Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife (review)

{ 158 } BOOK REV IEwS book (it’s too smart); it is a rare combination of painstaking scholarship and beautiful design that simultaneously informs and delights. —VAN SANTVOORD Tisch School of the Arts, New York University \ Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife. By Mechele Leon. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. vi + 184 pp. $39.95 cloth. In this elegantly written, erudite, lucid, and admirably researched short study of how the French Revolution appropriated Molière to its shifting ideological, political, and cultural purposes, Mechele Leon asks a question that goes beyond the temporal boundaries of her subject and remains of fundamental and universal importance for all Molièristes, be they academics or theatre artists: Who was and is Molière, and where does he and his theatre belong in the history of literature, culture, and theatrical practice? Do we define him as a literary icon, “a coherent and exalted figure suitable for framing and bequeathed to posterity ” (11), not to be tampered with, or as a working theatre artist, actor, and producer who is up for grabs? In her richly detailed, fascinating account of how the Revolution redefined, reshaped, refashioned, and reconstructed Molière and his work—how, in her words, “a challenge to the classical order was played out in the revolutionary reconfiguration of Molière’s reputation and the performance of his plays” (13)—Leon makes the case for approaching Molière not as an untouchable literary giant but as a living repository of new theatrical possibilities . The major strength of Leon’s study, in my opinion, lies in her choice to see Molière not as a “literary figure” but as a “theatrical figure.” That is, she approaches Molière “not as the marker for a stabilized set of printed texts” but as theatre artist, “a shifting protean figure” (10), emerging primarily from theatre production. If, as she says, “Molière functions far more efficiently as a national icon when he is contained as literature” (9), things get interesting when he is freed from the frame of conventional literary definition. After outlining, with enviable concision and clarity, the theoretical and conceptual framework of her study in her prologue,“The Theatrical Afterlife”— and it is to her credit that she does not shy from citing René Bray (out of fashion ) and Michel Foucault (very much in fashion) on the same page—Leon gets to the heart of the matter in six chapters. In the first two (“Repertory”and“Per- { 159 } BOOK REV IEwS formance”), Leon shows how actors and producers of the Revolution moved the marginal Molière, he of the vulgar farces and potboilers, from the periphery to the center of theatrical production. Doing so, they broke down the established eighteenth-century hierarchy of high versus low by creating a genre bâtard that mixed farce with high comedy. In an impressively researched section, Leon rehearses the opposition of established and conventional critics, still under the influence of Voltaire and Rousseau, to these theatrical “monstrosities.” In chapter 5,“Life,”she traces the continuation of the revolutionary project by showing how the biographical vaudevilles depicting Molière’s life “challenged Molière’s prestige as literary figure” (115), transforming the iconic figure of the playwright from man of the court to man of the people. To my mind, these chapters contain the essence of her argument and they—indeed the entire book— might be read in tandem with Lawrence W. Levine’s Highbrow, Lowbrow, which treats the same question of cultural hierarchies with regard to Shakespeare. If chapters 3 and 4, “History” and “Function,” strike me as straying somewhat from the heart of the matter, they are nonetheless well worth the read. “History” deals with how the problematical relationship between Molière and Louis XIV had to be rewritten to remove Molière from the ancien régime. It contains a lively narrative of how producers during the Revolution felt compelled to transform the Exempt’s vexing speech at the end of Tartuffe from praise of the king to an affirmation of revolutionary values. Chapter 4 offers us an account of how Molièrean comedy was retooled to become a weapon used against the...