ABSTRACT
The theatre of the Jesuits contrasted sharply with a tradition dependent almost entirely on the art of the actor and which, in Molière’s childhood, reflected the tastes of another public. This was the popular farce, a world away from the discreet and intensified concerns of the martyrs and heroes of both college and professional stages. The Old French Farce, conserving a tradition going back to the medieval stage, was still played by a celebrated company of farceurs at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the sole licensed theatre of the capital. Despite the achievement of the resident troupe royale in encouraging a new audience for serious drama, the actors were perhaps better known in the early part of the century for their performances under the comic mask. In this they were rivalled only by the Italian commedia dell’arte actors, with whom they occasionally shared the theatre. With new repertoire the respectable audience grew through the 1630s, but the farce continued strongly, and contemporaries recount how Molière’s grandfather took him to see the French farceurs, and possibly the Italians too, playing at the Bourgogne or at the Louvre. Italian and French traditions interacted, greatly to the advantage of the latter. The commedia dell’arte showed the value of physical mastery in the playing of a simple scenario or canevas, particularly where the language of performance was unfamiliar, even to many at court. French farceurs, for all the advantage of language, did not develop any form of extended text, but relied also on improvisation.1 Illustrations of their scenes and their characters show, as in the commedia, episodes of cuckoldry, gluttony and theft, with a distinctly popular appeal. At a time when the nuances of social life preoccupied the well-to-do, the farceurs must have offended as much by their naïvety as by the indelicacy of their material.
