Molière

Loading player...
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great figures in world literature. The French playwright Molière (1622-1673) began as an actor, aiming to be a tragedian, but he was stronger in comedy, touring with a troupe for 13 years until Louis XIV summoned him to audition at the Louvre and gave him his break. It was in Paris and at Versailles that Molière wrote and performed his best known plays, among them Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope and Le Malade Imaginaire, and in time he was so celebrated that French became known as The Language of Molière.

With

Noel Peacock
Emeritus Marshall Professor in French Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow

Jan Clarke
Professor of French at Durham University

And

Joe Harris
Professor of Early Modern French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

David Bradby and Andrew Calder (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Molière (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Jan Clarke (ed.), Molière in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Georges Forestier, Molière (Gallimard, 2018)

Michael Hawcroft, Molière: Reasoning with Fools (Oxford University Press, 2007)

John D. Lyons, Women and Irony in Molière’s Comedies of Mariage (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Robert McBride and Noel Peacock (eds.), Le Nouveau Moliériste (11 vols., University of Glasgow Presw, 1994- )

Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Noel Peacock, Molière sous les feux de la rampe (Hermann, 2012)

Julia Prest, Controversy in French Drama: Molière’s Tartuffe and the Struggle for Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Virginia Scott, Molière: A Theatrical Life (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production
22 May English United Kingdom Religion & Spirituality

Other recent episodes

The Vienna Secession

In 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of radical artists to break free from the cultural establishment of Vienna and found a movement that became known as the Vienna Secession. In the vibrant atmosphere of coffee houses, Freudian psychoanalysis and the music of Wagner and Mahler, the Secession sought to…
3 Jul 55 min

Hypnosis

Ever since Franz Anton Mesmer induced trance-like states in his Parisian subjects in the late eighteenth century, dressed in long purple robes, hypnosis has been associated with performance, power and the occult.  It has exerted a powerful hold over the cultural imagination, featuring in novels and films including Bram Stoker’s…
26 Jun 47 min

Paul von Hindenburg

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and role of one of the most significant figures in early 20th Century German history. Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) had been famous since 1914 as the victorious commander at the Battle of Tannenberg against Russian invaders, soon burnishing this fame on the Western…
19 Jun 52 min

Copyright

In 1710, the British Parliament passed a piece of legislation entitled An Act for the Encouragement of Learning. It became known as the Statute of Anne, and it was the world’s first copyright law. Copyright protects and regulates a piece of work - whether that's a book, a painting, a…
12 Jun 1 hr 02 min

Lise Meitner

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the decisive role of one of the great 20th Century physicists in solving the question of nuclear fission. It is said that Meitner (1878-1968) made this breakthrough over Christmas 1938 while she was sitting on a log in Sweden during a snowy walk with her…
5 Jun 59 min