Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife by Mechele Leon

By Mechele Leon

From 1680 until eventually the French Revolution, whilst laws abolished regulations on theatrical firm, a unmarried theatre held sole proprietorship of Molière’s works. After 1791, his performs have been played in new theatres far and wide Paris by means of new actors, sooner than audiences new to his works. either his performs and his photo took on new dimensions. In Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife, Mechele Leon convincingly demonstrates how revolutionaries challenged the binds that sure this preeminent seventeenth-century comedian playwright to the outdated Regime and supplied him with a spot of honor within the nation’s new cultural memory.

Leon starts off via examining the functionality of Molière’s performs throughout the Revolution, exhibiting how his privileged place as royal servant was once disrupted by way of the sensible stipulations of the innovative theatre. subsequent she explores Molière’s dating to Louis XIV, Tartuffe, and the social functionality of his comedy, utilizing Rousseau’s recognized critique of Molière in addition to appropriations of George Dandin in progressive iconography to debate how Moliérean laughter was once retooled to serve republican pursuits. After studying the large quantity of performs facing his lifestyles within the latter years of the Revolution, she appears on the exhumation of his continues to be and their reentombment because the tangible manifestation of his passage from Ancien Régime favourite to new nationwide icon.

The nice Molière is preferred via theatre artists and audiences around the globe, yet for the French humans it truly is no exaggeration to assert that the daddy of French Comedy is a part of their nationwide soul. via displaying how he was once represented, reborn, and reburied within the new France—how the revolutionaries asserted his relevance for his or her tumultuous time in ways in which have been audacious, irreverent, inventive, and extreme—Leon clarifies the real function of theatrical figures in holding and portraying a nation’s history.

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