Molière on Stage: What's So Funny? by Robert W. Goldsby (review)

Abstract

Robert W. Goldsby. Moliere on Stage: What's So Funny? London: Anthem, 2012. Pp. xx + 202 + [46 illus.] $39.95. There exist a considerable number of biographical depictions of Moliere. Beyond setting forth known facts and probable truths about his life, these bio-fictional plays, novels, and films might be classified according to degree of their presumptuousness about what cannot possibly be known: Moliere's innermost thoughts and feelings, particularly those concerning women in his life. As a commodity, Moliere's romantic life has made for brisk business. would venture to say that imagining Moliere's thoughts and in most vivid and emotionally inciting ways is an obsession that rivals, voire surpasses, our obsessions with Shakespeare--in love, or not. Moliere on Stage: What's So Funny?, while a work of nonfiction, has something in common with bio-fictions that trade in business of imagining man Moliere. this instance, assumptions about Moliere's intimate life are ser forth as providing key to understanding his plays. Goldsby's offers useful insights about language, characters, and staging of Moliere's plays, but does so through and around a narrative infused with specious notion that Moliere's plays are a map of his affairs with women. The is arranged in four acts with a total of seventeen chapters--some only a few pages. Progressing chronologically, each chapter discusses one or two of Moliere's major plays, first providing highly selective biographical context for their creation, followed discussions of past productions and performances that Goldsby has directed or seen in US and abroad. Goldsby, Professor Emeritus from University of California at Berkeley, has directed over a dozen of Moliere's plays and has seen some of most celebrated twentieth-century French productions. The overall effect of book, however, is a work of selective literary history married to armchair recollections amounting to more or less random observations about Moliere's plays and contemporary stage productions. While random does not mean uninteresting and past productions can be key to understanding how plays work in theater, was unable to discern clear guiding themes to and grew increasingly frustrated with unfounded declarations about Moliere's onstage and off. The author writes that his intention is to lead reader to discover ... what happens when Moliere's silent lines of text are transformed into a noisy play in three dimensional space (vii). In writing this book he states, I want[ed] to bring Moliere back to place he loved--the stage--by using language and theories, written and unwritten laws and trade secrets of his chosen craft to better understand this complex artisan of theater (7). But understanding Moliere for author too often revolves around interpreting plays as a function of Moliere's sexual-romantic passion and his frustration and sexual jealousy (33, 34). He declares that he was by possessed and obsessed his lust for a girl-child (62, 78). The author somehow peers into deepest part of Moliere's heart and finds him driven his wrenching feelings for his wife, Armande (87). Moliere is anguish[ed], fearful and passionately in love (94, 78, 95). Only when liberated from his torment and reunited with his wife does he find the delight coming from small grinning mask of Comedy (113). This particular narrative, one that interprets Moliere's plays through what can only be subjective tales about Moliere's deep but waning for his long-time companion Madeleine Bejart and tortured ones for Armande Bejart, dominates more than half book. …