The Hypochondriac or The Imaginary Invalid by Molière

Molière is a delight after the gory plays by Seneca! (Funnily enough, last time I read Molière was after the dark and repulsive revenge plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries).

I read the translation by Alan Drury, for the National Theatre in 1981, who devised the Prologue, Interludes, and Epilogues “in parallel to Molière’s rather than being a direct translation.” 

1/ The play is very funny. 

“ARGAN If a husband cannot leave anything to the wife he loves so tenderly, to the wife who has taken such great care of him, then precedent’s an ass. I’ll have to consult my lawyer to see what I can do. 

[…] 

ARGAN I shall have to make my will, my love, way Monsieur tells me to; but to be on the safe side, I’m going to give you twenty thousand francs in gold I have behind a secret panel next to my bed, and two bills payable to the bearer, one from Monsieur Damon and one from Monsieur Gérante. 

BELINE No, no, I’ll have none of it. How much did you say was behind the secret panel? 

ARGAN Twenty thousand francs, my love. 

BELINE Do not talk to me of riches, I pray you. How much are those two bills worth?” 

(Act 1) 

Some of his plays are different, such as Don Juan, but Molière’s plays—I mean the ones I know—tend to have the same format: the protagonist as the main object of satire; a hindered marriage; some charlatan/ trickster/ fraud (in this case, Beline the wife); a clever servant. 

“DIAFOIRUS SENIOR […] What’s irritating about the great is that when they are ill they absolutely insist their doctors cure them. 

TOINETTE How very presumptuous. You aren’t there for that. You’re there to issue prescriptions and to collect your fees. It’s up to them to get better if they can.” 

In this play, Molière lampoons hypochondriacs (like Argan) and quack doctors (like Diafoirus Senior, M. Purgon, M. Fleurant) and mercenaries (like Beline).

Between Act 2 and Act 3, Argan, his brother Beralde, and Argan’s servant Toinette go see a Molière play together—a play within a play I’ve seen many times but this is new—Molière’s characters go see a Molière play! 

“BERALDE […] That Molière play we’ve just seen; I would have thought that would have put you in the right track as well as given you something to laugh at. 

ARGAN Your Molière is an impertinent fellow with his so-called comedies. It’s a fine thing to make fun of honest men, like doctors.” 

(Act 3) 

The disturbing part however is that Molière collapsed onstage during his fourth performance and died soon after. Imagine being in the first audience watching the doctors curse Argan (played by Molière) and then seeing that Molière actually died! 

2/ Alan Drury is funny; another thing I like is that I can spot Shakespeare references in his translation. 

“ARGAN Listen, my girl, there’s no compromise. You have four days to make a choice. Either you marry Monsieur or get thee to a nunnery.” 

(Act 2) 

The same line in Charles Heron Wall’s translation is “Either you will marry this gentleman or you will go into a convent.” Drury’s choice is much funnier. 

“TOINETTE (crying out) Oh, my God, oh woe is me, what an untoward accident. 

BELINE What is it, Toinette? 

TOINETTE Ah, Madame. 

BELINE What is it? 

TOINETTE Your husband is dead. 

BELINE My husband is dead? 

TOINETTE Alas, yes. He’s shuffled off his mortal coil.” 

(Act 3) 

Again, Hamlet. 

I’m a simple girl—I get excited when spotting a Shakespeare reference. One of the pleasures of knowing Shakespeare is that you not only see his influence on playwrights, novelists, and short story writers, but also come across references by translators. E. D. A. Morshead’s translation of Prometheus Bound, for instance, has “More kin than kind” (evoking Hamlet’s “A little more than kin, and less than kind”) and “wild and whirling words” (again, Hamlet). Both are Morshead’s additions—at least that’s what I think when I compare this translation and the one by Theodore Alois Buckley.  

In these cases, it’s obvious, but sometimes it can be confusing—I saw “the dogs of war” and “’Tis I for whom the bell shall toll” in Philip Wayne’s translation of Faust, Part 1, but is it Goethe or the translator who references Shakespeare and Donne? 

3/ I love the light touch, the warmth and humour of Molière. A couple of months ago, I also read but didn’t blog about The School for Wives (translated by Richard Wilbur). 

Apart from Shakespeare, I would probably say my favourite writer of tragedies is Sophocles and favourite writer of comedies is Molière. 

My 20 favourite plays not by Shakespeare [updated]

There was a time when pretty much all I read was novels and short stories; the plays I knew were those assigned at school or university. Then I got into Shakespeare and my favourite plays a couple of years ago were all by Shakespeare. 

But now I have got a better grasp of drama, especially classical drama, so here’s a list of favourites that aren’t by Shakespeare (listed chronologically by the dramatist’s birth year, and grouped by country): 

• The Oresteia by Aeschylus, which is actually three plays: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides 
• Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus 
• Oedipus the King 
• Antigone 
• Electra by Sophocles 
• Hippolytus 
• Hecabe 
• The Bacchae by Euripides 
• Lysistrata 
• The Frogs by Aristophanes 
• Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe 
• The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster 
• The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley 
• The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton or Cyril Tourneur 
• Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca 
• Tartuffe 
• Don Juan 
• The Misanthrope by Molière 
• Phèdre by Jean Racine 
• The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen 

______________________________________

What can we see here? My tastes are predominantly Greek (and Shakespearean): 10 out of 20 plays are by the Athenian playwrights (or 12 out of 22 if you don’t count the Oresteia as one). Molière is another favourite. 

Only one play from the 19th century. No Goethe. No Chekhov—is that a surprise?—I struggled with his plays, having read only two, and much prefer him as a short story writer. No Oscar Wilde, simply because I haven’t read him—if “allowed” to include plays I’ve seen onscreen, I would name The Importance of Being Earnest (though it’s hard to say which play I would remove to make place for it). 

No Tennessee Williams, whom I liked at university. No one contemporary, but then the only one I know is Tom Stoppard—one day I’m going to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which I would probably like. 

Now this list is a bit of a cheat—a list of favourite plays, by Shakespeare and other dramatists, would be much, much harder. 

Name your favourite plays. 

Update on 19/3/2026:

I would probably replace The Revenger’s Tragedy or The Changeling with Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. Now this is a great, psychologically complex, haunting play. 

Tartuffe and The Misanthrope— Molière in Richard Wilbur’s verse translations

After the horrors of the Jacobean plays, here is warmth and light! 

1/ The eponymous character of Tartuffe, the impostor or hypocrite, doesn’t appear till Act 3.

Everything takes place in the Orgon household, as Orgon is under Tartuffe’s spell and has taken him into the house. Apart from Orgon, the only person who loves Tartuffe is Orgon’s mother, Pernelle. Everyone else hates him: Elmire, Orgon’s wife; Damis and Mariane, Orgon’s son and daughter and Elmire’s stepson and stepdaughter; Cleante, Elmire’s brother; Valere, Mariane’s lover; Dorine, Mariane’s maid. 

The play was first performed in 1664 and, according to Wikipedia, Molière played Orgon. 

Orgon is so taken with Tartuffe for some reason that he wants to break his promise and marry his daughter Mariane to him, against her wish but also—as it surprisingly turns out—not according to Tartuffe’s desire. 

Some of the best lines in the play belong to Dorine, the maid: 

“DORINE Tell him one cannot love at a father’s whim; 

That you shall marry for yourself, not him; 

That since it’s you who are to be the bride, 

It’s you, not he, who must be satisfied; 

And that if his Tartuffe is so sublime, 

He’s free to marry him at any time.” 

(Act 2 scene 3) 

Later: 

“TARTUFFE (taking a handkerchief from his pocket) For mercy’s sake 

Please take this handkerchief, before you speak. 

DORINE What? 

TARTUFFE Cover that bosom, girl. The flesh is weak, 

And unclean thoughts are difficult to control. 

Such sights as that can undermine the soul. 

DORINE Your soul, it seems, has very poor defences, 

And flesh makes quite an impact on your senses. 

It’s strange that you’re so easily excited; 

My own desires are not so soon ignited, 

And if I saw you naked as a beast, 

Not all your hide would tempt me in the least.” 

(Act 3 scene 2)  

Ha! 

The whole play is very, very funny. Tartuffe is a very good depiction of a religious hypocrite but Orgon is a more interesting case study and, despite the name of the play, is the central character. I note that we see Tartuffe’s pretence of piety in Acts 3 and 4 but have only one scene of his manipulation, when Damis angrily tells Orgon about Tartuffe’s (one-sided) flirtation with his wife and Tartuffe has to save himself—in all the other scenes, we see Tartuffe with people who have seen through him and hate him. Now look at Orgon—how is a man so utterly under another man’s spell that he’s willing to turn against his whole family and hand over to him his entire estate? It’s a great depiction of religious mania. 

2/ There is a figure that gets satirised in both plays:

In Tartuffe: 

“DORINE Oh, yes, she’s strict, devout, and has no taint 

Of worldliness; in short, she seems a saint. 

But it was time which taught her that disguise;

She’s thus because she can’t be otherwise. 

So long as her attractions could enthrall, 

She flounced and flirted and enjoyed it all, 

But now that they’re no longer what they were

She quits a world which fast is quitting her, 

And wears a veil of virtue to conceal

Her bankrupt beauty and her lost appeal. 

That’s what becomes of old coquettes today:

Distressed when all their lovers fall away, 

They see no recourse but to play the prude, 

And so confer a style on solitude. 

Thereafter, they’re severe with everyone,

Condemning all our actions, pardoning none, 

And claiming to be pure, austere, and zealous

When, if the truth were known, they’re merely jealous, 

And cannot bear to see another know

The pleasures time has forced them to forgo.” 

(Act 1 scene 2) 

In The Misanthrope, such a figure appears as Arsinoé: 

“CELIMENE It’s all an act. 

At heart she’s worldly, and her poor success 

In ensnaring men explains her prudishness. 

It breaks her heart to see the beaux and gallants

Engrossed by other women’s charms and talents,

And so she’s always in a jealous rage

Against the faulty standards of the age, 

She lets the world believe that she’s a prude

To justify her loveless solitude, 

And strives to put a brand of moral shame

On all the graces that she cannot claim…” 

(Act 3 scene 3) 

We all know that type, don’t we? 

On a side note, I don’t like the way scenes are divided in these plays—it’s marked as a new scene whenever a character leaves or enters, which doesn’t make sense—I prefer the way it’s done in Shakespeare’s plays. 

3/ This is the titular character of The Misanthrope: 

“ALCESTE […] we all desire 

To be told that we’ve the true poetic fire. 

But once, to one whose name I shall not mention, 

I said, regarding some verse of his invention, 

That gentleman should rigorously control 

That itch to write which often afflicts the soul; 

That one should curb the heavy inclination 

To publicize one’s little avocation; 

And that in showing off one’s works of art 

One often plays a very clownish part.” 

(Act 1 scene 2) 

Hahahaha I must say that to certain “poets” on the hellsite previously known as Twitter. 

Compared to the main characters of The Miser, The Self-Made Gentleman, and Tartuffe, Alceste is more ambiguous: his misanthropy is extreme, but at the same time Molière exposes the insincerity and hypocrisy and treachery around him—his fervour for honesty, his yearning for honour and justice, and his irrational love for Célimène make him in some way a quixotic figure. 

“ALCESTE No, no, this formula you’d have me follow, 

However fashionable, is false and hollow, 

[…] 

Should you rejoice that someone fondles you, 

Offers his love and services, swears to be true, 

And fills your ears with praises of your name, 

When to the first damned flop he’ll say the same? 

No, no: no self-respecting heart would dream 

Of prizing so promiscuous an esteem; 

However high the prise, there’s nothing worse 

Than sharing honours with the universe. 

Esteem is founded on comparison: 

To honour all men is to honour none…” 

(Act 1 scene 1) 

One can’t help liking him. 

“PHILINTE Come, let’s forget the follies of the times 

And pardon mankind for its petty crimes: 

Let’s have an end of rantings and of railings, 

And show some leniency towards human failings. 

This world requires a pliant rectitude; 

Too stern a virtue makes one stiff and rude; 

Good sense views all extremes with detestation, 

And bids us to be noble in moderation…” 

(ibid.) 

Molière gives Alceste’s friend some great lines—I would guess that these lines reflect Molière’s own attitude towards humanity—but he also depicts Philinte as an insincere man—it is one thing to avoid being brutally honest and hurting someone’s feelings, it is quite a different thing to give high praise to something we know to be bad, as Philinte does with Oronte’s poem. 

The play is, up to a point, more ambiguous. Another difference between The Misanthrope and some other Molière comedies I have read is that it doesn’t have a happy ending—in fact, the ending is troubling—as my friend Himadri puts it, Alceste is on the path towards becoming Gulliver. 

Both are great plays, and I enjoyed Wilbur’s translation. 

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? 

Don Juan, my first encounter with Molière

Sooner or later, I had to read France’s most important playwright, so here we go. The translation I read was by George Graveley. 

1/ I will again quote Salvador de Madariaga: 

“Don Quixote, Sancho, Don Juan, Hamlet, and Faust are the five great men created by man. Resembling in this the great men made directly by the Creator, their forms have been covered in each generation by a new over-growth of legends, opinions, interpretations, and symbols. Such is the privilege of those living beings of art who by sheer vitality impress their personality on the collective mind of mankind.” (Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology, chapter “The Real Don Quixote”) 

The character of Don Juan originates in the 1630 Spanish play The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest by Tirso de Molina, which I read last year when exploring the Spanish Golden Age. The curious part is that the original is barely known—if you look at the other figures, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are original, and Goethe’s Faust may be the most famous and influential version but Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is also a celebrated play—not only is The Trickster of Seville nowhere near as famous as Molière’s 1665 play Dom Juan, and the 1887 opera Don Giovanni by Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, but I also think that very few people know about its existence, or recognise the name Tirso de Molina. 

2/ Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan is a sociopath, who stops at nothing once he desires a woman, including disguising himself and pretending to be her lover in the dark, which is obviously rape but which also is cheating—that’s not exactly a seduction, is it? Molière’s Don Juan is more like the Don Juan in my head and in popular culture: a womaniser and manipulator. 

“DON JUAN So you think we should be tied for ever to the first object that takes our fancy, forswear the rest of the world, and have no eyes for anyone else? […] Constancy is only for fools. Every pretty woman has the right to attract us, and the mere accident of being seen first should not rob the others of their privilege of making prey of our hearts. Beauty delights me wherever I find it, and I fall a willing slave to the sweet force with which it seeks to bind me…” 

(Act 1) 

That’s an excellent depiction of the mind of a womaniser. And when we see him at work, well well well… the scene of him and the two peasant girls, Charlotte and Marthurine, is hilarious. 

3/ Molière is hilarious. There’s a funny scene where Don Juan tells his servant Sganarelle that he doesn’t believe in anything—not God, not hell, not the devil, not even medicine. 

“SGANARELLE You must have a very unbelieving soul. But look what a reputation emetic wine has got in the last few years. Its wonders have won over the most incredulous. Why, only three weeks ago, I saw a wonderful proof myself. 

DON JUAN What was that? 

SGANARELLE A man was at the point of death for six whole days. They didn’t know what to do for him. Nothing had any effect. Then suddenly they decided to give him a dose of emetic wine. 

DON JUAN And he recovered? 

SGANARELLE No. He died. 

DON JUAN An admirable effect, truly. 

SGANARELLE What? For six whole days he couldn’t die; and that finished him off at once.” 

(Act 3) 

Hahahahahahaha. 

4/ Compared to Tirso de Molina’s play, this one is tightly controlled—The Trickster of Seville has a four-page speech about Lisbon that adds nothing to the plot (to this day, I still don’t know what that’s about). 

Molière also gives us a much more interesting and memorable character. Both Don Juans are scoundrels, of course, but Molière’s has more charm and seductive power. The playwright humanises him by letting us see his perspective—Don Juan sees himself as open and generous, an appreciator of beauty, a lover of women—he also has some honour and courage, such as when he saves a man from robbers. Molière also depicts a warm friendship between Don Juan and his servant Sganarelle—they talk and banter and argue, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—Sganarelle is repulsed by Don Juan’s actions and afraid of losing his job but at the same time also charmed by him—so we too are charmed by Don Juan, or at least we can see his charm.

(Jane Austen would have liked this play, I think). 

5/ My friend Himadri said: 

“Molière makes more of Don Juan than just as satyromaniac. He is a man wedded to rationality, to reason. But the irrational is also an aspect of life, whether Juan accepts it or not. And it’s precisely this irrational aspect that destroys him.

One may even consider the statue to be symbolic of the irrational in Juan’s own psyche, but which he refuses to accept.”

Excellent play.