ABSTRACT
Molière’s comedy, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, is remarkable for a court 57entertainment, one performed for the first time in the aristocratic isolation of Louis XIV’s château at Chambord, in that it refuses to elide or supress questions of work and its monetary rewards even though anxious attempts for social and political reasons are made to conceal these abiding presences, which include, of course, the effort involved in the arts, and its remuneration. From beginning to end in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Molière unveils for us the artistic, social, financial and political conventions that art and society would seemingly prefer to conceal. The title of the comedy, normally understood as a monstrous collocation of a comically impossible social reality in fact nicely expresses these tensions of a reality of work and effort continuously suppressed by an official politics of courtly and aristocratic culture and of course by those who subscribe to that politics. The final balletic spectacle is ambiguously both the fictional ballet within the comedy and the royal diversion outside the comedy the invitation to which allows the Jourdains to transcend their social limitations by participating in the king’s cultural monopoly on social representations.
