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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Where Alceste Doesn't Care What You Think

The Misanthrope by Molière
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I can't quite explain, but I liked it.

If I described this play to myself, including the plot and the characters, I'd expect to hate it. 17th century French verse translated to English--not necessarily promising. And I read Moliere's Tartuffe, and found it not to my taste at all. By all rights I should have disliked this play. But I thought it was entertaining and interesting and thought-provoking.

Alceste is the misanthrope in question. I don't, as a rule, like stories about unlikable people, and he's kind of a jerk, but that didn't throw me. He's a nobleman stuck in a society where everyone compliments everyone else to their face, where flattery is the norm, but most of it is insincere. He's not like that. He hates that. It's strange that he's in love with a young woman, Célimène, who is exactly like that--she is sweet and friendly with everyone, allows all kinds of men to court her, gives and receives flattery at all times, refuses to offer a harsh opinion. She seems to care for Alceste, even though he criticizes her for this and demands she change.

Meanwhile, other women, for whatever reason, are in love with the misanthropic Alceste. He doesn't care. But it creates a number of love triangles.

Another plot point that shows his irascible but honest approach to life is when a powerful man reads a sonnet he wrote and Alceste is very direct, very rude about it. He hates the poem and advises the man to give up writing. To me, that's mean honesty, but it's perfectly consistent with his personality. So yeah, he's a real jerk. Amusingly, the injured man takes him to court over it (I don't know how that's a thing) and wins a settlement because Alceste refuses to apologize or make up in any way. So despite being grumpy and hard to be around, Alceste is the only one who's principled. He's the only one who's honest. I don't normally appreciate that kind of honesty, but I like it here.

When it is revealed at the end via intercepted letters that sweet Célimène is, behind their backs, talking crap about every man who's chasing her, including Alceste, I kinda thought he'd applaud her for it, because she's pretty harsh, using the kind of language he prefers. Nope. That's not how it was received. (If she had said all of these things aloud, in person, even to him, I think he would have been happy about it. Said in secret and revealed by accident didn't work.) He said he'd forgive her anyway if she'd run away with him, since he's wants nothing to do anymore with society, but she won't go.

I would have liked a happier ending, but I think, in the end, everybody's fine. His friend is gonna marry another nice young woman, Célimène is gonna keep having men adore her, and Alceste is gonna go be grouchy in some country home. Maybe he'll meet an overly-direct woman out there, in the imaginary life that happens after the play is over. But it doesn't matter--the message is key here, and I'm fine with that. Be direct and honest. Don't give false praise. Don't keep suitors dangling, leaving them in doubt and wasting everyone's time. Don't pretend to be devoted to a friendship with someone you despise. Don't worry so much about keeping everyone's good opinion.

Quit being such a hypocrite.

All good advice.

Recommended. Now I need a recommendation for a performance of it, preferably in English. I'm gonna go look.

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Where I Offer Molière a Few Notes

Tartuffe by Molière
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though there are a number of things about this play that I don't appreciate and don't much enjoy, there is enough to like that, even from a 21st Century English-speaking American perspective, I can give a modest nod to Tartuffe and say "Pretty entertaining."

In terms of construction, emerging as it does from its own history and tradition, it has a different organization and approach than I am used to. It's got 5 acts broken into scenes, so that's pretty much the norm, but it doesn't feel like 5 acts; it feels like one long scene. The play takes place all in the same place, the home of the family unfortunate enough to open their doors to the scammer, Tartuffe, and over a very short time. On the page, that comes off as bland, lacking in imagination, but I can't answer for the play as staged. Maybe it works.

Another format kind of issue is the annoying back-and-forth of the dialogue. It didn't resonate with me, and I had to work to try to fit it into my understanding of the work as a whole. Much of the dialogue found throughout, in scene after scene, is simple argument, with the same points repeated again and again in almost identical language. It read as if a rough draft had been left unedited, so much so that I wondered if it was truly a stylistic choice intentionally made (which is the default assumption when reading classics of world literature). The maid especially, arguing with Orgon, the head of the house, says nearly the same thing multiple times. (In much the same way that TV characters hang up without saying goodbye, you seldom find them repeating an argument. There isn't enough time for that, and it would sound weird.) However, considering that this is coming out of a tradition rich with homegrown farce and the broad slapstick of Italian Commedia dell'arte, the angry, snappy, in-your-face dialogue makes more sense. If I could see an audience laughing red in the face with the Dorine's effrontery, I expect it would make more sense than it did on the page. (I assume they laugh. I hope.)

The plot is terribly straightforward. It's all about the family hating having Tartuffe live with them while the father loves him. Every scene is about that central idea, and it's that single-mindedness that makes it feel like a long one-act play. Hiding a friend's subversive materials for him emerges very near the end as a bit of secondary plot, but it would have been so much better to introduce that near the beginning and make a little more of it, IMO.

And so on. The play didn't match my expectations. But it did some things I like.

For one, it pokes religious bigots and hyper-devout hypocrites in the eye. That's good. It got Molière in trouble--a lot of trouble--with religious authorities, and anything that upsets them is good in my book. Too bad we didn't continue down that road.

Also, I liked the ending. The scene with Orgon hiding to eavesdrop on the foolish Tartuffe trying to seduce his wife would make good comedy, I'm sure. And though I didn't love that the problems are solved off-stage by the king, I liked that the bad guy got caught and the good guys (the family, the daughter and her betrothed) all reconciled. A better version of this story (again, IMO) has someone, maybe the maid, producing evidence that convinces the king what was happening, or maybe something is done with the hidden materials that Tartuffe stole--frame him for the damning documents?--but I understand Molière was working with his audience's expectations, not mine. So bummer for me.

Kudos for annoying the religious extremists of his day, and fair play to Dorine, who showed no deference to her bosses at all. Class solidarity.

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