An abiding concern throughout Molière’s works, masculinity is a more multivalent, complex and nuanced phenomenon than one might expect. Focussing primarily on various external signifiers coded as masculine – particularly elements of appearance and dress such as swords, hairstyles, and beards – this chapter outlines the various forms that seventeenth-century masculinity can take when it intersects with other variables of age, social class, biological sex and so forth. For example, while the barbons of the older generation regard their beards as an unassailable symbol of male authority, they are troubled by their younger blondin rivals, whose gallantry and blond wigs strike them as effeminate. An even more affected mode of masculinity can be found in the bodily stylisations and verbal uncouthness of the aristocratic petits marquis. As this chapter demonstrates, masculinity in Molière emerges as something largely performed or asserted in relation to others – through domination of women or competition with other men (in duels, warfare or seduction). Such issues are starkly flagged up when cross-dressing or cross-casting are involved: in many of Molière’s plays, women’s success at passing as men, and men’s failure to pass as women, can often demonstrate the fragility of both social gender roles and men’s authority.

Molière’s career was punctuated by episodes of polemic. In the twin contexts of an ideological quarrel concerning theatre’s morality and a commercial war between rival theatres, he confronted primarily two types of enemy: the dévots who condemned theatre in general and his rivals who took against his theatre in particular. His private life was attacked as well as his public one (as author, actor and company leader). He was sometimes condemned with disdain as the ‘best farce actor in France’, sometimes with dread as a ‘demon clothed in flesh’. Faced with plots and threats of censorship, Molière shone by his exploitation of these polemical episodes to invent new theatrical forms and confirm his supremacy. From Les Précieuses ridicules to Dom Juan, via L’École des femmes and Tartufe, his entire output can be seen to derive from a conflictual logic, whereby each new play is generated by the debates surrounding the preceding one, in a process of constant negotiation with the legitimising powers whose support he sought: the Parisian public and those with political power. Polemic was thus a driving creative force and laughter became Molière’s most fearful weapon in bringing down his rivals.

Molière’s depiction of marriage and the struggle between parents and children over the choice of a spouse uses the framework of civil law to shape his treatment of the comedy in these quarrels. While Molière explores human folly to drive the action in plays such as Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and L’École des femmes, legal requirements for arranging a valid marriage in early modern France also form part of these stories. Only the Catholic Church could declare a marriage valid, but the French monarchy promulgated laws giving fathers the right to punish disobedient children with penalties ranging from disinheritance to criminal charges. However, Moliere’s works mock the men entrusted with this power, showing them to be vain and superficial patriarchs who seek partners that will elevate family status rather than providing for the happiness of their children. Mothers and servants step in to undermine these foolish plans and help children marry for love and happiness rather than social concerns. Despite their subordinate roles in their families and in French society, these figures understand how to get round the requirements of French law and the wishes of men to conclude happy partnerships for the young people in their midst.

Questions to do with women can seem to have little significance in Molière’s theatre. However, some emerge from the array of apparently interchangeable female characters, just as some plays treat topics concerning women that were then being discussed amongst the educated members of polite society. Thus, as regards education, L’École des femmes speaks out against the limited and restrictive teaching of the time – especially in convent schools. Equally, some of the plays point up the anxiety of some young women who believed they were regarded as the prey in a hunt, together with the demeaning process by which many were married off, while others posit the possibility of pleasurable and companionable marriage. The plays also treat the position of independent women, either the apparently self-supporting female characters of La Critique de l’École des femmes, or widows like Célimène in Le Misanthrope. Molière’s works make use of a narrow range of women and are in no sense radical as far as they are concerned. But they mock and deflate male attempts to shape women’s lives or to control their identity, and might be said to demand freedom and self-determination for them.

Working through an official system of academies, as well as through a more informal institution known as the Little Academy (Petite Académie), Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert controlled a wide-ranging propaganda of absolutism or, in the language of the time, a memorialising of the monarch’s gloire. This chapter investigates the strategy and mechanisms by which Colbert and his collaborators deployed the arts as an instrument of the state. It explores the ways in which Molière’s comedies and comedy-ballets developed out of an established system of courtly propaganda in the court ballet of the 1650s and 1660s, and examines changes instituted by Colbert in the 1660s. Finally, it examines Molière’s ambivalent response to the absolutist enterprise as expressed through these changes.

Molière played a significant role in the birth of Arab theatre and has continued to influence it right down to the present day. Every pioneer, from the Machrek to the Maghreb and not forgetting the Gulf, has been inspired by the Molière repertoire, and experts have often queried the reasons for his success. Presenting works by authors from all over the Arab world, this chapter defines Molière’s role in the development of a national Arab theatre, considering some of the adjustments and adaptations that proved necessary.

Although the theatre industry developed mainly from the nineteenth century onwards, Parisian theatres in Molière’s time already had some aspects of modern commercial entertainment – developing strategies to generate additional income and revenue through private performances, for example. This chapter examines how companies competed to position themselves as leaders in the Parisian market. It assesses the seasonal programming and level of success of the plays that were performed, examining the knock-on effect of increased competition on the Hôtel de Bourgogne in the 1660s, and shows the spending and investment choices of Molière’s troupe. As a commercial enterprise, the troupe aimed to attract Parisian audiences while continuing to please the court. It paid, therefore, particular attention to its facilities and services in the capital, and travelled outside Paris to participate in court festivities. The company had to juggle its duty to the King, for whom sumptuous and expensive entertainments were a means of showing his power and influencing other European courts, and to its bourgeois Parisian clients, who provided it with a regular income and could not, therefore, be neglected. In this respect Molière proved to be a wise man, becoming a wealthy entrepreneur of spectacles.

Molière is generally viewed as a comic author who mocks all aspects of society – aristocratic, bourgeois and peasant. However, he was himself part of this tripartite society and adopted points of view that, when we examine them, we see to be those of his caste – one of the people who dined at the King’s table. He was, in fact, at the intersection of two worlds, the court and the town (Paris), and in his works we meet individuals from different milieus, in the plays themselves but also making up the audiences that came to see them. He makes his characters ridiculous through exaggeration, thereby rendering less credible whatever they represent. When presenting different comic situations, Molière never comes down on one side or another. Instead, he offers suggestions, and leaves their appreciation up to the members of the public. They, according to their status or the circumstances in which they see the plays, receive them in one way or another, but always refuse to recognise themselves in any particular character. The focus of this article is, therefore, to determine whether Molière, whose criticism was so acerbic, really was this transgressive and subversive bourgeois author.

Molière’s comedy ballets were devised to glorify Louis XIV and were often performed in the grounds of royal palaces, where the decors created spectacle by means of effects involving doubling and continuity with the surrounding area. This is true of La Princesse d’Élide and George Dandin, both performed in the Petit Parc at Versailles; Les Amants magnifiques, given at Saint-Germain-en-Laye; and Psyché, which was staged in the Salle des Machines in the Tuileries. This courtier-like celebration of the prince’s domain and his fairy-tale magic via Vigarani’s stagings was haunted by the memory of the sumptuous festivity Fouquet had offered the King in his gardens at Vaux shortly before his fall from favour, which had itself been inspired by Apolidon’s enchanted castle in Renaissance texts. It suggested that the domain of the powerful could only be imagined and created by means of the performance of fantasies that stimulated adhesion.

In his Négligent (1692), Charles Dufresny has an aspiring playwright exclaim: ‘Molière has spoiled the theatre all right. Follow his example and immediately critics cry out that you pilfered his work; deviate from it in the slightest, and they complain that you are not staying close enough to Molière!’ – an ironic but fitting encapsulation of the ‘post-moliéresque’ era, when authors, facing increasingly challenging conditions, still somehow managed to reinvent comedy. The growing aura of commedia dell’arte and opera influenced productions of the newly formed Théâtre-Français, which for almost twenty years struggled in the shadow of the hugely successful Théâtre-Italien, then allowed to stage plays partly in French. When the latter was shut down by royal decree in 1697, the taste for ‘irregular’ comedy remained dominant, ultimately leading to the emergence of a new venue – the fairgrounds – and a new genre: the opéra-comique. Contrary to a long-standing negative vision, the Fin de Règne (1680–1715), with dramatists like Dancourt, Dufresny, Regnard and Lesage, was an apex of comedic innovation that never forgot or betrayed what Molière had accomplished.

Molière worked within the context of a powerful literary establishment, with complex systems of rewards and punishments. Sources of financial support were essential for an author and generally sought from patronage or from the church; institutional prestige might be conferred by election to the Académie Française. Patronage, always potentially unreliable, became increasingly dominated by the King and court and entailed considerable obligations, while the church could prove a formidable enemy. Such sources of patronage and prestige were complemented by a dynamic literary scene, in which reputations could be made or lost: through the salons, both the relatively more social and the more specifically scholarly; and through the critics, with again some writing for a more popular readership and some drawn from among the learned scholars. For a dramatist, popular success was a crucial factor. Molière encountered repeated difficulties, from the withdrawal of patronage, the hostility of the church, and attacks by critics and jealous rivals. He surmounted these with extraordinary success, through a unique combination of factors: great popular success in Paris, the breadth of his appeal, the support of the King and court, the admiration of powerful critical voices and, not least, the influential approval of distinguished scholarly commentators.

An ‘in context’ biography. What is available to a biographer when he is deprived of all correspondence and personal papers and is reduced to working on impersonal documents and archives? What can he do if his subject lived at a time when it was unthinkable to reveal anything about oneself in a work of fiction? What remains if he wants to eliminate all the invented tales and imaginary anecdotes contained in the first ‘lives of Molière’? What is left is to contextualise Molière. There is the historical, documentary (and thereby sociological) contexualisation that, over the last century, has radically transformed the traditional image of Molière the homme du théâtre; the aesthetic contextualisation made possible by the last fifty years of studies of galanterie, which can only be fully understood when linked to its socio-literary context; the recontextualisation of the conditions in which Molière’s plays were created; the contextualisation of theatre practices; the contextualisation of his sources in connection with their aesthetic context… Contextualising Molière, is to leave behind the vicious circles (the misanthropic Molière), legends (the jealous Molière) and errors (the sick Molière and medicine) to capture as best one can one of the most extraordinary comic dramatists of all time.

Molière’s publishing career highlights the ambiguities and eccentricities of the early modern Parisian book trade, while also demonstrating the author’s concern for his plays’ passage from stage to page. While Molière was initially victimised by unscrupulous booksellers, he eventually became an able participant in the publication process, capable of exploiting print’s possibilities to his own advantage. His career can be roughly divided into three phases: his early and ultimately successful battles against pirated editions that led to a stable publishing approach; his mid career rupture with his initial publishers and the resultant search for new partners; and his subsequent collaboration with Jean Ribou, including the alternative publication measures taken as a result of Ribou’s continued legal troubles. While on occasion Molière disavowed an interest in publication rhetorically, his actual practice reveals an author invested in the circumstances of his works’ printing and inventive in his interactions with Parisian publishers, in some instances even outmanoeuvring the professionals of the book trade. Working in an era prior to modern copyright protections, Molière learned to use publication, the royal privilege system, and personal notoriety to ensure ownership and control over his theatrical corpus.

Molière was an experienced actor and dramatist before he became a published author. He warned readers on more than one occasion that much of his art was simply lost in print. If that is self-evidently true, it is also the case that it was not all loss for Molière’s original readers: they could read his dedicatory epistles to society’s potentates whom he was trying to impress; they could read his occasional prefaces, in which he addressed his readers directly and with a lightness of touch that anticipates the dramatic text itself; and they could sometimes see illustrations that crystallised key aspects of his comic imagination. Moreover, readers would have been familiar with newly established conventions in the printing of dramatic literature that would have helped them to reconstitute in their mind’s eye aspects of performance: scene divisions evoking entrances and exits, and stage directions both explicit and (more importantly) implicit. The punctuation of the printed text is an unreliable guide to actual performances, but helps readers to hear the particular performance inscribed into the printed version of the text. Meanwhile, different editions, in the seventeenth century and since, with ever-evolving apparatus, offer readers increasingly varied approaches to the plays.

This chapter considers the supposedly ‘democratic’ way in which seventeenth-century theatre companies managed their affairs. Each troupe consisted of a number of share-holding actor members, and decisions relating to all aspects of the company’s activity were taken at meetings convened for particular purposes, whether general administration, play selection or to settle the end of year accounts. Women generally played an equal administrative role alongside men, and this is recognised as one of the few areas where such gender equality was the norm. Following Molière’s death, theatre companies came under the control of the First Gentlemen of the King’s Bedchamber, and (male) officers were appointed from among the actors to ensure liaison with them. The acting troupe was supported by a team of front-of-house and backstage staff, who were paid per performance, and where women were also well represented, particularly in the box office and other ‘front facing’ roles. Many of these women were former actresses, and this was one career that was open to them when they had to leave the stage. The company was also careful to look after its own, awarding pensions to former actors and employees and supporting other individuals by means of charitable donations.