ABSTRACT
There is no neat chronology to the career of Molière and certainly no orderly line of development for the literary historian to follow. Molière’s response to the changing theatrical culture of the day took different forms: his own comédie-ballet, which we may suppose took the playwright’s fancy, and opera, which manifestly did not. His brief involvement with literary models, and chiefly the example of Corneille’s tragi-comedy, was abortive, and it was the practice of actors rather than writers that he was to follow as a dramatist. We see a resurrection of the cruder structures of the farce at moments when a tidy chronology would show Molière’s genius to be at the height of its powers, concentrated on the works which now dominate the canon, and which he wrote for the means and tastes of the town theatre. The ‘great’ five-act works emerged, as we have seen, from the methods of the old farce and a professional practice which extended the potential of comic acting into hitherto unsuspected areas of dramatic interest.
