The Misanthrope And Other Plays - Brossura

“There are no better comedies than his.”—The New York Times

“Molière understands the genius of comedy, and presents it in a natural style.”—Jean Chapelain

Molière, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in1622, began his career as an actor before becoming a playwright who specialized in satirizing the institutions and morals of his day. In 1658, his theater company settled in Paris in the Théâter du Petit-Bourbon. The object of fierce attack because of such masterpieces as Tartuffe and Don Juan, Molière nonetheless won the favor of the public. In 1665, his company became the King’s Troupe, and the following year saw the staging of The Misanthrope, as well as The Doctor in Spite of Himself. In 1668, he produced his bitterly comic The Miser and, in the remaining years before his death, created such plays as The Would-Be Gentleman, The Mischievous Machinations of Scapin, and The Learned Women. In 1673, Molière collapsed onstage while performing his last play, The Imaginary Invalid, and died shortly thereafter.

Donald M. Frame was Moore Professor of French at Columbia University and an acclaimed scholar and translator of French literature. Among his notable works of translation are The Complete Essays of Montaigne, The Complete Works of Rabelais, and the Signet Classics Tartuffe & Other Plays and Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories.

Lewis C. Seifert is Professor of French Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France, 1690–1715: Nostalgic Utopias and Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France, as well as numerous articles on seventeenth-century French culture.