The Background of the Turkish Ceremony in Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

Abstract

Since the first performance of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme there have always been critics who consider the Turkish ceremony a regrettable lapse On the part of Molière. No doubt there always will be, though they may find it difficult to phrase their disdain more devastatingly than that lively nineteenth-century critic, le comte de Saint-Victor, who called Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme "une comédie enterrée vivante dans un sarcophage turc." Such occasional strictures of the Turkish nonsense in the play may be a matter of taste or of judgement warped by idolatry; Molière, like Shakespeare, suffers from being worshipped as a sacred cow.