Comedy and French Classicism

The full view of seventeenth-century comedy and its wide array of playwrights has sometimes been obstructed in literary history by the pre-eminence of its single greatest representative, Molière. This is something of an exception. If we turn to tragedy, the parity of Corneille and Racine levels the field for broader considerations of the genre; as for the moralistes, the traditional grouping together of authors such as Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère allows no single figure to obscure the whole; and the stark absence at the time of a great French epic poet opens that genre to the widest, if most purely theoretical, accounts. Fortunately for comedy, the experimental genius of Molière managed to assemble in a single corpus a remarkable range of the comic forms that flourished around him. High literary comedy or physical farce, biting social satire or gently elegant pastoral, modern setting or ancient, verse or prose or musically interspersed comédie-ballet, one-act or three-act or five-act, the playwright's work would seem to exceed even the exhaustive generic catalogue detailed by Hamlet's Polonius. Beyond questions of theatrical form, Molière's subject matter similarly spans a vast spectrum, from the courtiers that surrounded the Sun King (Les Fâcheux, L'Impromptu de Versailles) to the beggar in the forest (Dom Juan), from Latin-spouting university professors and pedantic poets (Le Mariage forcé, Les Femmes savantes) to the most education-deprived servant or sequestered girl (L'École des femmes).