Molière's works and theatrical significance

¶ … play of Moliere and one of his famous work "A school for wives." This paper will highlight the roles of different characters and what important aspect and part was played by each individual in making the lay a major success and a worth watching comedy play.

Moliere

Moliere is considered as one of the best French comedy writers, his plays are a classic and make the crowd laugh for hours. "A school for wives" is one of his most classic comedies in which he has highlighted the issues of women from various aspects and point-of-view. The audience goes through fits of laughter's during the whole play, especially during the excellent performance of the actors, who portray the women and wives and the problems each of them undergo and the solution they come up with.

The school of wives is one of classic comedies that portray the role of women in the lives of men, and how men try to empower women in their life. The play has also highlighted the strong feelings and emotions and of love, and how it can change a person. Moliere has portrayed the motion of love in a very beautiful manner by which he has emphasized the role of love in a woman as well as a mans life and how this one emotion of love can bring about changes in the character of a person for the sake of the love.

The School for Wives

French actor and playwright, the greatest of all writers of French comedy. Moliere's stunning success is those plays in which, attacking hypocrisy and vice; he created characters that have become eternal types, such as the hypochondriac Argan, Tartuffe, the hypocrite, Harpagon, the miser, and Alceste, the misanthrope. A very delicate characterization than Agnes or a more heartfelt Arnolphe than, an Arnolphe who genuinely is mystified about how he got from his beginning plot to her winning counter-plot, and is hurt and cuckold, at least in his own eyes. The servants Alain and Georgette were as fractious and funny as the audience would want in a servant..

The main character, Arnolphe, is a 42-year-old member of the bourgeoisie who think that of all the evils and moral wrongs a man could be subjected to, being ranks number one. In order to escape that humiliating plot, he has raised a girl, Agnes, from the age of four to be a perfect idiot so that when he marries her, her only concern in life will be for his well being. He, is a middle-aged Casanova, has reached the conclusion that the best safeguard of a wife's honor is ignorance. He decides that a woman should only know how to sew, pray, spin and love the man to whom she is promised. He sees that his ward Agnes is brought up at a convent school in complete isolation. But the young lady involuntarily outwits him. She bestows her affections upon the courageous Horace, and the guardian, after being made her confidante, is eventually left out in the cold.

Arnolphe's obsession with avoiding cuckholdry is a larger symbol for achieving the constituent of chance in life. He is dependent on his wife's actions for his status as cuckhold or not, as he has no control over whether she cheats on him. Woman traditionally represents chaos and nature; Man represents logic, rationality and the law imposed upon nature in an effort to control it.

On the evening Arnolphe plans to marry Agnes, everything possibly wrong that can go wrong does. Every attempt he makes to have power over her fails. This supplies the comic fuel for the play and makes the audience go through fits of laughter. While Arnolphe is away on a trip, Agnes falls in love with another man and slowly comes out of her idiotic fog. Her intellectual awakening is attributed to her falling in love. The bottom line is that women are forever dependent upon men to shape them. As regards Agnes, whose name is the type of a simple, artless girl, her character develops as the plot of the comedy rolls on. In the first scene, she is an uneducated, ingenuous maiden; but she gradually changes under the influence of love, and becomes earnest, intelligent, and even logical.

The troubles of Sganarelle and Arnolphe are the troubles of jealous husbands in every age, and it is idle to stack up instances in the predecessors of Moliere that may have added to form his conceptions for the play. One of those that come nearest to the type is the story about a gentle knight of Hainault, in the forty-first of the Novels nouvelles du Roi Louis XI., reproduced by Scarron in his Nouvelles tragi-comiques.

The ingenuous self-confidence of Arnolphe, curiously distinct with his recurring jealousies, finds an ante-type in many an ancient Italian story. Moliere's own history also furnished him with his subject, for he was now married, and did not find in marriage the happiness he hoped for. Without wishing to attribute to him all the ludicrous irrationality of Arnolphe, or to suppose that his wife was another Agnes, still we imagine that though he had scarcely been married a year, he felt already the necessity of watching over, and if possible, of guiding the steps of his youthful spouse. It seems to that in many of the sayings of Arnolphe, there is to be found a feeling of resentment and infatuation, rather out of place in the mouth of such a preposterous dignitary, but which give clear suggestion of what was even then passing in the mind of the author. The words that Arnolphe uses when kneeling at the feet of Agnes show what tempestuous passions must have possessed Moliere; and though it is often dangerous to identify a poet with his creation, still there must be always some part, however small, of the individuality of the originator in the character he produces.