"Moliere is probably the greatest and best-loved French author, and comic author, who ever lived. To the reader as well as the spectator, today as well as three centuries ago, the appeal of his plays is immediate and durable; they are both distinctly accessible and inexhaustible."--Professor Donald M. Frame
Moliere is probably the greatest and best-loved French author, and comic author, who ever lived. To the reader as well as the spectator, today as well as three centuries ago, the appeal of his plays is immediate and durable; they are both distinctly accessible and inexhaustible. Professor Donald M. Frame"
Moliere, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in1622, began his career as an actor before becoming a playwright who specialized in satirizing the institutions and morals of his day. In 1658, his theater company settled in Paris in the Theater du Petit-Bourbon. The object of fierce attack because of such masterpieces as
Tartuffe and
Don Juan, Moliere nonetheless won the favor of the public. In 1665, his company became the King's Troupe, and the following year saw the staging of
The Misanthrope, as well as
The Doctor in Spite of Himself. In 1668, he produced his bitterly comic
The Miser and, in the remaining years before his death, created such plays as
The Would-Be Gentleman,
The Mischievous Machinations of Scapin, and
The Learned Women. In 1673, Moliere collapsed onstage while performing his last play,
The Imaginary Invalid, and died shortly thereafter.
Donald M. Frame was Moore Professor of French at Columbia University and an acclaimed scholar and translator of French literature. Among his notable works of translation are
The Complete Essays of Montaigne,
The Complete Works of Rabelais, and the Signet Classics
Tartuffe & Other Plays and
Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories.
Virginia Scott is Professor Emerita in the Department of Theater of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of
Moliere: A Theatrical Life,
The Commedia Dell'Arte in Paris, and
Performance, Poetry and Politics on the Queen's Day: Catherine de Medici and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainebleau (with Sara Sturm-Maddox).