État Présent: Molière

The somewhat uneven fortunes of états présents on Molière indicate the difficult task of selecting highlights from the vast bibliography of recent years. The most significant attempt to evaluate criticism published between 1900 and 1970,¹ while considered 'un guide raisonné de ce musée critique',² was undervalued on account of its bias towards form-orientated critics such as René Bray and Will Moore.³ Other états présents have likewise had a distinct parti pris. In 1947, Moore, in the one previous état présent on Molière in French Studies, used the opportunity to plead for a new critical emphasis which focused on aesthetic rather than on moral aspects,⁴ a gauntlet which Raymond Picard picked up in 1958, in his dismissal of those who portrayed Molière as an 'amuseur sans cervelle'.⁵ Georges Couton's update sustained Picard's focus, in what was becoming a largely Anglo-French divide,⁶ with Couton highlighting renewal in principally those studies which provided a 'connaissance meilleure du contexte politique, social, philosophique'. Gaston Hall iterated his long-standing dual concern to respect the punctuation of the early editions and to examine Molière's transformation of his cultural legacy, particularly of the work of minor poets and of comic traditions.⁷ Divergent approaches were brought together by Francis Lawrence in eight studies of a special number of Œuvres et critiques.⁸ The last substantial état présent provided a history of scholarship over 100 years from the demise of Le Moliériste in 1889.⁹ This article will therefore concentrate, without (as far as possible) a personal agendum, on major trends in Molière studies since 1990.

Bibliography

The major innovation in bibliography has been in the exploitation of electronic resources. The online bibliography located at Pézenas, a site conceived and developed by a leading French Molière scholar, Gabriel Conesa, while not pretending to be exhaustive, is an invaluable research tool.¹⁰ The Agorra Encyclopedia,¹¹ though less comprehensive, complements the Pézenas site which it justifiably calls 'richissime'. Selective focused bibliographical data and texts are contained in CESAR, an online database which, gathering information on the plays, people, and performance spaces in French theatre between 1600 and 1800, is particularly helpful in contextualizing Molière's plays.¹² Two sites dedicated to French theatre have provided a useful forum for discussion of current issues.¹³

These electronic sites, which supplement the annual lists supplied, for example, by the MLA bibliography and the ISI Web of Knowledge, have facilitated emendation and updates, which were not practicable with the printed volumes. The major concern is the need for maintenance to ensure that these sites are endlessly contemporary. Three volumes in hard copy have, however, contributed to Molière bibliography: the late Jürgen Grimm's philological and socio-historical survey,¹⁴ the 1823 titles listed at the end of the second volume of Patrick Dandrey's magisterial study of Molière and medicine,¹⁵ and The Molière Encyclopedia, edited by James Gaines, which, though aimed primarily at students, is a ready source of information for specialists.¹⁶

Biography

The dearth of information with regard to Molière's life, in particular, during the period up to his return to Paris in 1658, has given rise to countless hypotheses and fabulations. The major challenge lies in the absence of manuscripts and documents in Molière's own hand, which forces biographers to rely on archival sources and writings about Molière by others. The rigorous scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s by Madeleine Jurgens and Elizabeth Maxfield-Miller, Georges Mongrédien, Sylvie Chevalley, and Suzanne Dulait, has exposed the sentimental, anecdotal approaches of many biographers. The late Roger Duchêne, renowned for his biographical studies on Ninon de Lenclos, Madame de Lafayette, La Fontaine, and Madame de Sévigné, brought together the two distinctively French approaches of the biographie historique and the biographie interprétative, avoiding the pitfalls of predecessors, by distinguishing carefully between fact and myth, and recontextualizing the plays in the light of literary, social, political, and scientific developments.^17...