Molière: A Playwright and his Audience by W. D. Howarth (review)

REVIEWS W. D. Howarth. Molière: A Playwright and his Audience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pp. 325. Hardcover: $49.50. Paperback: $15.95. It is indeed difficult to write yet another study on a literary figure of the importance of Molière. Not only has he been the object of immense and longstanding scholarly attention, but his works have been seen or read so often as to leave them almost permanently and irrevocably cloaked in a pall of “déjà vu,” a cast that prevents us from seeing them afresh. In the volume under consideration here, W. D. Howarth’s not inconsid­ erable achievement is to have written a thorough and thoughtful assess­ ment which avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of just retelling the traditional views or of venturing too deeply into the waters of current jargon and change for change’s sake. Rather, he has found an acceptable middle path that permits him some striking and provocative interpretations for veteran “moliéristes” and that yet offers a complete presentation suitable for undergraduate students. As he announces in his preface, Howarth chooses to avoid the bio­ graphical approach, preferring to concentrate on the texts themselves. Furthermore, he has his eye constantly peeled for what he calls their “practical” nature, that is, as plays, as dramatic texts recreated on stage by actors. Hence the volume’s subtitle and the particular critical slant this gives to the entire book. “Part I: The Background” contains three chapters, the first of which deals with Molière as an actor, the evolution of his acting style, and its influence on the type of characters he created. The two other chapters are larger in scope, treating the various audiences Molière wrote for as well as comedy or the comic tradition as it existed in his time. In addition to speaking of pragmatic matters, viz., the size and shape of seventeenthcentury theaters and who sat where in them, Howarth also discusses the differences between the Court audiences at Versailles and other royal châteaux and the Parisian public. This first section is a fine effort to (re) place Molière in his own social, ideological, and artistic context. While acknowledging the changing inter­ pretations of various figures (Alceste is, of course, the outstanding ex­ ample of one who has been understood in the most contradictory ways by subsequent audiences and who has even influenced, in a strange reversal, how biographers saw Molière himself), Howarth wants especially to know how Molière’s audience understood his characters and reacted to them. To this end Howarth risks yet another discussion of the seven­ teenth-century code of the “honnête homme.” However, he is successful here because he captures the problematic nature of this social phenomenon for the stage. Molière offers for his audience’s approval certain figures who embody this societal ideal. At the same time, Molière himself violates this code in his professional desire to provoke laughter and ridicule. As 281 282 Comparative Drama a “moraliste” Molière supports the concept of “honnêteté” while as writer and actor he rejects this ideal which eschewed any professional special­ ization, any exaggeration of manner or behavior, or any total commitment to achieving one single goal. At the base of these comedies Howarth finds then a dramatic tension between an attractive social norm and Molière’s personal incompatibility with it. The second section traces a chronological progression and an increas­ ing aesthetic refinement in the form and content of the plays. Discussing the farcical antecedents of Molière’s comedies, Howarth proposes the notion of resemblance as he follows the evolution of Mascarille and Sganarelle, two stock “bouffons” who are really multiple versions of a single comic naif as he finds himself in various circumstances. These two characters and their avatars thus hold the key to Molière’s comic art both as playwright and as actor. Although his name is not used consistently, Mascarille usually is a cunning schemer, the “valet rusé,” a role which culminates in Scapin of the Fourberies, while the Sganarelles are all obsessed clowns, blind to reality and trapped in their own delusions of grandeur or of success...