Comedy in Context: Essays on Moliere by H. Gaston Hall This book brings
together a dozen essays devoted to the aspects of Moliere's stagecraft,
each of which illustrates in its way Hall's thesis of comedy in context.
It is only in the later generations that some knowledge of Moliere has
become a part of French popular culture through universal education, for
in his own time Moliere's art did not reach the vast majority even of
Frenchmen. This volume of essays thus complements other studies of the
comedies by focusing attention for an even larger audience upon the
plays as Hall believes the playwright conceived them. The first seven
essays consider questions and themes common to a number of Moliere's
plays, and the last five deal with individual comedies in the order in
which they were originally published: L'Ecole des femmes, Tartuffe, Dom
Juan, and Le Misanthrope. All the essays convey the author's conviction
that Moliere was a writer of comedies which can be properly understood
only in the historical and literary context in which they were imagined,
written, performed, and published. For Hall, the historical context of
the comedies is clearly a reflection of Moliere's activities as an
actor-manager of his own company as well as a reflection of the social
conditions of seventeenth-century France. In addition, Hall shows the
rich literary context of the plays by discussing resources of literary
works and of authors that provided subjects for Moliere. Through a close
analysis of the texts, Hall establishes historical and literary bases
for the plays and gives them new dimension and meaning. H. Gaston Hall,
a distinguished Moliere scholar, translator, and author of many learned
works in French, Spanish, and Italian, is a reader in French at the
University of Warwick in England.
