Moliere: A Theatrical Life (review)

Molière: A Theatrical Life is the first important English-language biography of the playwright/actor/manager since John Palmer's Molière, published in 1930. Virginia Scott's reexamination of the events and personal relationships of the life of the man born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin results from her belief that "times have changed and so has biography" (1).

Indeed, the changes in the genre of scholarly biography are a central part of Scott's agenda. Scott notes that Palmer's biography demonstrates a conventional "positivist view of the evidence" (7) of Molière's life, one drawn from a three-century tradition of French scholarship. This tradition, introduced in Charles Varlet La Grange's original biography of 1682 and carried on in Roger Duchêne's Molière (Fayard 1998)—which is the most recent French biography—is the hagiography that relied heavily on the portrait of the playwright as a literary and intellectual genius while ignoring the more elusive actor and comedian. Simultaneously, in these previous studies, scholars tie the plays solely to external conditions and anecdotes, such as patronage or the pamphlet wars (the published reactions to Molière's controversial dramaturgy). As Scott puts it, "[A] problem with the positivist view is its refusal to consider the plays themselves, not as evidence of Molière's actual life so much as suggestive signs of his emotional and inner life" (7). Instead, Scott takes a different approach, aiming "to express those intersections between myself and the past that I experience imaginatively. What that means is that I order what I know or believe I know so as to create characters—whom I choose to call Molière and Madeleine [Béjart]—who could have made with some degree of probability the choices I believe the real Molière and the real Madeleine to have made. I am not in pursuit of 'truth,' so much as what Elizabeth Hardwick calls a 'consistent fiction'" (4).

The difficulty of this task, however, is apparent to Scott: "There are no original manuscripts, no letters, journals or written documents from the hand of Molière, nothing of what biographers usually require for reasonably reliable evidence of a subject's life and inner life" (4). In other words, Scott did not write this biography because she discovered new documentation that revealed new truths or new facts about Molière; instead, she takes a fresh look at the same facts. What makes Scott's biography of Molière different from Duchêne's, for example, is two-fold: first, she surrounds the character of Molière with an in-depth cultural history of Paris and the many people who touched his life, and, second, she considers Molière's plays as indicators of his "own values and ideas" (7). Scott presents her study as "a set of possibilities . . . an arrangement of facts, opinions, conjectures, rumors, and lies" (8). The plays, she argues, should not be read as literally autobiographical, but, through their correlation to the events of Molière's public life, as barometers and illuminators of the playwright's private response to these external events. Scott acknowledges her own debt to previous work as both translator and director of Molière's plays. In other words, to the same kind of production work that the playwright himself engaged in on these same plays which has, in turn, given Scott new insights into the man behind the plays.

Scott's biography is both scholarly and accessible. It is designed to be "useful to the actors, the directors, and the dramaturges who produce Molière's plays and to the public that sees them" (8). It is thoroughly documented and annotated, and both her notes and bibliography will be of use to scholars. Because there are, as Scott says, no new documents or discoveries, she takes the opportunity to envelop the known documents and facts in cultural history...