L’Avare and Le Bourgeois Geltilhomme—reading Molière, thinking about Shakespeare

I read L’Avare (The Miser) and Le Bourgeois Geltilhomme (here translated as The Self-Made Gentleman) in the translation by George Graveley. The latter is also known as The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Middle-Class Aristocrat, or The Would-Be Noble. 

1/ Why do people ignore plays? And neglect the 17th century? Molière is very good and very funny. Laugh-out-loud funny even on paper. 

If we compare him and Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s sense of humour tends to be puns, wordplay, and bawdy jokes (the man’s English after all); these things aren’t in Molière, at least not in the plays I’ve read; his comedy tends to heavily focus on satire, stock characters, farcical elements, fast-paced dialogue, mishearing or misunderstanding, etc. I admit that Molière is funnier, but, because of the nature of their comedy, Shakespeare has more funny lines that can be standalone quotes. 

Another difference is that Molière—not just in these plays but I believe in general—tends to adhere to the classical unities: unity of action (one principal action), unity of time (no more than 24 hours), and unity of place (a single location). Shakespeare doesn’t give a toss.  

2/ I don’t have much to say about The Miser. It’s a delight. One thing I’m gonna note is that even though Molière and Balzac both depict misers in the characters of Harpagon and Felix Grandet, The Miser has not only the light-heartedness of a comedy but also the warmth of a man who makes fun of human foibles but still likes humanity, whereas Eugenie Grandet presents a rather cynical view of the world.  

Molière makes me think of Henry Fielding. 

3/ Like Shakespeare, Molière was also an actor. I just didn’t realise that he gave himself the main roles (Harpagon in The Miser, Jourdain in The Self-Made Gentleman). 

So he’s like Orson Welles. 

4/ Reading these plays—one is about a miser and the other is a social climber—I’ve realised that, unlike Molière, Shakespeare doesn’t really do satire. His comedies are a wide range of genres: farce (The Comedy of Errors), slapstick (The Merry Wives of Windsor), romcom (Much Ado About Nothing), pastoral comedy (As You Like It), and others that are harder to categorise (what kind of comedy is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example?), but not satire—one counter-example I can think of is Malvolio in Twelfth Night, but he’s not the central character and more importantly, he may have been initially created as a satire of the Puritans but became an individual, not just a type. 

(My view of Malvolio is heavily influenced by the performance of Richard Briers—he gives the character tragic stature).

Another thing is that Shakespeare has more variety, at least that’s my impression. When I got the Shakespeare bug a couple of years ago, I was reading one play after another—not all his plays at once but still many in succession—and it was all fine. Now I’m exploring Molière—Britannica says he wrote 31 plays (presumably that includes the one-act plays)—the third play, The Self-Made Gentleman, starts to feel a bit samey—it’s still very funny, but I can see the similarities. 

5/ The Self-Made Gentleman is hilarious though. Molière is a bit hard to quote because often the humour is some back-and-forth that goes on for a page or two, but here’s a funny line when Jourdain (the social climber) meets a Marquise: 

“M. JOURDAIN Madam, it is a great honour for me to see myself so fortunate as to be so happy as to have the pleasure that you have had the kindness to accord the favour of doing me the honour of honouring me with the privilege of your presence; and if I had only the merit to merit a merit such as yours, and Heaven, envious of my good fortune, had accorded me the joy of seeing myself worthy… to… to…” 

(Act 3) 

6/ In both plays, Molière gives the strong impression that he pokes fun at different types of people but still likes people—there’s no malice in his laughter—Jourdain is ridiculous, yes, but aren’t we all? In our own ways?