Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) credited his contemporary Jacques Amyot’s (1513–93) translations of Plutarch (Lives, 1559; Moralia, 1572) with lifting him out of the mire of ignorance and inspiring him to write the Essays.1 Together, Amyot and Montaigne ensured the tremendous cultural importance of Plutarch in France from the late sixteenth century onwards.2 After a decline during the Enlightenment when the Encyclopédistes deemed his ideas obscure, Plutarch again rose to prominence at the close of the eighteenth century thanks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and the revolutionaries. A republican Plutarch had replaced Plutarch as the “mirror for princes” whose works the playwright and historiographer Jean Racine (1639–99) had read to an ailing Louis XIV.

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.

This chapter sets out to establish what Molière’s prefaces and meta-theatrical plays tell us about audience laughter. In these texts, Molière sets up the notion of an ideal public, primarily by means of spectator characters who act as models or counter-models in terms of reception. His laughing characters allow us to understand the link between Molière and the laughter of a public that saw itself in them. In this way, Molière echoes wider contemporary discourse on comedy at the same time as contributing to its development. He offers reflections on parody, on the connection between audience laughter and poetics, on the relationship of the social aspects of audience laughter to moral decency and on laughter as an indication of a comic author’s merit. His spectator characters reflect a contemporary discourse that saw laughter as an entirely legitimate reaction to the performance of comedies, and Molière is thereby situated at the heart of the critical re-evaluation of laughter that occurred between 1660 and 1670, of which he was at once a beneficiary and one of the driving forces.

Critics, commentators and historians have seized upon the ridiculous, comedic elements of Molière’s portrayals of salon culture and allowed the satire to upstage reality. Molière has been understood as belittling women’s attempts to influence expression in order to distance further salon culture from mainstream literary culture. However, considered in his seventeenth-century context, the playwright is not satirising women’s control of language or desire to critique literature in order to censure salon culture; rather Molière revels in exploring this complex cultural landscape that was as integral to the seventeenth century as the Sun King’s powerful rays. Molière’s contemporaries would not have interpreted the dramatist as censoring women’s agency. Posterity has tended to distance Molière from this worldly culture, recreating him as the all-knowing satirist who attempts to bring his contemporaries to their senses and excise worldly culture from the Grand Siècle. But Molière is not Alceste – he does not reject sociability, salon culture and galanterie. To conceive of salon culture and the values and practices associated with it – conversation, galanterie, sociabilité – as limited to a rarefied and marginalised space and practised only by an elite group is to misunderstand Molière’s context as well as the playwright’s intentions and his comedy.

Livrets were distributed to the spectators of all of Molière’s plays created at court and involving music, from Le Mariage forcé (1664) to La Comtesse d’Escarbagnas (1671). They explained the action, described the decors, costumes and dances, and gave the names of those dancing. This chapter explore three ways of reading these livrets. First, they are precious traces of the conditions in which the plays were created within court entertainments. Second, they constitute a specific branch of theatre publishing with its own aesthetics – involving a combination of different art forms and an accumulation of different pleasures – and its own audience, which is designated as an elite. Finally, because they contribute to the representation of monarchical power, they are a way of demonstrating a close relationship with this power and of recording it in the long-lived form of print. All this makes them an ideal site in which to observe the ways in which theatrical practices were institutionalised in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the central role Molière and his troupe played in this process.