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The School for Husbands
dp n="18" folio="" ?dp n="19" folio="3" ?Introduction
Molière was devotedly familiar, all his life, with the commedia dell’arte, that form of Italian popular comedy in which stock characters like Pantalone (an amorous old miser) and Arlecchino (a foolish servant) improvised their scenes within skeletal plot outlines or “scenarios.” During his thirteen years of touring in the provinces, Molière without question saw and learned from those commedia troupes which, in the seventeenth century, traveled to all of the centers of Europe; and his biographer Grimarest says that the company which he brought to Paris in 1658 was “trained to extemporize short comic pieces in the manner of the Italian actors.” When, in that year, he pleased the court with his farce Le Docteur amoureux, and secured the patronage of the king’s brother, his Troupe de Monsieur was given the use, for half of each week, of the Salle du Petit-Bourbon, sharing that theater with a resident Italian company headed by the great commedia actor Tiberio Fiorelli. Contemporary accounts tell us that it was a happy association, and that Molière never missed one of Fiorelli’s performances.
dp n="20" folio="4" ?An admiring indebtedness to Italian comedy, outweighing all other influences, can be seen throughout Molière’s plays and entertainments, but seems to me particularly visible in his early success The School for Husbands (1661). The single setting of the play is that public square, with its clustered houses or “mansions,” which was the traditional backdrop of commedia performances. The action recalls the commonest of commedia plots, in which the innamorati or young lovers, balked by their elders and aided by clever servants, manage to outwit their oppressors and marry. As for the characters, Sganarelle is one of Molière’s quirky Pantalones, and Lisette and Ergaste are French cousins of those zanni who, in the Italian comedy, represented impudent servants with a taste for intrigue.
The School for Husbands, however, is a firmly constructed, fully written play in the high mode of verse comedy. Nothing is left to improvisation. Such a farcical bit as Valère and Ergaste’s accosting of the oblivious Sganarelle (Act One, Scene 3), which in commedia would give the actors all sorts of inventive latitude, is here wholly worded and choreographed by the dialogue and stage directions. The chief persons of the play, though behind them loom certain stock figures, are variously individuated by Molière’s art and endowed with a measure of complexity. In the first act of Husbands, we meet two middle-aged brothers, Sganarelle and Ariste, who have promised a dying friend to rear, and perhaps ultimately to marry, his two orphaned daughters. Ariste, an easygoing man of fifty-nine or so, has treated his spirited ward Léonor in a considerate and indulgent fashion, thus gaining her grateful affection. Sganarelle, Ariste’s junior by twenty years, is a premature fuddy-duddy who has raised his charge Isabelle with a domineering strictness, and it will of course be the business of the play to rescue her from his tyranny and unite her with her romantic young neighbor Valère. Certain peculiarities of Sganarelle (whose central part was originally played by Molière himself) are conveyed in the play’s early scenes: His cranky opposition to fashion and to urban social pleasures, his extolling of ancestral ways and standards, his crusty bad manners, his mistrustfulness, his ill will toward Ariste. All these things, as the second and third acts proceed, become intelligible aspects of his psychology.
As Albert Bermel has noted, the second act—in which the cause of Isabelle is advanced by a series of clever deceptions and dodges—has a number of surprises for us. Isabelle, who in Act One was a poor victim with but twenty-nine syllables to say, emerges in Act Two as a mettlesome, resourceful young woman who, horrified by the prospect of a marriage to a bully, drives all the action by improvising one ruse after another. It is surprising, too, that the enamored Valère and his canny valet Ergaste, who at the end of the first act retired to ponder stratagems, are in the second reactive at best, their behavior being largely confined to the divining of Isabelle’s purposes and the abetting of her initiatives. When the figures of a play behave in unexpected and yet credible ways, it increases their dimensionality, and here it is above all the unanticipated actions of Sganarelle which serve to build complex character. The suspicious man of Act One becomes, in Act Two, utterly gullible; the harsh guardian bec...
