The Cambridge Companion to Moliere

by Edited by David Bradby , Andrew Calder

• ISBN13: 9780521837590
• ISBN10: 0521837596
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-10-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

A detailed introduction to Moliére and his plays, this Companion evokes his own theatrical career, his theatres, patrons, the performers and theatre staff with whom he worked, and the various publics he and his troupes entertained with such success. It looks at his particular brands of comedy and satire. L'École des femmes, Le Tartuffe, Dom Juan, Le Misanthrope, L'Avare and Les Femmes savantes are examined from a variety of different viewpoints, and through the eyes of different ages and cultures. The comedies-ballets, a genre invented by Moliére and his collaborators, are re-instated to the central position which they held in his uuvre in Moliére's own lifetime; his two masterpieces in this genre, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire, have chapters to themselves. Finally, the Companion looks at modern directors' theatre, exploring the central role played by productions of his work in successive 'revolutions' in the dramatic arts in France.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
Notes on contributors	ix
Preface	xiii
Chronology	xv
The career strategy of an actor turned playwright: `de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace'	1	(14)
Marie-Claude Canova-Green
The material conditions of Moliere's stage	15	(22)
Jan Clarke
The master and the mirror: Scaramouche and Moliere	37	(20)
Stephen Knapper
Moliere as satirist	57	(14)
Larry F. Norman
How (and why) not to take Moliere too seriously	71	(12)
Richard Parish
L'Avare or Harpagon's masterclass in comedy	83	(12)
Robert McBride
Laughter and irony in Le Misanthrope	95	(12)
Andrew Calder
Comedies-ballets	107	(14)
Charles Mazouer
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme: Moliere and music	121	(18)
John S. Powell
Medicine and entertainment in Le Malade imaginaire	139	(12)
Julia Prest
Moliere and the teaching of Frenchness: Les Femmes savantes as a case study	151	(14)
Ralph Albanese, Jr
L'Ecole des femmes: matrimony and the laws of chance	165	(12)
Roxanne Lalande
Moliere nationalised: Tartuffe on the British stage from the Restoration to the present day	177	(12)
Noel Peacock
Landmark twentieth-century productions of Moliere: a transatlantic perspective on Moliere: mise en scene and its historiography	189	(12)
Jim Carmody
Dom Juan the Directors' Play	201	(14)
David Whitton
`Reculer pour mieux sauter': modern experimental theatre's debt to Moliere	215	(14)
David Bradby
Select bibliography	229	(10)
Index	239