The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Molière · a comedy in five acts and in verse · eleven speaking roles · first performed at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, Paris, 4 June 1666; published by Jean Ribou, 1667 · scored on Molière’s French, read from knowledge; no text in hand, French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and Richard Wilbur’s verse translation (1955) for sense
Mode
High comedy of character and manners in verse, turned on a virtue; a moral argument left without a verdict, closing near tragedy
Mythos
The man who will not lie in a world that lives by lying: refusal, trial by the world’s courts, and withdrawal to the wilderness; the anchorite’s flight and Timon’s, without allusion
Phase
One day in Célimène’s house, from a quarrel between two friends to the hero’s exit, with a lawsuit and a tribunal decided offstage
Presentation
Drama; five acts in rhymed alexandrine couplets, eleven speaking roles, one place, one day and one action; no prose, no interludes, one old song recited
Register
From the marquis admiring their own teeth and a valet’s farce of a lost paper to the debate of two temperaments and the cold grandeur of the last scene
Scale
One salon and its circle: four suitors, three women, two friends, and the court, the law and the world reported from beyond its walls
Governing Proposition
A man who will let no word pass that does not come from the heart loves a young widow who plays every suitor against the others, and in one day in her house he condemns a sonnet, makes an enemy, loses a lawsuit, hears her letters read aloud and leaves society for a remote place. The wager of the comedy is that the demand for perfect sincerity is itself a form of self-love, that a society of politeness is a society of mutual flattery which no one can leave without leaving it altogether, and that a comedy which laughs at the honest man, in the very couplets of the civility he denounces, can hold him and his moderate friend in balance and give the right to neither.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Qu’est-ce donc? Qu’avez-vous?”
“What is it? What is the matter with you?” The play opens on a quarrel already under way, and the question is put to Alceste. His answer is a demand on the world: “Je veux qu’on soit sincère, et qu’en homme d’honneur, / On ne lâche aucun mot qui ne parte du cœur”
“I want people to be sincere, and as men of honour to let no word slip that does not come from the heart.” His friend Philinte answers for the world as it is, and for patience with it: “La parfaite raison fuit toute extrémité”
“Perfect reason flees every extreme.”
The debate is the play’s law, set out before anything happens, and almost nothing will. Philinte’s calm is a temperament as much as a philosophy, and he says so: “Et mon flegme est philosophe autant que votre bile”
“And my phlegm is as philosophical as your bile.” Alceste, for his part, says more than he hears. He wants to be singled out, he tells Philinte, and the friend of all mankind is no friend of his. The demand for sincerity is already a demand to be preferred, and the man who makes it does not notice. Neither friend is given the right. The play holds both, and goes on holding them to the last line.
The comedy is Le Misanthrope, ou l’Atrabilaire amoureux, in five acts and in rhymed alexandrine couplets. Molière’s troupe first played it at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris on 4 June 1666, with Molière as Alceste, and Jean Ribou published it in 1667 with Donneau de Visé’s Lettre écrite sur la comédie du Misanthrope. It keeps one place, Célimène’s house in Paris, one day and one action. There are eleven speaking parts: Alceste; Philinte; Oronte, a sonneteer and suitor; Célimène, a young widow, whom Alceste loves; Éliante, her cousin; Arsinoé, a prude; Acaste and Clitandre, marquis; Basque, Célimène’s servant; a guard of the Maréchaussée; and Du Bois, Alceste’s valet. The lawsuit Alceste will lose and the quarrel that goes before the marshals both happen offstage. What is on stage is talk.
Movement II
Oronte, a stranger to Alceste, asks for his sincere opinion of a sonnet, and reads it: “Belle Philis, on désespère, / Alors qu’on espère toujours”
“Fair Phyllis, one despairs, while one always hopes.” Philinte praises every line as it comes. Alceste gives his verdict: “Franchement, il est bon à mettre au cabinet”
“Frankly, it is fit for the privy.” Oronte asked for sincerity and wanted praise, and he goes out an enemy.
Against the sonnet Alceste sets an old song, which he recites: “J’aime mieux ma mie, ô gué!”
“I’d rather have my love, heigh-ho!” The scene is the comic height of the play, and it is also its argument in small. A precious poem in short lines stands against the alexandrine in which the play is written, and both stand against a popular song; the quarrel over sincerity becomes a quarrel over style. Alceste says so: “Ce style figuré, dont on fait vanité, / Sort du bon caractère et de la vérité”
“This figured style, of which people are so vain, departs from good character and from truth.”
The verdict has consequences the stage never shows. The quarrel over the sonnet goes before the marshals’ tribunal. The first test of his principle was made on a stranger, over a poem, and it has carried him before a court. The play’s structure is already plain. The world will judge Alceste twice, in its courts and in its salon, and the courts will do their work out of sight, while the salon does its work in front of us.
Movement III
Célimène receives, and her circle talks. In the scene of the portraits she draws the absent one after another, each portrait a miniature of a type, and the company takes its pleasure in them. The scene shows the salon in its pleasure and Célimène in her art, and the art is the one she will be found to have turned on the men in the room.
Éliante answers Alceste’s rage with a speech on the blindness of lovers, adapted from Lucretius, in which every defect of the beloved becomes a grace: “La pâle est aux jasmins en blancheur comparable”
“The pale one is like jasmine in whiteness.” The lover sees what he wishes to see, and calls it truth. In the third act the two marquis, Acaste and Clitandre, sit admiring themselves, their teeth and their fortune. They repeat what the portraits showed, and add to it only their vanity, given naked.
Then Arsinoé calls, and the coquette and the prude meet in a duel of speeches. Arsinoé covers envy with virtue, Célimène answers with wit, and the two speeches are built in strict parallel, so that the form itself shows the two women trading in one coin. Arsinoé offers Alceste her influence at court, and is refused. The man who will not flatter will not be helped by those who do.
Movement IV
Alceste has a lawsuit, and he means to lose it for the sake of being right, so as to have proof of how the world is made: “Pour la beauté du fait, avoir perdu ma cause”
“For the beauty of the thing, to have lost my case.” It is the purest form of his principle and the plainest form of his pride. He would rather be wronged and right than helped and owed.
In the fourth act his valet, Du Bois, fumbles for a note he has lost. It is a farce of the old kind, a servant’s comedy of a forgotten paper, and it serves the timing of the plot more than its meaning; the play elsewhere does not lean so heavily on the old farce. Even so it stands under the play’s one law, as the farthest point of a range that runs from the valet’s fumbling to the master’s last couplet.
Both offstage verdicts come down at the end. The lawsuit is lost, to a rival who lies, and the world has done to Alceste exactly what he said it would. The tribunal over a sonnet and the court over a cause are the law of self-love in the world’s institutions, as the salon is that law in its talk. The plot happens out of sight and arrives as news, and the form pays for it: the stage, which holds the salon whole, never shows the courts that do the deciding.
Movement V
Célimène’s letters are read aloud. In them she has drawn her suitors as she drew the absent in the scene of the portraits, and the art the salon enjoyed is now turned on its own circle. The suitors leave her one by one, until the room is nearly empty. The scene is cold, and it rises to a grandeur near tragedy. The world’s second verdict, the salon’s, has come in on the same day as its first.
Alceste asks her to leave the world with him for the wilderness, and she refuses: “La solitude effraye une âme de vingt ans”
“Solitude frightens a soul of twenty.” The line is the play’s fairest to her. Her wit was the only power her position allowed her, and he asks her to give up the only place where it is power. He asks to be preferred to the whole world, which is what he asked for at the start.
Philinte and Éliante are joined, the secondary couple, as comedy requires; the hero is not. Alceste takes his leave in two lines: “chercher sur la terre un endroit écarté / Où d’être homme d’honneur on ait la liberté”
“to seek some remote place on earth where one is free to be a man of honour.” He goes out of Célimène’s house, which is to say out of the play, since the house is the only place the play has. Whether the ending is comic at all, whether Philinte is wise or complicit, whether Alceste loves Célimène or his own need to be preferred: the play does not say, and three and a half centuries have not settled it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds very little, and it must look hard, because the play has almost no plot to carry: every scene has to earn its place by what it shows, and nearly all do. The opening debate sets the law. The sonnet scene puts Alceste’s principle to its first test, on a stranger, and wins him an enemy. The portraits show the salon at its pleasure and Célimène at her art, so that her letters in the last act are recognised as the same art turned on her suitors. The duel with Arsinoé shows the prude and the coquette trading in one coin, and the lost lawsuit and the letters bring the world’s two verdicts down on Alceste together. The test bites in two places: Du Bois’s farce of a forgotten paper in the fourth act, which serves the timing more than the meaning, and the marquis’s display of themselves in the third, which repeats what the portraits showed.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the demand for perfect sincerity is itself a form of self-love, and a society of politeness is a society of mutual flattery that no one can leave without leaving society. Alceste states the first half against himself without hearing it. He wants to be singled out, and the friend of all mankind is no friend of his: his sincerity is a claim to be preferred. Beside it the play discloses the lover who wants to own the beloved’s truth as he would own her, and a woman of twenty whose wit is the only power her position grants her. Neither Alceste nor Philinte is given the right; the play holds both. Held below the top because what it discloses is one society’s manners, made universal by depth rather than by range.
Score: 9.0 / 10
A comedy of conversation, and its elevation is mostly the high pleasure of wit, which counts but rarely reaches transport. The comic height is the sonnet scene: Oronte’s precious lines, Philinte praising each in turn, Alceste’s verdict that the poem is fit for the privy, and the old song he prefers to it. The cold height comes at the close: the letters read aloud, the suitors leaving one by one, Célimène refusing the wilderness because solitude frightens a soul of twenty, and Alceste’s exit, a scene with a grandeur near tragedy. Between the two, elevation is rare by design, and the axis scores frequency with height. What holds it here, second lowest of the twelve, is that register: the play rises by wit in its first half and by bleakness at its end, and keeps level between.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Myth built, though from a drawing room. The archetype is the man who will not lie in a world that lives by lying, and the play builds it rather than invoking it: Alceste’s whole course is the course of the pattern, from the refusal to flatter, through trial by the world’s courts, to the withdrawal to a remote place where a man may be free to be a man of honour. The anchorite’s flight and Timon’s are in it, without allusion. The pairing of Alceste and Philinte became one of the standing antinomies of European ethics, and Alceste’s name a name for a type. The axis stands at the bar and no higher because the myth is built from character more than from action or image: the play has no ritual, no sacred and no great symbol, and its archetype lives in two temperaments arguing.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is Roman comedy and its Italian heirs, with intrigue, disguise and a marriage at the end, and Molière’s own five-act verse comedy of character, already made in L’École des femmes (1662) and Tartuffe (1664). The turn: a comedy with nearly no intrigue, whose action is talk; a comic hero whose flaw is a virtue, so that the audience laughs at the honest man and cannot settle whether it should; an ending without the hero’s marriage, in which the lovers part and the hero leaves for exile while the secondary couple is joined. The stake was real. Tartuffe had been banned and Dom Juan withdrawn; the company needed a success, and Molière offered it a comedy that does not make the pit roar. Held below the top because the break with the comedy of character had been made in the two earlier plays.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. The rhymed alexandrine couplet is the measure of civility itself, the polite form in which every speaker, Alceste included, must speak: his rage is confined to the very decorum he denounces, and the comedy lives in the strain. The sonnet scene sets a bad poem in short lines against the alexandrine and against a popular song, so that the play’s argument about sincerity becomes an argument about style. The single place is Célimène’s house, the salon itself, from which Alceste can escape only by leaving the play, and his exit is the work’s conclusion. Held off the top by the lawsuit and the tribunal, which the form keeps out of sight at some cost to necessity: the plot needs both verdicts, and the stage never shows either.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: three and a half centuries of dispute over what the play means, and the dispute has not closed. Donneau de Visé read Alceste as ridiculous in 1667. Rousseau, in the Lettre à d’Alembert (1758), charged Molière with making virtue laughable to please society, and the charge has been answered and renewed ever since. Fabre d’Églantine’s Le Philinte de Molière (1790) turned the moral against Philinte; the Romantics read Alceste as a tragic figure; stagings have played him as a fool, a hero, a neurotic and a self-portrait of Molière. Célimène yields as much: a heartless coquette, or a young widow of wit with no other power. The text holds its questions open: whether Philinte’s moderation is wisdom or complicity, whether Alceste loves Célimène or his own need to be preferred, and whether the ending is comic at all.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is European drama of the seventeenth century, and French comedy first within it. The force: the play made the comedy of manners capable of a moral argument without a solution, and made laughter itself the question; high comedy in Europe, the comedy of a society talking, takes its measure from it. Held below the top because much of Molière’s reorganisation of comedy is shared with L’École des femmes and Tartuffe, and because its reach is as the model of a genre more than as the opening of a new one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: William Wycherley adapted it as The Plain Dealer (1676); the English comedy of manners, Congreve and later Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), draws on its salon and its portraits; Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit builds on its pattern of the truthful man driven out of society; and Rousseau made it a text of the Enlightenment’s quarrel with the theatre.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as Molière’s company published it in 1667; there is no loss and no rival version. Presence: three and a half centuries in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, founded in 1680 with Molière’s plays at its core, and in performance throughout the French-speaking world; read in French schools without a break; translated into the major European languages, and kept on the English stage in Wilbur’s version and in the adaptations of Tony Harrison and Martin Crimp. Fabric: its surface is fixed to a society, the court of Louis XIV, its salons and the marshals’ tribunal, but the play has outlived those conditions and is read for what they pressed on. A single society’s comedy, whose presence beyond French rests on a few translations, and a survival of centuries, not millennia: that holds the figure where it is.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged on the French. The command is of conversation in verse: the alexandrine broken across speakers in quick exchange; the long speech of argument, Philinte’s moderation and Éliante’s catalogue of the lover’s blindness, adapted from Lucretius; and the set piece, in the portraits, each a miniature of a type, in the duel of Célimène and Arsinoé, two speeches in strict parallel, and in the sonnet scene, timed beat by beat. Alceste’s voice is made distinct by its oaths and its repetitions, so that his character lives in his rhythm. The construction is clean: one place, one day, the offstage verdicts arriving together at the end. The charges are old and French: the verse has its padding, rhymes forced in places, which Fénelon and La Bruyère charged against Molière’s style, and Du Bois’s scene is mechanical. They are kept small.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of Du Bois fumbling for a lost note and Alceste’s last couplet; or the marquis admiring their own teeth and fortune and Éliante’s Lucretian speech on the blindness of love. One law governs them: self-love, and the gap between what a person is and how he wishes to be seen. The marquis display it naked; Oronte asks for sincerity and wants praise; Arsinoé covers envy with virtue; Célimène plays every suitor against the others; and Alceste’s demand to be loved for his honesty obeys the same law in its purest form. Even the lawsuit, lost to a rival who lies, and the tribunal over a sonnet are that law in the world’s courts. The range runs from farce to near tragedy, and it is held. Held off the top because Du Bois’s scene leans on the old farce more than the play elsewhere allows.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on what one comedy of five acts holds, without penalty for being a single play. Consciousness, fully, in Alceste’s divided self. Love and courtship, in four suitors and three women. Friendship, in Philinte’s patience. Society as a system: the salon, its talk, its portraits, its economy of esteem. Literature and criticism, in the sonnet. Law, in the lawsuit and the marshals’ tribunal. The court, in Arsinoé’s offer of influence there, which Alceste refuses. The position of women, in a widow of twenty, her cousin and a prude. All of it is held in one room and under one law. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the room shuts out: labour, the family and children, the sacred, nature and history are not present, and the city outside the salon is only reported. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3, then The Bottomless Well at 9.1, The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 9.0. A text whole since 1667 and performed and taught without a break for three and a half centuries; a dispute over what it means, from Donneau de Visé and Rousseau to the stagings of the present, that has not closed; a disclosure that the demand for sincerity is a form of self-love, which holds; and one law of self-love governing a valet’s farce and the hero’s exit alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: consciousness, love, friendship, the salon, criticism, law, the court and the position of women are held in one room, and labour, the family, the sacred, nature and history are shut out of it. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.7, where the elevation is chiefly the pleasure of wit, rising to near tragedy only at the close. The music of the alexandrine to a native ear is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Inner Law at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.6, Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last exactly at it. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 7.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Molière’s Le Misanthrope, ou l’Atrabilaire amoureux, comedy in five acts and in verse, first performed by Molière’s troupe at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, Paris, on 4 June 1666, with Molière as Alceste, and published by Jean Ribou in 1667 with Donneau de Visé’s Lettre écrite sur la comédie du Misanthrope. It is scored as the surviving text as published in 1667, a text for performance; there is one text, and no rival version is in question. Productions are evidence of its life, and none of them is the work. Every axis is judged on Molière’s French. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. French is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own plain English beneath; no published translation is quoted, and everything else is paraphrased. Translation · Richard Wilbur’s verse translation (1955) is the English version best known to this reading and was used for sense, because it is the version known best here and keeps the play in rhymed verse. Tony Harrison’s version (1973), moved to de Gaulle’s France, and Martin Crimp’s (1996), moved to modern London, are adaptations and were not used for sense. None is in hand, none is quoted, and nothing in any of them is charged or credited to the play. The French is read here, though not with a native ear: the measure, the rhymes and the lines known are judged, and the music of the alexandrine beyond them is neither credited nor charged. References are by act; scene numbers and line numbers are not given. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact length of the text in lines, the number of scenes in each act, the placing of several episodes within the acts, and the reception of the first run, are not given.