Tartuffe
Moliere Creates Modern Comedy
Author: Laun, Henri Van
Moliere Creates Modern Comedy
1659
The seventeenth century was the period of a very remarkable literary outburst in France, an outburst which has done much to mould French genius of more recent times. The latter part of the century, which has been called the
Augustan age of France, the age of Louis XIV, has certainly been but seldom equalled in the number and variety of the writers who adorned it. Yet it owes much of its brilliancy, much of its rapid development, to the training of the decades previous to 1650, and especially to the enthusiastic patronage of that great statesman Richelieu. Were a Frenchman seeking for a single event, a single date to mark the most striking moment of this literary era, he would probably select the foundation of the French Academy by Richelieu, in 1635.
Or perhaps he might turn to the production of Corneille's most famous tragedy,
Le Cid, in 1633. Neither of these events, however, has quite what we would recognize as a world-wide significance. The Academy has done much for France, but it has always remained a French academy, and the forty "immortal"
Frenchmen who constitute its membership have not always owed their election solely to literary eminence. Neither have Corneille's tragedies been accepted as models by the world at large.
But under Corneille's influence the French stage developed from a state of buffoonery and wooden imitation of the ancients to a state where a greater artist than Corneille gave it really world-wide prominence. Moliere is not only the most celebrated of French actor-managers; he is the greatest of all character-comedy writers, the teacher of all future generations, and the satiric scourge of his own. When in 1659 his comedy Les precieuses Ridicules took Paris by storm, it did more than make a reformation of the manners of its own. It taught the world what true comedy should be, and it sent ringing through the
Author: Laun, Henri Van
Moliere Creates Modern Comedy
1659
The seventeenth century was the period of a very remarkable literary outburst in France, an outburst which has done much to mould French genius of more recent times. The latter part of the century, which has been called the
Augustan age of France, the age of Louis XIV, has certainly been but seldom equalled in the number and variety of the writers who adorned it. Yet it owes much of its brilliancy, much of its rapid development, to the training of the decades previous to 1650, and especially to the enthusiastic patronage of that great statesman Richelieu. Were a Frenchman seeking for a single event, a single date to mark the most striking moment of this literary era, he would probably select the foundation of the French Academy by Richelieu, in 1635.
Or perhaps he might turn to the production of Corneille's most famous tragedy,
Le Cid, in 1633. Neither of these events, however, has quite what we would recognize as a world-wide significance. The Academy has done much for France, but it has always remained a French academy, and the forty "immortal"
Frenchmen who constitute its membership have not always owed their election solely to literary eminence. Neither have Corneille's tragedies been accepted as models by the world at large.
But under Corneille's influence the French stage developed from a state of buffoonery and wooden imitation of the ancients to a state where a greater artist than Corneille gave it really world-wide prominence. Moliere is not only the most celebrated of French actor-managers; he is the greatest of all character-comedy writers, the teacher of all future generations, and the satiric scourge of his own. When in 1659 his comedy Les precieuses Ridicules took Paris by storm, it did more than make a reformation of the manners of its own. It taught the world what true comedy should be, and it sent ringing through the