The School for Wives, The Critique of The School for Wives and Don Juan

Summary

This volume joins three plays from the most embattled years of Molière's career. The School for Wives (L'École des femmes, December 1662) made him the most talked-about playwright in Paris; The Critique of The School for Wives (June 1663) answered his detractors on stage; and Don Juan, or The Stone Guest (Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre, February 1665) followed the banning of Tartuffe and was itself withdrawn after fifteen performances. The School for Wives is a five-act verse comedy. Arnolphe, a wealthy man of forty-two who has spent years laughing at deceived husbands, believes he has found a safeguard: he bought the four-year-old Agnès from a poor woman, had her raised in a convent in deliberate ignorance, and now keeps her in a separate house under the name Monsieur de la Souche, intending to marry her. But young Horace, son of Arnolphe's friend Oronte, has seen Agnès and fallen in love, and, not knowing that 'La Souche' and Arnolphe are the same man, he confides every stage of his courtship to Arnolphe himself. Arnolphe's precautions, including a set of 'Maxims of Marriage' that Agnès must read aloud, only teach her to deceive him. Love educates her faster than he can keep her ignorant. In the end Agnès is revealed as the lost daughter of Enrique, whom Oronte has already promised to Horace, and Arnolphe leaves the stage speechless. The Critique is a one-act prose conversation in a Paris salon. A précieuse lady, a foppish marquis and a pedantic poet attack the play for indecency and for breaking the rules of art; Dorante, who speaks for Molière, replies that the great rule of comedy is to please a sensible audience, and that a play is better judged by the pit than by pedants. Don Juan is a five-act prose play drawn from the Spanish legend first dramatised by Tirso de Molina. Don Juan, a nobleman who has abandoned his wife Elvira after taking her from a convent, travels with his servant Sganarelle, a timid and muddled believer who argues with him about heaven. He courts two peasant girls at once, tempts a beggar to blaspheme for a gold coin, cheats his creditor Monsieur Dimanche with flattery, scorns his father's rebukes and Elvira's plea to repent, and invites to dinner the statue of a Commander he killed. The statue nods, comes, and returns the invitation. In the last act Don Juan pretends to have been converted, using feigned devotion as a shield, before the statue takes his hand and he is consumed by fire. Together the plays raise questions about education and freedom, about what makes comedy good, and about unbelief and judgment. They suit grades 10-12. The library has no public-domain English text attached for these plays, so it gives no quotations.

Plot or Argument

• The School for Wives, Act I: Arnolphe's plan

  Arnolphe explains to his friend Chrysalde why he will marry an ignorant girl, and visits Agnès, who chatters innocently about sewing. He then meets Horace, newly arrived in town, who asks him for money and confides that he is courting a girl kept by a jealous 'Monsieur de la Souche'.

• The School for Wives, Acts II and III: the lessons

  Arnolphe questions Agnès, who artlessly reports Horace's visits. He orders her to throw a stone at the suitor, then reads her the Maxims of Marriage. Horace returns to tell Arnolphe, with delight, that Agnès threw the stone with a love letter tied to it.

• The School for Wives, Acts IV and V: the escape and the recognition

  Arnolphe bars the doors and arms his servants, but Horace is hurt in a ladder fall and Agnès runs away with him; Horace, not knowing, entrusts her to Arnolphe's keeping. Arnolphe pleads with Agnès, who says plainly that Horace knows how to make himself loved. Enrique returns from America, Agnès proves to be his daughter, and the marriage arranged between her and Horace stands.

• The Critique: a salon quarrel

  Uranie and Élise receive visitors who have seen the play. Climène is shocked by imagined indecencies, the Marquis can only sneer 'tarte à la crème', and the poet Lysidas invokes Aristotle and Horace. Dorante defends the play's characters and argues that the rules exist to serve pleasure, not to forbid it. The conversation ends when a servant announces supper.

• Don Juan, Acts I and II: the seducer abroad

  Sganarelle describes his master as a great lord who believes in nothing. Elvira confronts Don Juan, who mocks her. Shipwrecked while pursuing a betrothed girl, he is rescued by the peasant Pierrot and promptly courts both Charlotte, Pierrot's fiancée, and Mathurine, promising marriage to each.

• Don Juan, Act III: the forest and the tomb

  Disguised, Sganarelle as a doctor, they debate medicine and religion. Don Juan offers a hermit-beggar a gold coin to swear; the man refuses, and Don Juan gives it anyway. He rescues Don Carlos, Elvira's brother, from robbers, and comes upon the Commander's tomb, where the statue nods its acceptance of his mocking invitation.

• Don Juan, Acts IV and V: warnings and the stone guest

  Don Juan flatters Monsieur Dimanche out of the house without paying, endures his father Don Louis's rebuke and Elvira's last plea, and dines with the statue, which invites him in turn. He then announces a conversion, privately explaining to Sganarelle that pretended piety will protect him. A spectre and the statue give final warnings; the statue takes his hand, and he is swallowed in flames, leaving Sganarelle crying for his unpaid wages.

Characters

• Arnolphe (Monsieur de la Souche), guardian and would-be husband

  A self-satisfied bourgeois who has mocked other men's marriages and tries to guarantee his own by keeping his bride ignorant; his control turns to anguish.

• Agnès, Arnolphe's ward

  Raised in a convent without instruction, she begins utterly naive and learns frankness, wit and resolve through her love for Horace.

• Horace, young lover

  Son of Oronte, open-hearted to a fault; he keeps confiding his plans to the one man he should not.

• Chrysalde, Arnolphe's friend

  The voice of moderation, who warns that a foolish wife is no protection against folly.

• Dorante, speaker in the Critique

  A reasonable courtier who defends the play and states Molière's view that comedy must please and portray its age truly.

• Don Juan, libertine nobleman

  Brave, charming and contemptuous of every obligation, human or divine, who believes only that two and two make four.

• Sganarelle, Don Juan's servant

  Cowardly, talkative and superstitious, he defends faith with comic illogic and is the play's frightened conscience.

• Elvira, Don Juan's abandoned wife

  Taken from a convent and deserted, she returns in Act IV having renounced her anger, to beg him to repent.

• The Commander's statue, the stone guest

  The monument of the man Don Juan killed, which accepts his invitation and brings judgment.

Lessons

• Ignorance is not innocence

  Arnolphe thinks a wife kept ignorant will be a faithful one, and he plans her life as a project of control. The comedy shows the plan failing on its own terms: Agnès, having no instruction in judgment, simply follows her heart, and the only lessons she gets from Arnolphe teach her to hide things. Molière is not arguing for license; Agnès ends in an honourable marriage approved by her father. He is mocking the idea that virtue can be secured by keeping a person small. Classical Christian education, which aims to form judgment and love of the good, stands on the other side of Arnolphe's experiment.

  • What does Arnolphe fear, and why does he think ignorance will protect him?
  • How does Agnès change between Act II and Act V? Is the change growth or corruption?
  • What is the difference between protecting a child's innocence and keeping her ignorant?

• The rule of all rules is to please

  In the Critique, Molière stages the arguments of his enemies (prudish, fashionable and pedantic) and lets Dorante answer them. Dorante's case is that comedy must hold up a true mirror to its age, and that the classical rules are observations about what pleases, not laws to overrule an audience's good sense. The short play is an early piece of literary criticism in dramatic form and a model of answering critics with wit rather than anger.

  • Which of the critics' objections has the most force? Which is weakest?
  • Is 'pleasing the audience' an adequate test of a good play? What would Aristotle add?
  • Why might Molière have chosen to answer his critics in a comedy rather than a preface?

• Don Juan and the patience of heaven

  Don Juan receives warning after warning: Elvira's plea, his father's rebuke, the beggar's refusal to swear, the statue's nod, the spectre. He answers each with wit or contempt. The play makes his courage and charm real, which is why its judgment is serious: he is not damned for lack of opportunity. Sganarelle's muddled defence of faith is comic, yet he is right about the end. Students can trace the warnings and weigh Molière's portrait of a man who hardens himself (Hebrews 3:15).

  • Make a list of the warnings Don Juan receives. Which comes closest to moving him?
  • Why does Molière give the defence of religion to a foolish servant? Does that weaken it or make it more striking?
  • In the beggar scene, Don Juan gives the coin even though the man refuses to swear. What does that gesture reveal?

• Feigned conversion

  In Act V Don Juan announces a change of life to his father and then tells Sganarelle it is a mask: a reputation for piety, he says, will cover his vices better than open defiance. Written while Tartuffe was banned, the speech turns Molière's earlier theme into the confession of a man who knows exactly what he is doing. The final judgment follows directly on it, which makes pretended devotion the last and worst of Don Juan's sins.

  • Why is pretended devotion worse in this play than open unbelief?
  • How does Don Juan's feigned conversion compare with Tartuffe's?
  • Sganarelle's last words are about his wages. Is the ending comic, tragic, or both?

Context

In the early 1660s Molière's troupe, under the protection of Louis XIV and his brother, held the Palais-Royal theatre in Paris and competed with the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. The School for Wives provoked a 'quarrel' carried on in pamphlets and rival plays, in which Molière was accused of obscenity, irreverence toward religion (over the Maxims of Marriage) and ignorance of the rules. The following years brought the ban on Tartuffe (1664) by pressure from devout circles, and Don Juan was written in that atmosphere.

Composition

The School for Wives was first performed at the Palais-Royal on 26 December 1662 and printed in 1663. The Critique was performed on 1 June 1663, and Molière continued the quarrel in The Impromptu of Versailles that autumn. Don Juan was first performed on 15 February 1665 and was dropped after fifteen performances; it was not printed in Molière's lifetime in its full form, and Thomas Corneille's verse adaptation replaced it on stage from 1677. Molière drew on Italian and French versions of the Spanish legend first dramatised in Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla (c. 1630).

Reception

The School for Wives was a great popular success and remains one of the most performed plays of the French repertory. Don Juan was attacked in a 1665 pamphlet for impiety; modern critics have often read it as Molière's most daring play, while disagreeing whether its judgment of Don Juan is sincere or conventional. The legend continued through Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni (1787), Byron's Don Juan and many later versions.

Comparisons

• The Misanthrope and Other Plays

  The Misanthrope (1666) came a year after Don Juan, and Alceste and Don Juan stand at opposite poles: one demands perfect sincerity from everyone, the other pretends to virtue for convenience. Arnolphe shares Alceste's wish to control a beloved woman and his failure to do so.

• The Miser and The Would-Be Gentleman

  Arnolphe, Harpagon and Monsieur Jourdain are three versions of Molière's ruling-passion father or guardian, whose obsession (with fidelity, money, rank) endangers a young woman's marriage until a recognition scene or a trick sets things right. Arnolphe, alone of the three, is made to feel genuine pain.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine appears in one scene of Don Juan. In Act III, Sganarelle has disguised himself in a physician's gown and finds that peasants consult him; Don Juan dismisses medicine as one of mankind's great errors, and Sganarelle defends the reputation of emetic wine (antimony), a remedy then the subject of fierce controversy in the Paris faculty. The exchange anticipates Molière's later doctor comedies. The library has no text attached for these plays, so the pointer is to the scene, not to a checked passage.

• Don Juan, Act III, Scene 1

  Sganarelle in a doctor's costume; Don Juan scorns medicine as pretence, and Sganarelle cites the emetic wine controversy as evidence for its power.

  Physicians Doctors Quackery Charlatans Pharmacology Poisons

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the letter Agnès might send to the convent nuns who raised her, a month after her marriage to Horace.

• Dialogue

  Write a short scene in the manner of the Critique, in which modern readers argue whether Don Juan is a tragedy or a comedy.

• Essay

  Arnolphe and Don Juan both treat women as objects of their own designs. Write an essay comparing how Molière exposes and punishes each.

• Classroom

  Read the Maxims of Marriage aloud in class, then discuss which maxims reveal Arnolphe's fears rather than any real duty of marriage.

Further Reading

• The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, Tirso de Molina

  The Spanish play (c. 1630) that first gave the Don Juan legend dramatic form.

• Don Giovanni, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte

  The 1787 opera, the most famous later version of the stone guest story.

• Tartuffe, Molière

  The banned play whose theme of false devotion returns in Don Juan's last act.

• The Impromptu of Versailles, Molière

  Molière's 1663 sequel to the Critique, in which he plays himself rehearsing his troupe.