Molière, original name Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (baptized January 15, 1622. Paris, France —died February 17, 1673. Paris), French actor and playwright, the greatest of all writers of French comedy .
Portrait of Molière, oil on canvas by Pierre Mignard, c. 1658; in the Musée …
DeA Picture Library/age fotostock
Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France often combined against him, the genius of Molière finally emerged to win him acclaim. Comedy had a long history before Molière, who employed most of its traditional forms, but he succeeded in inventing a new style that was based on a double vision of normal and abnormal seen in relation to each other—the comedy of the true opposed to the specious. the intelligent seen alongside the pedantic. An actor himself, Molière seems to have been incapable of visualizing any situation without animating and dramatizing it, often beyond the limits of probability. Though living in an age of reason, he had the good sense not to proselytize but rather to animate the absurd, as in such masterpieces as Tartuffe . L’École des femmes . Le Misanthrope . Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme . and many others. It is testimony to the freshness of his vision that the greatest comic artists working centuries later in other media, such as Charlie Chaplin. have been compared to Molière.
Early life and beginnings in theatre
Scandals and successes
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(1622-73). What Shakespeare is to English literature, Moliere is to French literature. His works do not have the same breadth and depth that Shakespeare’s have in their view of human life, nor are they as full of poetry. No modern dramatist has equaled him, however, in the comedy of manners-that form of comedy in which one laughs at the fashions and foibles of his time. Although he portrays his own countrymen and his own age, Moliere is like Shakespeare in that he belongs to all lands and all ages. After more than three centuries, his plays continue to delight their audiences as they did in the days of the Grand Monarch Louis XIV, Moliere’s patron.