The Misanthrope . The Miser . The Hypochondriac . The School For Wives . Tartuffe
Molière
Reviewed by: Lale Eskicioglu lale@readliterature.com
The book I have is called Five Plays, Introduced by Donald Roy and published by Methuen World Classics. It contains:
1. The School for Wives
2. Tartuffe
3. The Misanthrope
These three translated into English verse by Richard Wilbur. Absolutely fantastic translations! I think even people who have read Molière in French should read Wilbur's renditions.
4. The Miser
5. The Hypochondriac
These two translated into English prose by Alan Dury.
In all plays there are silly disguises, hiding to witness the vice of somebody, witty servants, a wise person who ends up showing the right way, and of course, one or two main characters with extreme traits:
- in The Misanthrope, the savagely honest Alceste, the would be recluse;
- in The Miser, the mean and stingy Harpagon who takes his love of money to such extremes as to starving his horses;
- in The Hypochondriac, the exaggerated attraction of Argan to doctors and diseases;
- in The School For Wives, the excess jealousy and fear of "receiving a pair of horns" of Arnolphe, his idiotic idea of bringing up a young girl in ignorance, to later make her his wife, his ultimate lack of understanding of human nature; and
- in Tartuffe, Orgon's asinine, almost sick devotion to Tartuffe, a complete charlatan, a swindler and a hypocrite.
All the plays conclude in predictable happy endings (except for The Hypochondriac which ends in an uncharacteristically different way). Don't expect complexity of plot, realistic dialogues or surprise culminations. Do expect however, acute satire, humour and delightful poetry. Do keep in mind that these plays were written in the 17th century.
Now, a few words on each individual play:
The Misanthrope
The Misanthrope starts with an amusing clash of two friends which reveals, with no room for mistake, the personality and philosophy of Alceste, the misanthrope:
Philinte:
Why, what have I done, Alceste? Is this quite just?
Alceste:
My God, you ought to die of self-disgust.
I call your conduct inexcusable, Sir,
And every man of honour will concur.
I see you almost hug a man to death,
Exclaim for joy until you're out of breath,
And supplement these loving demonstrations
With endless offers, vows, and protestations;
Then when I ask you 'Who was that?', I find
That you can barely bring his name to mind!
Once the man's back is turned, you cease to love him,
And speak with absolute indifference of him!
As you can see, Richard Wilbur's translation is absolutely delightful. Although, I have to admit, since there is so much music in the lines, / and if you read pages of these rhymes, / you might find yourself reading for the melody's sake / and losing the meaning, then you have to take a break.
Alceste is a man with strict principles, who does not give in to the pressures of social manners, friends, love or even law suits. He has to be brutally honest, at all times, no exception. He is "inclined to be unfashionably sincere." His encounter with Oronte, an aspiring poet, is brilliant. Here is the excerpt I love the most:
Oronte:
...
In short, I am your servant. And now, dear friend,
Since you have such fine judgement, I intend
To please you, if I can, with a small sonnet
I wrote not long ago. Please comment on it,
And tell me whether I ought to publish it.
...
Alceste:
...
Sir, these are delicate matters; we all desire
To be told that we've the true poetic fire.
But once, to one whose name I shall not mention,
I said, regarding some verse of his invention,
That gentlemen should rigorously control
That itch to write which often afflicts the soul;
That one should curb the heady inclination
To publicize one's little avocation;
And that in showing off one's works of art
One often plays a very clownish part.
...
You're under no necessity to compose;
Why you should wish to publish, heaven knows.
There's no excuse for printing tedious rot
Unless one writes for bread, as you do not.
Resist temptation, then, I beg of you;
Conceal your pastimes from the public view;
Of course at the end, Alceste, the misanthrope, the man who is so unfashionably sincere, finds no other choice than to "flee this bitter world where vice is king, and seek some spot unpeopled and apart, where he will be free to have an honest heart".
The Miser (l'avare) is about a stingy, greedy, miserable man who cannot love anything other than money, not even his own children. But that doesn't stop him from wanting to get married to a young and beautiful woman, a woman better suited to his son.
Harpagon, the miser, the avarice, the scrooge reminded me a man I have met 5 years ago and could never forget although our encounter lasted less than half an hour. I had taken my car to the garage for a regular maintenance. The garage had a shuttle service to take the customers to their destinations after they left off their car. That particular day, I was alone on the shuttle and the driver, between the garage and my work place (15-20 minutes of drive) told me his entire life which consisted of making and saving money, and most importantly avoiding traps of spending. (The traps he talked about were not the "impulsive shopping" kind, the traps he talked about were normal, day-to-day living for ordinary people.) He was an old man with all his front teeth rotten from lack of care (or from avoiding the trap of paying for dental care).
There was a photo of a decent looking middle-aged, blond woman, stuck to the inside of the sun shade. When he lowered the sun shade, I saw the woman's picture. He told me she was his girlfriend. He had a girlfriend, with those teeth he had managed to get a girlfriend! He told me how she always wanted to go out and spend money. He was not a fool. He was not going to let a woman spend his money in restaurants and movies. No, sir! She had to learn to pass time with distractions that didn't require any spending. He told me how she always talked about getting married. Did she take him for an idiot? Get married and have to share your money?
This man, who talked non-stop about how much he had and how little he spent, and who was driving a shuttle bus of a service station, had 6 antique cars at the time, or so he told me. He was buying them, doing the necessary repairs and re-selling them. Obviously he had money to have his teeth fixed. I often thought about that man, about the woman who would want him for a boyfriend, his antique car hobby-business, his odious teeth and his detestable talk of not spending any money, any where, other than on antique cars. Believe me, Harpagon exists.
Harpagon of Molière's creation, unlike real-life Harpagon, does want to get married. He wants a dowry too. And just like the Harpagon the shuttle-bus-driver and antique-car-collector, he doesn't want his woman to cause him any extra expenses. Well, he is not going to get it. It is either money or love. At the end, he is still lucky to keep his cash-box.
The Hypochondriac is my favourite Molière play. I recommend this play to anyone who is or has ever been ill (real or imaginary).
Argan loves to be sick and to be treated. Being sick is his main occupation. In the opening scene Argan is calculating what he owes to doctors and pharmacists. Upon finding the price of a potion too high, he laments: "If one is to be treated in this manner, one will no longer wish to be ill."
As in all Molière plays there are disguises (particularly in this play so much so that even the masks of Mission Impossible II start to seem reasonable), there are hidings and/or pretending to be dead, there is a maid wiser than the master, the villain wife who wishes her husband dead so that she can inherit his money, all the usual Molière elements.
In The Hypochondriac, however, there are quite a few variations as well. For instance Molière himself is in the play. In Molière's play, there is a Molière play. And even Molière is not immune to Molière's mocking. The characters of the "real" play, watch a decidedly banal Molière play, in which Molière himself acts as well. At the end of the play-in-play, Argan and Molière have this exchange:
Argan:
Are you Monsieur Molière, the author?
Molière:
I am.
Argan:
You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
The sad note is that in 1673, Molière was acting on stage in The Hypochondriac (not as Molière the author who was played by someone else, but as Argan) while he was a really sick man. During the fourth performance of the play at the Palais-Royal in Paris, Molière was seized by a fit of coughing and began to spit blood. If you read this play, you will see the irony of Argan (played by Molière) pretending to be dead, and the maid's explanation of his faux-death by "something wrong with the lungs". Molière carried on with the rest of the show, but died within an hour after the show ended.
The Hypochondriac pokes a lot of fun at the science of medicine and the doctors. If you are an MD with a sense of humour, you will get a kick out of this play. If you are an MD without a sense of humour... Well, tough luck! As Jerry Seinfeld once said, "This is comedy, someone's gonna get hurt!"
Arnolphe! Even in the 17th century nobody should be so out-of-touch! And you Horace! Your recounts of your love life to Arnolphe make Monica Lewinsky's confessions to Linda Tripp look like a good idea. Where is discretion my friend?
Arnolphe is a rich old man -just like every other main character in Molière's plays- who is obsessed with not becoming a "cuckold", finds an orphan girl, and with the determination to create a perfect wife for himself, has her raised up by nuns without any real life training or guidance. She is deliberately kept ignorant. When she comes of age, Arnolphe wants to marry her. Alas, not even the witch was able to keep Rapunzel out of sight for too long. Horace catches a glimpse of beautiful Agnes and ruins Arnolphe's plans.
I would love to see Tartuffe on stage. I can imagine how hilarious it would be. There are a couple of scenes so comical that even on paper they look very funny. This is one of Molière's more famous and important plays because in the age when religious hypocrisy was ripe, Tartuffe made a successful exposé of it
The only problem with this play is that the character Tartuffe so overplays the religion card that he doesn't so much come across as a hypocrite but more of a true-to-God swindler. I believe, with some subtlety the hypocrisy theme could be better presented. But, who am I to second guess Molière, RIP, the great man who now sleeps side by side with his buddy, La Fontaine, another great satirist, in Père Lachaise cemetery:
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