Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy by Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde (review)

The last three of this book’s five chapters focus respectively on ‘Molière’s Dom Juan’, ‘A Study of Le Tartuffe’, and ‘The Case of Benserade’s Iphis et Iante’, but this excellent, wide-ranging, and rigorously researched book is much more than a series of case studies. It will enrich any scholar’s or student’s knowledge and appreciation of seventeenth-century French comedy. When Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde studies individual plays, they are invariably situated in contexts informed by wide critical perspectives and a sensitivity to comic drama not only of seventeenth-century France but also of Italy, Spain, and the ancient world. She takes a theme that might have seemed well worn, explored above all in Corneille’s Le Menteur and Molière’s Le Tartuffe, ou, L’imposteur, and, by casting her net widely, she demonstrates how central the question of lying is to the task of the comic dramatist and to the pleasure of the theatre audience. Her conclusion admirably sums up the many different functions that lying performs in these plays and that run in filigree through her preceding analyses. Lying can play a crucial structural function and generate different kinds of dramatic irony. It performs a moral function in allowing what is conventionally taboo to be enacted in a fictional space. There is an ideological function, too, in that it can prompt audiences to reflect on particular problems of human behaviour in the real world (a function that got Molière into trouble and that helps to account for the compelling nature of his comedy). It can perform what Wilton-Godberfforde calls a rhetorical function, drawing attention to the ludicity of language, most obviously in those many plays that give voice to the braggart character type, such as Matamore in Corneille’s L’Illusion comique, but also Molière’s Dom Juan (this character type is the subject of her second chapter). Above all, there is the self-referential function, where the constant references to lying and role-playing irresistibly draw attention to the activity of dramatists and actors, whose essentially mendacious work so frequently drew the opprobrium of the Church, even as it is the basis of the audience’s pleasure. The author has modestly not given centre stage to Le Menteur on the grounds that there is already ample commentary on it from the perspective of lying, but it is nonetheless a key text in her survey of different perspectives on lying explored in the first chapter. Wilton-Godberfforde’s detailed and percipient close readings clearly show how comedy ‘intentionally obscures the more complex and at times troubling dimensions of the subject matters upon which it chooses to focus’ (p. 175); and the opening of her conclusion, in which she evokes our post-truth era and fake news, underlines the relevance of her reflections as well as the continuing relevance of the particular comic scrutiny to which seventeenth-century comic dramatists subjected liars of all types.