Where the Doctor Knows He Doesn't Know

The Doctor in Spite of Himself by Molière
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a light bit of drama, a quick read, and I liked it a little bit. I disliked parts, too. I'm sure most of the amusement afforded by this little play is in seeing the burlesque, the overacting, the slapstick, rather than looking at the words on the page, but I'm not sure I'd ever pay money for the privilege.

This three-act plays speeds along almost like a one-act play, so fleeting that I wonder how long it ran when it was originally performed. But I like it better for being quick. What I don't like is the Punch and Judy feel, the making light of assault. I get it that marital strife is a comedy staple, but it's still distasteful. Even when looking at it like a sketch, pure lampoon, it's still emerging from a very dark place.

I don't think anyone feels too bad for Sganarelle when his wife gets him back for beating her. She convinces a couple men that her husband is a great doctor, but he pretends not to be, and she directs them to beat him until he confesses he is a doctor. If you picture him as Elmer Fudd or the coyote, maybe it's a funny bit. The genuine, redeeming, useful (IMO) satire follows. He passes himself off as a doctor, prescribing things to anyone who needs a doctor, demanding payment while caring not at all whether any of his remedies work. (They don't, of course.) Now, that sucks, but he makes the reasonable point that doctors of the time did no better than him. I think that's true. In his own words:

I find it's the best of all trades because whether you do good or harm you still get your money. We never get blamed for doing a bad job. We just hack away at the stuff we are working on, and whereas a cobbler making shoes can't spoil a piece of leather without having to foot the bill himself, in our trade we can make a mess of a man without it costing us a penny. If we make a mistake, it isn't our look out: it's always the fault of the fellow who's dead.

He's not wrong.

Sganarelle is not better a human at the end than at the beginning, and he's horrible at the beginning. There's a happy ending for a couple of lovers, though--at the cost of some Deus Ex Machina, come in the form of a sudden inheritance. But this isn't meant to be serious, I guess. A frothy little nothing that makes a good point earns from me a barely passing, probably-skip-it 3.

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