Critical consideration of Le Malade imaginaire is often shaped by the fact that Molière, playing the hypochondriac of the title, Argan, fell ill during the fourth performance of the work and died later that evening, on 17 February 1673. With this in mind, it is impossible not to be aware of the striking irony of the play's cheerful discussion of death, of the scenes in which Argan pretends to be dead (III, 12-14) and of his invective against Molière's stage depictions of the medical profession. In III, 3, for example, Argan declares that 'si j'étais que des médecins, je me vengerais de son impertinence; et, quand il sera malade, je le laisserais mourir sans secours' ['if I were a doctor, I would avenge his impertinence and, when he falls ill, I would leave him to die without any assistance']. With hindsight, his words seem almost prophetic, but there is no reason to believe that, in writing Le Malade imaginaire, Molière was somehow anticipating his own death. Rather, he was entering a new and challenging period of his theatrical career at the pinnacle of his creative inspiration, having just had his theatre renovated at great expense and having recently taken on a new musical collaborator.

While Molière was a genuine 'malade', Argan is only a 'malade imaginaire'. When Toinette and later Béralde (the two most sensible characters of the play) ask Argan what exactly is wrong with him, he is unable to provide a specific answer and responds instead with righteous indignation.

Le Misanthrope, written in 1666 at the height of his career, is perhaps the most polished and thoughtful of Molière's plays. It offers us 1,800 or so alexandrines of conversation between elegant figures in a Parisian literary salon on the fringes of the court. It stands in counterpoint to the richly staged comédies-ballets and machine-plays, written initially for the court, which dominated Molière's output in the mid-to-late 1660s. Le Misanthrope was never performed at court. The play is difficult to place; it does not follow the conventions of literary or erudite comedy which dominated the comic stages of Italy, Spain and France in the Renaissance and seventeenth century. These, though immensely varied, followed more or less loosely the patterns of the Roman or New Comedy tradition of Plautus and Terence, in which complex plots contained tales of romance that, after many twists and turns, ended in universal rejoicing. Corneille's Le Menteur (1643) was one of the most elegant examples of the genre. Surprisingly perhaps, for all its polish and its focus on court circles, Le Misanthrope owed more to the traditions of French farce: as in La Jalousie du Barbouillé, probably the earliest of Molière's surviving one-act farces, the play portrays a battle of the sexes, a row between a would-be tyrant and a clever woman who deceives him; other smaller quarrels in Le Misanthrope echo the central one, each in turn imparting its vigour to the play's progress, none ending in reconciliation. Le Misanthrope also has features of the comédie-ballet. Key encounters in the play are expanded into elegant set-piece performances designed to entertain both the audience and other characters on stage. Two of these are paired readings, one of a sonnet and a popular song (I, 2) and another of two letters (V, 4).

With Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), Jean-Baptiste Molière and Jean- Baptiste Lully created a masterwork of musical comedy. This was the ninth collaboration of their seven-year association, and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme became by far their most popular work - one that remained among Louis XIV's favourite entertainments throughout his life. This comédie-ballet, glowing with comic inspiration, proved 'les deux grands Baptistes' (as Mme de Sévigné called them) to be simply the best team of comic collaborators before Mozart and da Ponte. In fact, it was for Le Bourgeois gentilhomme that Molière coined the term comédie-ballet.

Le Bourgeois gentilhomme also marked a new direction in the genre of comédie-ballet. The early comédies-ballets were intended for court fêtes in which the King and his courtiers would participate as dancers in the intermèdes [musical interludes]. Louis XIV had performed a variety of colourful and exotic roles in these early works - including those of gypsy (Le Mariage forcé), peasant (La Pastorale comique) and Moor (Le Sicilien). But after the King's retirement from the stage with Les Amants magnifiques (where he was to portray Neptune in the first intermède, and Apollo in the last) the genre broke with tradition. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was the first wholly professional comédie-ballet in which noble amateurs did not participate.

As with many of the earlier comédies-ballets, Louis XIV had a hand in selecting the subject matter. The visit of an envoy, Suleïman Aga, from November 1669 until May 1670 provided the comic inspiration for the central musical episode. This diplomat, charged with repairing diplomatic relations between France and the Ottoman Empire, proved a difficult personality.

Molière’s Theatres

On 12 September 1643, the Illustre Théâtre, of which Molière was a member, rented the jeu de paume des Mestayers with the intention of converting it into a theatre. The first building in which Molière performed professionally was, therefore, a former tennis court. Paume had been popular since the Middle Ages, but had declined by the seventeenth century, leaving many buildings empty. There was at this time only one purpose-built theatre in Paris: the Hôtel de Bourgogne, constructed by the Confrérie de la Passion in 1548 for the production of mystery plays, on which it held the monopoly in the capital. These were soon banned, and the Confrérie profited from its premises by renting them out to the companies of actors newly circulating in France following the end of the Wars of Religion. Since its monopoly was interpreted as applying to all theatrical activity in the capital, troupes performing elsewhere, in an empty jeu de paume for example, were heavily fined. This was the situation until the 1630s, when, gradually, two more or less permanent troupes were established in the capital, one at the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the other in a jeu de paume in the Marais district, called simply the Théâtre du Marais. It was with these that the Illustre Théâtre had to compete.

Tennis courts did not make ideal theatres. They were long, narrow buildings (a three-in-one ratio of length to width was standard), and the sightlines from anywhere other than directly in front of the stage were poor. It had been thought that early companies converted these buildings by installing a second gallery opposite the existing spectators' gallery and building a simple trestle stage at one end.

Thus wrote Grimarest in 1705. Three centuries later, we hardly know Molière's life, or his career, any better. We have only a few verifiable facts about his childhood and training. His thirteen years of life in the provinces have left few clues. Even in his last years in Paris, when his career as dramatist is well documented, his private life remains unknown. Moreover, Molière did not talk about himself. Few are the texts where he writes in the first person: a couple of prefaces, petitions and acknowledgements, generally linked to the debates arising from his work, and in the work itself a few passages where he acts out his own role as actor-director-author. Thus we can only get a feel of the man through what his contemporaries said; and their accounts generally take the form of unreliable anecdotes through which either his enemies sought to ridicule him, or else his friends aimed to make him the hero of a golden legend.

When Molière married the actress Armande Béjart in 1662, he was forty years old and exactly twice her age. It remains unclear to this day whether Armande was the daughter or the younger sister of Madeleine Béart, Molière's former mistress and co-founder of the Illustre Théâtre, but she was born in 1642, during the same year that Madeleine and Jean-Baptiste became lovers. Some speculation arose as to whether the actor had married his own daughter and his rival Montfleury went as far as to present a written accusation of incest to Louis XIV. Although the scandalous rumours eventually subsided, Molière's marriage to a much younger woman was fraught with predictable infidelities and strife. In examining L'École des femmes (1662) with regard to the circumstances surrounding its creation, its reception and its literary value, it is impossible to avoid some speculation regarding the conflation of life and text. For one thing, Molière's marriage to Armande was conspicuously staged in early 1662, framed by the June 1661 production of L'École des maris and the December 1662 production of L'École des femmes.

Of equal significance to our understanding of the play is the polemical quarrel that followed the tremendous success of Molière's first major opus. L'École des femmes was the author's eighth play and his first five-act comedy in verse. The play marked a turning point in Molière's career, away from traditional farce and toward a new type of comedy that dared to bridge the gap between the comedic and tragic genres.

The difficulty no doubt arises in part from Molière himself. If a writer of comedies writes in addition about the nature and purpose of comedy, we are likely to attend to what he says; and Molière does this both in a range of liminary pieces and, most engagingly, in two metatheatrical plays, La Critique de L'École des femmes and L'Impromptu de Versailles. The status of utterance in the two types of text is clearly subtly different, and it should certainly not be assumed that everything spoken by Molière's apparent mouthpieces can be taken at face value. But then, it is not clear that everything written by Molière can either.

La Critique de L'École des femmes (hereafter La Critique) is a one-act play, in which certain of the objections to, amongst other things, the use of sexual innuendo in the play it defends (L'École des femmes) are addressed and ridiculed by the urbane and discriminating figures of Dorante and Uranie. One of the episodes at issue concerns the young and naive Agnès's confession to her possessive guardian and would-be husband Arnolphe that her clandestine suitor Horace, in the course of a previous encounter, had stolen her ribbon (II, 5). This confession scene is exploited comically, however, by Agnès holding back the crucial noun which will reveal what it was that was taken from her.

Public education in nineteenth-century France was charged with the responsibility of ushering the nation into an era of modernity marked by reconstruction, and the militant republicanism of the 1880s valorised the pedagogical dimension of the State. The Republican School was, first and foremost, an ideological construct, public instruction being one of the chief objectives of French policy-makers during this period. A socio-critical approach to Republican schooling in France during this period will allow us to examine the cultural dynamics inherent in the educational process, that is, the transmission of knowledge or, more specifically, the role of traditional literary education, particularly as it sheds light on the critical reception of Molière. By propagating a series of cultural models, the Republican School sought to shape French youth according to a particular strategy. An analysis of this process clearly raises various ethical, anthropological and ethnological issues. We will attempt to demonstrate the breadth of these issues by briefly examining the Republican School in light of the socio-cultural and ideological forces at work in nineteenth-century France: 1) nationalism, or the role of ethnic identity; 2) the rise of the bourgeoisie; 3) the politics of laïcité, or the secularisation of French society; 4) the history of the teaching of French and the formation of school discourse; and 5) the influence of literary education and humanism.

In rewriting the myth of Narcissus, La Fontaine reminds us that nothing was so hard to avoid in seventeenth-century France as were mirrors. It is a statement both literally and figuratively true. In concrete terms, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles is the most famous example of a rage for reflective glass that produced, among other crazes, the explosion of miniature mirror fashion-accessories described by La Fontaine. More broadly speaking, the ubiquitous mirror was perfectly indicative of a powerful collective obsession with individual reputation: that is, with the reflection of personal honour, wit and respectability displayed in the mirror of others' opinions. The birth of a new leisured class under absolute monarchy - characterised by an increasingly powerless aristocracy seeking what distinction it could find in personal cultivation and charm (and from a bourgeoisie emulating its glamour) - created a world in which personal worth was determined less by political or economic power than by the value of one's stock in the social exchange. Both nobles and the rich bourgeoisie played their role in the social comedy of court or town before an audience of critical and ever-gossiping peers, and they carefully gauged their image as reflected in their aristocratic circles, their literary salons or, more mundanely, their neighbouring bourgeois homes.

If over the course of the last half-century or so the majority of Molière scholars have become increasingly convinced of the value of studying the plays in the context of their performance in the theatre, the task of analysing Molière in performance has itself grown considerably more complex during the same period, particularly with the proliferation of Molière productions following the Second World War. This proliferation was especially evident in France, where the decentralisation of state-supported theatre led to the creation of what has become, in effect if not always in name, a network of national theatres - a network in the sense that many productions tour from one state-supported theatre to another, and also in the sense that companies from time to time pool resources to make certain projects possible. Over roughly the same period, a decentralisation of theatre occurred in the United States, although not as a result of a consciously promoted government policy. The institutions that were created in the American process of decentralisation came to be called regional or resident theatres, although four decades or so after the majority of those decentralised institutions came into being, given the remarkable homogeneity of their season planning and the very small number of resident companies of actors these theatres house, they are now 'regional' and 'resident' in name alone. Despite this homogeneity of taste, however, there is very little networking of productions in the American theatre - touring remains the province of the commercial theatre.

The notorious difficulty of reproducing Molière on the British stage has been a commonplace disclaimer in prefatory statements by translators and in programme notes by theatrical directors. The dramatist's verve and comic spirit, steeped in Gallic culture, were perceived as 'foreign' within the British theatrical tradition. Translating Molière's work, as George Meredith warned when analysing the vis comica of Tartuffe, was 'like humming an air one has heard performed by an accomplished violinist of the pure tones without flourish'. Until recently, Molière has not enjoyed the success on the British stage which his status warrants. As John Fowles lamented, Molière has been consigned to a theatrical limbo in Britain, to the status of a study dramatist: 'on the whole, we don't know what to do with him so we leave him alone'. This perceived 'foreignness' has led even to a questioning of Molière's status as a comic dramatist, and of his accessibility beyond the Hexagon.

There is an additional level of 'foreignness' with regard to Tartuffe, which is of all Molière's comedies perhaps the most rooted in seventeenth-century French mores. The concept of the directeur de conscience, introduced by the Counter-Reformation Church in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century, has no equivalent in the British ecclesiastical tradition. This essay will seek to analyse attempts by translators and directors, from Molière's times to the present day, to make Tartuffe accessible to British audiences.

Some translators have opted to retain the notion of a 'foreign text'. These have included, for the most part, the academically orientated translations, intended more for publication than for performance. Some of these are contained in translations of complete works. The dramatic effectiveness of most of these versions has been called into question.

Until the middle of the last century, Dom Juan was one of Molière's least valued plays. Withdrawn - possibly suppressed - after its initial run, and sidelined during nearly three centuries of critical and theatrical neglect, it came into its own during the twentieth century, when it featured prominently in the experiments of major theatre artists throughout Europe. In France it came to be seen as a touchstone of directorial art and, with Le Misanthrope, became one of the two most frequently performed works of the entire repertoire.

The ubiquity of Dom Juan is such that to recount its performance history would effectively be to describe the most significant directorial tendencies of the twentieth century. This essay, which can only hint at the richness of the play's stage life, has a twofold purpose. First, to account for its singular place in the history of the stage. Second, to evoke a sample of modern productions. By comparing some stage interpretations in their respective contexts it is possible to see how, by being constantly reactualised, a text composed in 1665 to meet a specific need can resonate profoundly in different and varied cultural contexts.

To elaborate on the last point: contemporary culture is saturated with cultures of the past to the point where they become naturalised and virtually invisible. Al Pacino directs Shakespeare, Claude Chabrol films Madame Bovary, John Lennon sings on the radio every day. However, not all the past is of equal interest or value to us.

The contributors to this volume have demonstrated the impossibility of approaching Molière without also reflecting on how we read and view his work, how we understand it and construct a model of what it means for us. For example, Ralph Albanese has shown how advocates of laïcité in nineteenth-century France found meanings in Molière's work to fit their educational project of building a modern secular French identity. Noöl Peacock has demonstrated how Tartuffe has been appropriated by different British theatre companies as they develop their own cultural discourses - most notably in the case of Jatinder Verma's intercultural project with his 1990 production at London's National Theatre. Charles Mazouer has reminded us that a whole aspect of Molière's comédies-ballets (which represent almost half his output) has been neglected for centuries, only to be rediscovered in the wake of the classical music industry's promotion of baroque music. Like Shakespeare's oeuvre, Molière's has a protean quality, and each succeeding generation discovers a new Molière in its own image. The purpose of this last chapter in the Cambridge Companion is to explore some of the ways in which theatre reformers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have rediscovered aspects of Molière that mirror their own preoccupations and have found that one of the most effective methods of researching and developing new approaches to the art of theatre is through productions of his plays.

Qualis erit? tanto docente magistro. What will he be like with such a great master? With hindsight it is difficult to know how seriously to take the question accompanying the frontispiece illustration to Le Boulanger de Chalussay's attack on Molière (fig. 7). Though Weyen's print has been described by the Italian theatre scholar Ferdinando Taviani as perhaps the only image we have of a seventeenth-century actor transmitting his knowledge to another, the same scholar reminds us that, whereas a similar image would not be out of place in an eastern context, or if it had depicted western clowns, acrobats or dancers, this one in particular is a satirical depiction of two actors, and therefore its overriding intention is the denigration of its target, Molière.

If this is so, then presumably the satire is intended to function by the association of the French actor/author with the great Neapolitan actor/clown Tiberio Fiorilli, studying his comic grimaces with the aid of a mirror and under the threat of an eel-skin whip. This chapter will examine the extent to which we can trace this relationship and the effect it has had upon both Molière's own acting and the acting of Molière in France and Italy at the close of the twentieth century. Starting with seventeenth-century eyewitness accounts, I will concentrate particularly upon the implications of Molière's relationship with Scaramouche for his jeu or style of playing. Developing positions put forward by H. Gaston Hall, I will consider the interplay between the French farce tradition, the Italian comic actors' reliance on physicality and the relationship of mask to seventeenth-century theories of physiognomy.

One of the most striking features of L'Avare is the fact that Harpagon bestrides the stage like a colossus, present in twenty-three out of thirty-two scenes, with his dominant presence bearing down even more heavily on the final two acts. At first sight, from a structural point of view, the play seems at best nothing but a series of hastily assembled sketches on avarice, with an inconsequential, meandering plot, at worst simply unbalanced with insufficient counterweight to Harpagon. To many critics, the play ushers into the Molière canon a new disturbing note of bitter cynicism in relationships between the characters. Finally, and most persistently, the familiar accusation of plagiarism levelled against Molière by his contemporaries seems documented to an overwhelming extent. The charge of Riccoboni, to the effect that it would be an achievement to find four scenes of the playwright's own devising, seems self-evident. Yet the view of Molière's friend, the poet Boileau, that L'Avare is one of his best plays, is borne out by its perennial popularity with theatre audiences. This chapter seeks to investigate some of the ways in which Molière's stagecraft enables him to theatricalise an old theme through the creation of a multi-dimensional character of comedy, with appropriate references to sources deemed 'major'.

Whenever Molière's legion of contemporary critics questioned the originality of his plays, usually out of well-grounded reasons of professional jealousy, they arrived at the answer implicit in their question. Looking for originality of theme and plot, they concluded predictably that neither was to be found.