Moliere: A Theatrical Life

Description

In this biography, Virginia Scott locates Moliere's life and work in the social, literary and theatrical contexts of the period. She offers a narrative account of his life and an overview of his plays in the wider setting of the development of seventeenth-century French drama. Her research extends from Moliere's boyhood and his Jesuit education at the College de Clermont, through the beginning of his theatrical career in Paris and as a vagabond actor in the provinces, to his days as a court dramatist under Louis XIV. He was a controversial playwright, striking out against hypocrisy in religion and medicine, and finally a cynical survivor of the literary, cultural, and marital wars. This full-length biography, the first to be written about Moliere in English since 1930, will appeal to the general reader as well as specialists in French and Theatre Studies.

Virginia Scott is Professor of Theater at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of The Commedia dell'Arte in Paris (1990), winner of the George Freedley Award for best book in theatre studies, 1991.

' ... arrestingly illuminates the complex world of the theatre and court, both in Paris and elsewhere, that finally constitutes almost all that can really be known of Moliere's life.' The Economist 'As the first substantive English-language biography of Moliere since 1930, this is a happy arrival for students of the theater and of French literature and culture ...'. Publishers Weekly