This book offers a new approach to the work of the great classical author. Molière’s is obviously a patriarchal world in which women are most often treated as objects of patriarchal autocracy, which expects their submission. Yet in a number of his plays, women display ample resourcefulness in countering the patriarchal rule, often managing to outwit it. To explore this topic, the book scrutinizes Molière’s most important comedies, The School for Wives, Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, and Don Juan, all of which feature complex female characters who play important roles. They show that Molière acknowledged a fully valid space for women and recognized their right to their own lives. As a prelude, the book analyzes two comedies from the margins of Molière’s oeuvre, The Ridiculous Précieuses and The Learned Ladies, which provoked controversy and indignant feminist criticism, since they appear to deride the emancipatory efforts of the time.

This is a book about how Molière, France's most celebrated author of comedies, made something strikingly new out of the traditional comedy plot of thwarted courtship. Though justly celebrated for his mastery of physical comedy and farce, one of Molière's key moves was to pay attention to the way women could use language. Seventeenth-century France was a time when speaking well became exceptionally important, and in this arena women were the trend-setters. Among the most important places to display taste and social skills were the salons, gatherings presided over by women. Yet women still enjoyed little in the way of rights, particularly regarding a central decision in their lives: the choice of a husband. French regulations of marriage contracts became increasingly restrictive, largely to the detriment of women. To draw attention to their plight, women novelists and essayists presented case studies in how men and women misunderstood one another, how women were coerced to wed, how marriages could become nightmares, and how courtships could fail. Against this fraught social background Molière showed women using one of the few assets they had, their mastery of words, and in particular the rhetoric of irony, to frustrate the plans of fathers, guardians, and other authority figures. The comedies discussed here include very well-known plays such as The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, The Learned Ladies, The School for Wives and Don Juan, and also less known but revealing and thought-provoking works such as The School for Husbands, George Dandin and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac.

Blending biography with fiction, this portrait of the famed French playwright is written by a kindred spirit: the author of The Master and Margarita. Mikhail Bulgakov and Jean-Baptiste Poquelin—more commonly known as Molière—had much in common. The twentieth-century Russian satirist and dramatist and the seventeenth-century French playwright known for Tartuffe and The Misanthrope shared a love for finding material in the shortcomings and follies of the human condition. They both created their art under unpredictable and often repressive regimes—Bulgakov under the Bolsheviks and Molière under King Louis XIV—and often saw their work censored or banned. Both were also favored by influential men: King Louis was Molière’s patron, and Stalin, despite his oppressive rule, was a fan of Bulgakov’s work. Perhaps it is not surprising that Bulgakov penned such a vibrant, affectionate biography of one of the greatest masters of comedy in the Western canon. Written between 1932 and 1933 and eventually published posthumously in 1963, Bulgakov’s portrait of the famed French playwright and actor goes beyond the usual boundaries of biography—the two men at times seem to be communicating with each other across the centuries through Bulgakov’s lively prose and inspired interpretations of the life of a literary kindred spirit. Sliding delightfully between fiction and meticulous fact, The Life of Monsieur de Molière is not to be missed. “In its playfulness and hybridity, this book looks forward to contemporary 'faction' that fuses fiction and biography.” —John Dugdale, The Guardian Book Review