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or The Stone Guest (Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre, February 1665) followed the banning of Tartuffe and was itself withdrawn after fifteen performances.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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

Verified 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.