Molière: Reasoning with Fools by Michael Hawcroft

Abstract

568 Reviews Lestrange argues thatAnne de Bretagne's patronage was directed at both territorial interest and supporting her daughters. Antoinette de Bourbon's tomb forher hus band as a statement of theGuise family's religious priorities is the subject of the essay by Jessica Munns and Penny Richards. For Dora Polachek, the role of theGuise women in supporting religious polemics depended on proper gender behaviour, but gender conformitymade these effortsalmost invisible to latergenerations. In contrast to the propensity to disappear, Catherine de' Medici was remark ably visible. No woman in Renaissance France can match her legacy as a patron. Laurent Odde argues that Catherine's architectural interestswere a precursor to monarchical staging by Louis XIV. Chantal Turbide reconstructs the now destroyed Hotel de laReine as a window into theworkings of theValois monarchy. Caroline zum Kolk demonstrates how Catherine's correspondence shaped her patronage of painting, sculpture, and architecture towards celebrating royalty. Alexandra Zvereva concentrates on Catherine's portrait patronage, supervision of royal representation, and effectson the elevation of the status of artists. Kerrie-Rue Michahelles traces Catherine's influence on future generations through her testamentary dispositions. Contemporary responses toCatherine and female patronage are explored in Sheila ffolliott's essay on Nicolas Houel. Despite promises to explore how elite patronage linked to popular ideas and arts, one must often squint to see it,but that is aminor complaint. This is a rich, varied, thought-provoking collection based on an array of archives andmethods. The essays teach us much about not only patronage but also gender dynamics, Renaissance art in its many forms,politics, and family as inflectedby the concerns of female patrons. Vanderbilt University Katherine Crawford Moliere: Reasoning with Fools. ByMichael Hawcroft. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. ix+235 pp. ?55. ISBN 978-0-19-922-883-6. Of the threebooks that Moliere scholars have promised themselves towrite one day, the first?the relationships ofMoliere's plays to themoraliste tradition?appeared when Pierre Force published Moliere ou leprix des choses (Paris: Nathan, 1994). The second is the object of this review: an analysis ofMoliere's raisonneurs, who are at the heart of the long-standing quarrel over Moliere homme de theatrevs. Moliere penseur. The third?a properly dramaturgical study of the complete plays?remains to be done, although Michael Hawcroft has cleared the path. Itwould be difficult to find a more pedagogically inspired book thanMoliere: Reasoning with Fools. Hawcroft tells us what the project is, how he intends to at tack it,and what the resultswill be. Subscribing to the old principle that repetitio est mater studiorum, he repeats his intentions several times, and takes the extraordinary measure of repeating the fullbibliographical information every time awork appears initially in a chapter. This might be understandable iftherewere no bibliography or index; but both are provided. Yet, these are cavils compared to the distinctive results thatflow fromHawcrofVs rhetorical approach to the five comedies where the raisonneur plays a major role: MLRy 104.2, 2009 569 Vicole des marts, VEcole desfemmes, Tartuffe,LeMisanthrope, and LeMalade ima ginaire. (Hawcroft treatsAriste of Les Femmes savantes as a would-be raisonneur.) From Bruntiere and Bray, through Peacock and Defaux, to Calder and Dandrey, among others, Hawcroft makes the point that Tt is, in part, the consistently high degree of selectivity thathas entrenched thewidely divergent views' (p. 20). For that reason, to devote an entire book to a detailed analysis of all the utterances of the raisonneurs within the structures of the comedies constitutes the only method for coming to a reasoned conclusion about their function. Hawcroft introduces us initially toAriste inVEcole des maris, who 'is the first of a series ofmale characters inMoliere's plays who try to save the comic fools from the consequences of their folly' (p. 52).Why do theymake the effort?Because all the raisonneurs aremoved by gentle motives, most often friendship. Given the didactic drive behind Hawcroft's approach, one might have expected him tohelp the readerwith references to seventeenth-century attitudes to friendship, such as those that JonathanDewald offers in his highly respected Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993). Carefully demonstrating thatMoliere's genius lies in presenting moral issues within farcical structures,Hawcroft show...