ABOUT THE PLAY

The Misanthrope is considered to be Molière’s masterpiece — the playwright himself declared he would never be able to write anything better. He started writing the play in 1664 at a time of personal and professional crisis. A religious cabal had succeeded in forbidding the performances of Tartuffe; his health was already starting to decline sharply; and his wife Armande’s infidelities tortured his jealous soul, leading to an anguished breakup. Molière poured his personal woes into his play, which he also hoped would be sufficiently successful to compensate for the financial loss his company endured after the Tartuffe debacle. The Misanthrope was premiered at the Théâtre du Palais Royal in June 1666; Molière played the honest-to-a fault, antisocial Alceste, and his wife Armande played his witty and ruthless paramour Célimène. Performed over thirty times in its opening run, the play was not a complete failure — but it was far from the major success Molière was hoping for, and was seldom to be remounted by the company during his lifetime. The audience was put off by the seriousness and austerity of a comedy that made people laugh only “in their souls," as a contemporary critic described — a far cry from Molière's previous (and forthcoming) popular comedies.

Indeed, The Misanthrope offers the best example of the way in which Molière transformed French comedy. Instead of basing his comedy on the traditional Italian and Spanish models, peopled with stock characters involved in complicated, twisted plots, Molière used the model of French tragedies, which explore the subtle inner workings of human nature. As the full title The Misanthrope, or the Cantankerous Lover indicates, Molière did conceive the play as a comedy, and we know he performed Alceste as a comic character, one whose idiosyncrasies — stubbornness, prejudice, excesses, and refusal to conform to either common sense, reason or social conventions — were made to be ridiculed. However, following the French tragic model, Molière built the play’s entire plot around the main character’s psychological quirks. He also imbued Alceste with a very personal anger and bitterness, and clearly deplored the moral and social circumstances that spurred Alceste’s extreme reactions. The Misanthrope thus comes across as a fascinatingly complex, tragic character study, embedded within a comedy of manners replete with colorful characters — the ridiculous marquis, the heartless coquette, and the unfulfilled prude, to name but a few. Molière took great pains to polish the play’s verses as well as its overall construction, and emphasized the social and artistic role played by language, from the fawning emptiness of the marquis’ boring and flat verses to Célimène’s hilariously scathing and mean witticisms. By contrast, Alceste’s multifaceted personality and his formidable text (both in quality and quantity of lines) has allowed for a wide range of interpretations throughout the centuries, from highly comic to utterly tragic, showing the play’s versatility and continued relevance to each historical moment in which it is performed.

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ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris in 1622. Under the pseudonym Molière, he and Madeleine Béjart created a theatre troupe in 1643 called "The Illustrious Theatre." Their first shows were failures, and Molière was thrown into debtor’s prison. Upon his release he went on the road as the troupe's director, principal actor, and occasional playwright. In 1658 the troupe successfully mounted its first performance in front of King Louis XIV, and in 1659 The Affected Young Women launched Molière's career as a playwright. Molière and his players became the King's troupe in 1665, but some of the more religiously or socially virulent plays were not well received. Tartuffe (1664) and Dom Juan (1665) were both forbidden, and The Misanthrope (1666) enjoyed only mild success. That same year Molière wrote The Doctor In Spite of Himself, his most elaborate attempt to date at criticizing the medicine of his time, albeit in a farcical setting. The play was a big success, and from then on Molière focused on comedies up until his very last play, The Imaginary Invalid (1673), in which he played the lead role and derided, one last time, his contemporaries’ blind faith in what was then (and arguably still is) a very inexact science. During the fourth performance of the play Molière started coughing blood onstage; he finished the performance and died a few hours later. In 1680, by order of the King, his troupe was merged with two rival troupes to form the Comédie Française.

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–Mirabelle Ordinaire