Lanterna Rally

Author: Moliere Moliere (Poquelin)

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-07-20

Total Pages: 38

ISBN-13: 9781535377119

Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies) is a comedy by Molière in five acts, written in verse. A satire on academic pretention, female education, and préciosité (French for preciousness), it was one of his most popular comedies. It premiered at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal on 11 March 1672.Two young people, Henriette and Clitandre, are in love, but in order to marry, they must overcome an obstacle: the attitude of Henriette's family. Her sensible father and uncle are in favour of the marriage; but unfortunately her father is under the thumb of his wife, Philaminte. And Philaminte, supported by Henriette's aunt and sister, wishes her to marry Trissotin, a "scholar" and mediocre poet with lofty aspirations, who has these three women completely in his thrall. For these three ladies are "learned"; their obsession in life is learning and culture of the most pretentious kind, and Trissotin is their special protégé and the fixture of their literary salon.The Learned Ladies" was the last-but-one of Molière's plays and the last of his great rhyming-couplet comedies. Its predecessors had used the artificiality of the style to add point and irony to some of Molière's most trenchant examinations of aspects of the human condition. For lighter-hearted satire, sending up specific behaviour rather than the general human condition, Molière tended to use prose. "The Learned Ladies" has the best of both worlds: it satirises a specific fad (intellectual pretension) but - perhaps because its subject requires an appropriately "high style" - is written in rhyming verse. Targeting cultural snobbery, "The Learned Ladies" mocks the fashion, current among upper-class ladies, for holding "salons" to discuss such "learned" matters as the arts, philosophy and science. The joke, to Molière's audience, was not merely intellectual snobbery, but that the snobs were women. This was an age when matters of the mind were, in theory, still the province of men; upper-class women were expected to be charming, witty, interested in the world and its doings, but not scholars. The majority of the aristocratic ladies in Molière's own audience probably took this view and shared the opinion of the men, that "learned ladies" and their gatherings were fools, fit targets for the pedants, charlatans and other confidence-tricksters who preyed on them. "The Learned Ladies" played for a couple of dozen performances (a successful "run" for court plays at the time) and attracted none of the hostility and scandal of Molière's more contentious works. This French-to-English translation is by A. R. Waller and is scrupulously accurate to Molière's meaning.