The Misanthrope and Other Plays

Summary

The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine. In The Misanthrope (1666), written in alexandrine couplets, Alceste is a man who despises the flattery and polite lies of Parisian society and insists on total sincerity. His friend Philinte urges tolerance of human failings. Alceste nevertheless loves Célimène, a witty, flirtatious young widow who thrives on social gossip and keeps several suitors in play. He offends the foppish Oronte by condemning his sonnet, loses a lawsuit he refuses to influence, and is outraged when Célimène's letters mocking each of her admirers are revealed. He offers to marry her if she will retire with him into solitude; she refuses, and he departs to seek a place where one may be honest, leaving Philinte to marry the sincere Éliante. The play's subtitle, The Atrabilious Lover, links Alceste to the black bile of humoral melancholy. Tartuffe (1664–1669) portrays a religious hypocrite who worms his way into the household of the credulous Orgon, who offers him his daughter and signs over his property; Orgon's wife Elmire exposes Tartuffe by letting her husband, hidden under a table, witness his attempted seduction, and only the king's intervention saves the family. The play was banned for five years after protests by religious factions. The Sicilian is a short comic ballet in which a French gentleman frees a Greek slave from her jealous Sicilian master. A Doctor in Spite of Himself (1666) is a farce in which the woodcutter Sganarelle, beaten by his wife's contrivance into pretending to be a physician, cures a girl's feigned dumbness with Latin gibberish and helps her elope with her lover. The Imaginary Invalid (1673), Molière's last play, concerns Argan, a hypochondriac who submits to endless enemas, purges and bleedings from his doctors and wants to marry his daughter to a medical student; his wily maid Toinette disguises herself as a doctor, Argan's grasping second wife is exposed, and the play ends with a mock ceremony making Argan himself a physician.

Top Lessons

• Sincerity and sociability

  The Misanthrope asks whether complete honesty is compatible with social life. Alceste is admirable and ridiculous at once, and the play declines to settle the question.

• The disguises of hypocrisy

  Tartuffe shows how outward piety can mask greed and lust, and how the credulous cooperate in their own deception.

• The authority of medicine

  Molière's medical comedies mock doctors who hide ignorance behind Latin, ritual and confidence, and patients who crave their authority. The satire asks what makes medical knowledge trustworthy.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Molière is the great satirist of seventeenth-century medicine. The Imaginary Invalid opens with Argan totting up his apothecary's bills for enemas and purges, and portrays doctors who bleed, purge and quote Latin authorities while refusing new ideas: the younger Diafoirus boasts of opposing the circulation of the blood. Its final ceremony, a mock doctoral graduation in macaronic Latin, ridicules the Paris Faculty of Medicine. A Doctor in Spite of Himself shows that confidence and jargon can pass for medical knowledge. The Misanthrope's subtitle, L'Atrabilaire amoureux, places Alceste within humoral theory as a man of black bile, a melancholic temperament; his gloom and need for solitude invite psychological readings, best framed as interpretations of a comic type. Molière, chronically ill with a lung disease in his later years, collapsed while playing Argan, a famous irony in theatre and medical history.

• The Misanthrope, subtitle and Act 1, Scene 1

  Alceste's black humour and contempt for society, framed by the subtitle 'The Atrabilious Lover' (atrabile = black bile).

• A Doctor in Spite of Himself, Act 2

  Sganarelle, disguised as a physician, diagnoses Lucinde's feigned dumbness with Latin nonsense and reversed anatomy.

• The Imaginary Invalid, Act 1, Scene 1

  Argan audits his apothecary's bill for enemas, purges and draughts.

• The Imaginary Invalid, Act 2

  The Diafoiruses visit; young Thomas Diafoirus boasts of rejecting the circulation of the blood; the doctors examine Argan.

• The Imaginary Invalid, Act 3

  Monsieur Purgon curses Argan with a cascade of diseases; Toinette, disguised as a doctor, prescribes absurd remedies; Argan feigns death to test his family.

• The Imaginary Invalid, final interlude

  Burlesque Latin ceremony admitting Argan to the medical profession.