns of character commit tragedy to depicting the world as it ought to be, comedy focuses on the world as it is, whatever lofty ambitions its inhabitants pursue. In the case of comedy, then, realism of the sort Molière’s troupe aimed at is a matter of vraisemblance in both uses of the word: the sense of natural plausibility required to sustain the dramatic illusion also conforms to the demands of conventional propriety that Corneille’s Le Cid violated. While it was seen to be improbable for a tragic heroine to divide her heart between her lover and the murdered author of her days, a comic heroine’s readiness to sacrifice not only her father but a geriatric husband on the altar of sexual bliss was a stock feature of comic plots. So while tragedy was obliged to rearrange even the facts of history in the service of a grand ideal of human conduct for which ordinary experience provides little warrant, comedy reduces heroic idealism to the flesh-and-blood contingencies of day-to-day affairs.
To use a medical metaphor—which Molière’s career-long satirical obsession with medicine recommends—if the springs of tragic action are symptoms of the messy empirical particulars that tragic characters strive to overcome, comedy diagnoses the underlying pathology that defines the world both arts reflect. As Molière puts it in the Critique de L’école des femmes (The Critique of the School for Wives) (1662), staging a critical conversation about an earlier play that I will turn to shortly, “When you depict heroes, you do what you like. These are portraits painted at pleasure, in which one seeks no resemblance, and you need only follow the promptings of an imagination that takes flight and that often quits the true for the fabulous. But when you depict men, you paint according to nature. People want such portraits to bear a likeness, and you’ve achieved nothing if you don’t make us recognize the people of your age.” By contrast with tragedy, comedy is thus a “public mirror” devised to enable audiences to see their own faces, foibles, and flaws—what they really are, whethe
r they like it or not. Molière’s plays accordingly not only paint an image of the world the poet and his contemporaries lived in; they offer increasingly critical soundings of that world designed to explain, among other things, the low facts of life as comedy depicts them.
Three plays lay out the core of Molière’s comic vision: Tartuffe (1664–69), Don Juan, ou le festin de pierre (Don Juan, or The Stone Guest) (1665), and Le misanthrope (1666). All three were staged as part of the ferocious public controversy ignited by L’école des femmes (The School for Wives) (1662), as increasingly sharp rejoinders to the renewed “quarrel of the morality of theater” occasioned by what many in the public decried as the earlier play’s combined “obscenities” and “impieties.” Charges of immorality had been leveled at theater from the earliest days of Christianity—a peculiar feature of the seventeenth-century version of the debate was in fact the insistence with which it recycled arguments originally articulated by Tertullian and Augustine in the third and fourth centuries CE. Actors were denounced for being professional liars, prostituting themselves in the service of pleasures inimical to Christian virtue. Careful scrutiny of even the noblest tragedy revealed that, far from fostering a spirit of humble worship, theater’s fundamental subjects were the passions of ambition, revenge, hatred, and sexual love. A natural outgrowth of these facts was the notorious depravity of players’ daily lives, producing scenes of drunkenness and debauchery that spilled over into the public playhouse, where wine and women were purchased at will.
The quarrel had been temporarily suspended with a royal edict of 1643—inspired by Cardinal Richelieu and policed by the Royal Academy that he had created in 1635—which declared the newly polished theatrical productions promoted under state supervision to be exempt of the disorders for which the stage had traditionally been vilified. Even so, by episcopal decree, all actors and actresses in the archdiocese of Paris were subject to automatic excommunication as long as they continued in their profession—a decree so rigidly enforced that, despite his fame and the highly remunerative royal patronage he enjoyed, Molière had to be buried in the middle of the night to avoid a public scandal. The ground was thus laid for a fresh outbreak of hostilities as soon as occasion permitted.
L’école des femmes supplied it. The play tells the story of one Arnolphe—a man predestined for cuckoldry by his very name, which recalls the folkloric patron saint of betrayed husbands, Arnolf de Cornibont. (The historical Arnolf was not in fact a saint; but the connotation of an abundance of cornes, or “horns,” in the unfortunate toponym he bore proved irresistible.) Despite the unlucky augury of his name, Arnolphe intends to marry. However, having made a twenty-year study of the marital misfortunes of his fellow citizens, he has developed a foolproof plan based on what he calls, in grandiloquent allusion to Descartes, a carefully worked-out “method.” Some years past, he purchased an orphan girl, Agnès, whom he has had educated in a convent far from the haunts of men and according to a pedagogical system of his own devising. The aim is to render her une sotte, a woman so ignorant of the ways of the world and her own desires as to be incapable of deceiving him. Needless to say, the scheme comes to grief when Arnolphe’s bride-to-be meets the handsome (if witless) Horace and falls in love. The result is the hero’s feverish struggle to retain the upper hand in the face of Agnès’s ever-clearer grasp of her own identity and wishes. “For Love,” as Horace puts it in one of many foolish confidences to the man in whom he fails to detect his rival, “is a great teacher: what one never was he teaches us to be; and, often, his lessons change our whole way of life in an instant.”
Simple—and even routine—as its plot may be, the play pushed the limits of public propriety. Just as theater’s devout enemies would insist, the play’s theme is love rather than virtue. Molière then rubs salt in the wound by making it inescapably plain that by “love” here he means sex—and sex in explicit defiance of the pious commonplaces of orthodox morality, trotted out in a hilariously self-defeating sermon Arnolphe delivers on the joyless duties of a properly submissive wife. Further, to a parodic sermon whose satirical force provoked righteous indignation in its own right, the play adds a series of smutty double-entendres that gave great offense: mention of cream tarts in a context that makes obvious scatological allusion to sexual discharges; an explanation of the springs of male jealousy that employs the image of a man sticking his thumb in another man’s bowl of soup; and above all, an episode in which, recounting to her captor the circumstances of her first meeting with Horace, a shamefaced Agnès lingers over a dangling definite article (le …) when describing how the young man took hold of an item of her person. Even though the offending object turns out to be a harmless ribbon, since the relevant definite article is masculine in French (le ruban), it could not fail to make both Arnolphe and the audience think of sexual body parts, all of whose names are masculine—le sein, le tétin, le cul, le con. The result was as stupendous as it was predictable: a storm of pamphlets, satirical plays, angry homilies, bawdy verses, and even a public outcry in the playhouse itself, pitting the poet’s freethinking partisans in the cheap seats against right-minded gentlemen clustered in the loges.
Molière’s initial response to the controversy took the form of the two short plays mentioned earlier: the Critique de L’école des femmes, staging a mock debate in which we get, in addition to ridicule of lay enemies in high society, the first attested use of the word “obscenity” in French; and the Impromptu de Versailles, which takes the fight to the rival theatrical company that had seized on the quarrel to bring Molière down a peg. His first major retort, however, was the original, three-act version of Tartuffe, staged at court in 1664.
Tartuffe turns the tables on the poet’s high-minded adversaries by portraying them not, as in the Critique or the Impromptu, as fools or bloated incompetents but as religious hypocrites bent on destroying the hard-won secular pleasures and liberties on which both the authority and well-being of the modern state depends. The specifically political stakes are emphasized by the way the denouement in all versions, from 1664 down to the final one of 1669, incorporates the king himself, Louis XIV, in person.
The action foregrounds the behavior of a bourgeois père de famille, Orgon, whose pious mother, Mme Pernelle, opens the play by scolding her son’s children and beautiful second wife, Elmire, for indulging in the newfangled worldly delights of the day—fancy clothes, sumptuous dinner parties, flirtatious galanterie, and of course, as chief among them, theater. The focus thus falls from the outset on everything that makes modern life worth living. The head of the household deepens the threat. Doubtless under pressure from his mother, Orgon has contracted pious scruples of his own. In search of spiritual guidance, he has become enamored of one Tartuffe—a man whose hypocrisy, though perfectly plain to everyone else in the family, Mme Pernelle excepted, escapes the infatuated father. Worse still, he introduces Tartuffe into his home, where, in addition to stuffing his face, the scoundrel tries to seduce his benefactor’s wife even as Orgon decides to marry his daughter to him. By the time the spirited Elmire manages to open his eyes, it is too late. For Orgon has just deeded his house to the interloper, giving him at the same time incriminating papers relating (so the date of the premiere leads us to surmise) to the anti-royalist strife of the Fronde era of 1648–52, when the reigning monarch was still in his minority.
It is at this point that royal officers intervene, ostensibly to evict Orgon and family from their home. However, at the last moment and, given that the play premiered at court, in the presence of the sovereign himself, one of the officers reveals his identity as the king’s personal lieutenant, sent by Louis to expose Tartuffe as a criminal on whose fraudulent doings the king’s eye has rested all along. Having opened with the arraignment of the worldly blessings that the king’s wise conduct of the political economy has showered on his grateful subjects, the play closes with shameless flattery designed not only to praise Louis but also to enlist him in defense of Molière’s art:
Remet
tez-vous, Monsieur, d’une alarme si chaude.
Nous vivons sous un Prince ennemi de la fraude,
Un Prince dont les yeux se font jour dans les cœurs,
Et que ne peut tromper tout l’art des Imposteurs.
D’un fin discernement, sa grande âme pourvue,
Sur les choses toujours jette une droite vue,
Chez elle jamais rien ne surprend trop d’accès,
Et sa ferme raison ne tombe en nul excès.
Il donne aux Gens de bien une gloire immortelle,
Mais sans aveuglement il fait briller ce zèle,
Et l’amour pour les vrais, ne ferme point son cœur
A History of Modern French Literature Page 22