In a petition to King Louis XIV, Molière wrote, “The mission of comedy is to correct men’s vices.” Both a product and a daring critic of classical France, Molière developed a sophisticated and influential vision of the comic genre. This vision reinvented theatrical comedy through character-based satirical portraits of various aspects of seventeenth-century French society. Charles Newell, Court Theatre’s artistic director, and Larry Norman, University of Chicago associate professor of Romance languages and literature, discuss Molière’s most important works and his infamous claims about the reformative powers of theater.
Molière painted by Nicolas Mignard (1658).