Molire A Theatrical Life [Paperback]

This biography of Moli?re was first published in 2000 and will appeal to general reader and specialists in French and Theatre Studies.Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as Molière, is an important figure in European literature and drama, whose plays are still taught and performed throughout the world. Locating his life and work in the social, literary and theatrical contexts of the period, Virginia Scott offers a narrative account of Molière's life and an overview of his plays in the wider setting of the development of seventeenth-century French drama. This full-length biography, the first to be written about Molière in English since 1930, will appeal to the general reader as well as the specialist.Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as Molière, is an important figure in European literature and drama, whose plays are still taught and performed throughout the world. Locating his life and work in the social, literary and theatrical contexts of the period, Virginia Scott offers a narrative account of Molière's life and an overview of his plays in the wider setting of the development of seventeenth-century French drama. This full-length biography, the first to be written about Molière in English since 1930, will appeal to the general reader as well as the specialist.Molière's long-lost trunk of letters and manuscripts has yet to be found amidst the dust of some Parisian attic, but in spite of that, a story of his life can be told from documentary evidence, reminiscence, gossip and innuendo, and inferences from his plays. He was very much a man of his time and place, and this new biography, the first to be written in English since 1930, places the great actor/playwright in his historical context as the son of well-to-do bourgeois and student at the Jesuit College de Clermont in the 1630's, as one of a group of stage-struck hopefuls and as a vagabond actor in the provinces in the 1640's and 50's, and--from 1658 to his deló6