The Neoclassical French
Theater
The neoclassical French theater’s
conventions were inspired by the classical
drama of Greece and Rome. Hence the
term neoclassical to describe it.
Like its ancient antecedents, the
seventeenth-century French theater
observed the ancient unities: the unity of
time, a stipulation that a play’s action be
confined to a twenty-four hour period; the
unity of place, a single setting; and the
unity of action, a single plot.
Moliere’s Tartuffe honors all three.
Plays that violated the unities were
thought to be crude and inelegant by the
educated neoclassical audience, which
consisted largely of courtiers and
aristocrats and well-to-do merchants.
Tartuffe was performed for the court of
Louis XIV.
French neoclassical plays sometimes
reflected the ideas and upheld the values
popular among these classes; sometimes
they satirized them.
In either case, the good manners, wit, and
common sense of neoclassical comedy
mirrored the aristocratic world and suited
its audience.
The neoclassical stage differed from the
stages of Shakespeare and Sophocles in
being an indoor theater with a pictureframe stage.
The proscenium arch with its curtain
separated audience from actors.
Neoclassical plays were enacted on a box
stage, which represented a room with a
missing fourth wall, allowing the audience
to look in on the action.
The scenery was not elaborate. It was
painted and served as a backdrop for the
action.
Candles and lanterns illuminated both the
actors and the audience.
Costumes tended toward the elaborate
and ornate as in Elizabethan drama.
On both the Elizabethan and neoclassical
stages actors were ordinarily costumed in
contemporary dress that was appropriate
to the social status of the characters.
A major difference between neoclassical
and earlier drama was that female
actresses assumed women’s roles,
enabling playwrights to include more
extensive, more frequent, and more
realistic love scenes than had been
possible previously (since boys had
assumed women’s roles in Shakespeare’s
time).
As in the earlier eras of drama, however,
language still did much of the work, so that
even though the intimacy of the French
neoclassical playhouse – with a capacity
to seat perhaps four hundred spectaors –
allowed for refinements of facial and
physical gesture, action remained
subordinate to dialogue.
Moliere
Moliere was a poet and an actor as well as
a playwright.
He performed in his own plays, playing
Orgon in Tartuffe.
Moliere’s genius was limited to comedy.
His comedies were satiric rather than
romantic.
Moliere was the king of farce. He was the
most influential playwright of the
neoclassical period, and had the largest
impact on playwrights after his time.
He freely admitted to depicting the failings
of humans truthfully.
He used farcical characters to depict true
character-types of the time period, and
was persecuted for attacking human
weakness.
He utilized the criteria of the Académie, as
well as neoclassical language (he often
used rhymed couplets).
Another characteristic of neoclassical
theatre that is often apparent in his plays
is deus ex machina.
In two of his most popular plays, Tartuffe
and The Would-Be Gentleman, the conflict
is resolved in the end with a letter arriving
from the king solving all the problems and
providing closure to the story.
Molière also had his own theatre troupe, and
their theatre was called the Palais Royal.
In 1665, Louis XIV made Molière's troupe “The
Kings Men."
He died in 1673 while acting in The Imaginary
Invalid . Because he was associated with the
theatre, he was refused a Church burial.
Louis became upset and, in the end, Molière
was buried at night in a small parish. Not long
after his death, in 1680, Louis consolidated the
Molière-Marais group, which was entitled the
Comedie Francaise, the first (and still existing)
national theatre.
Tartuffe satirizes both religious hypocrisy
and fraudulence. It also pokes fun at the
obsessive fanaticism and the blind
gullibility of those who allow themselves to
be victimized by the greedy and the selfserving.
When Tartuffe was first staged in 1664, it
stirred up those who considered it an
attack on religion.
Moliere retitled it The Imposter to indicate
that Tartuffe’s piety is fraudulent, the
original version of the play was censored
and banned.
To defend himself and the play against
charges that Tartuffe attacked religion,
Moliere wrote three prefaces and later
changed his original ending.
The publicity enhanced the play’s o\popularity,
and the work was returned to the stage under
the protection of the King.
Its three-hundred-year-plus life span, however,
is due neither to royal protection nor to notoriety,
but rather to the ingenuity and vitality of its plot,
the profundity of its characterization, and the
brilliance of its language, unerringly translated
by Richard Wilbur into rhymed iambic
pentameter couplets.
DiYanni, Robert. Literature Reading Fiction, Poetry,
Drama, and the Essay. Boston, Massachusetts, 1998.
Alvin Goldfarb. Bibliography: A. Houssaye, Behind the
Scenes of the Comédie Française (1889)
H.C. Lancaster, The Comédie Française, 2 vols (1941;
1951).