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MoliereThe Imaginary Invalid
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1673A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Molière, or Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73)
Born in Paris in 1622 to parents who were wealthy upholsterers, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was well-educated and studied law. In 1643, he decided to reject tradition and renounce succession of his father’s position as royal upholster to go into theater. He co-founded the Illustre-Théâtre company in Paris in 1643 as an actor-manager-playwright, supposedly at the urging of his cofounder, the actor and director Madeline Béjart, who was also his lover. In 1644, Poquelin renamed himself Molière. The company struggled and failed, staging tragedies and tragicomedies, and Molière spent time in debtors’ prison. He toured France with other companies for over a decade, and his first full-length play, Le Étourdi ou les Contretemps (The Blunderer, or the Counterplots), premiered in 1655. He returned to Paris in 1658, having gained experience and expertise. He had his big break when the company performed Pierre Corneille’s Nicomède on an improvised stage at the Louvre for King Louis XIV, followed by one of Molière’s short pieces, Le Docteur Amoureux (The Amorous Doctor). At this point, his work began to receive recognition and acclaim, even earning the patronage of the king’s brother, Phillipe d’Orléans.
In 1662, at age 40, Molière married 20-year-old Armande Béjart, the daughter of his former lover Madeline. Those who didn’t like Molière spread rumors that he married his own daughter, but Armande’s paternity is well-established. After seven years of patronage with the king’s brother, the king took patronage himself, and they became known as Troupe du Roi. The king even acted as godfather to Molière’s son, Louis. Although Molière preferred tragedy, his farces made his name synonymous with French comic theater. Molière grew more and more popular, and he was no stranger to scandal and controversy. His plays meshed comedy with social commentary, and he was criticized by religious figures in particular for his lampooning of religion and his irreverent depiction of marriage. In 1662, Molière generated controversy with The School for Wives, a play about a wealthy man who raises a young woman as his ward with the intention of marrying her. He responded to the outrage with The Critique of the School for Wives in 1663, in which he mocked his detractors, placing his critics at a dinner table after a performance of the play and incorporating some of the complaints that were aimed at The School for Wives.
A much greater scandal surrounded what became, perhaps, his most famous play: Tartuffe, ou l’Imposteur, which was produced in 1664 at Versailles. The title character, Tartuffe, pretends to be holy and convinces a rich man to disinherit his family and hand over his wealth. Seen as a direct and deliberate attack on the Catholic Church, the play created major controversy, although it was popular with theatergoers and with King Louis XIV himself. The archbishop of Paris sent out an edict threatening to excommunicate anyone who patronized or participated in the play. Despite Molière’s attempts to rewrite it and an anonymous Lettre sur la comédie de l’Imposteur (1667) published to defend the play, public performances were banned until 1669. However, his career continued, and he wrote The Misanthrope, often considered his best play, in 1666. His health started to decline, and he died in 1673 after barely making it through a performance as the title character in The Imaginary Invalid. According to French law, as an actor, he wasn’t allowed to be buried in a churchyard unless he renounced his profession before death. Molière died before he had a chance to do that, but the king granted him a Christian burial among unbaptized infants.
Genre Context: Neoclassicism and Les Comédies-Ballet
The Renaissance that was spreading through Europe arrived in France in the late 16th century. What began with the revival of classic Greek and Roman texts eventually developed into French Neoclassicism. The concept of neoclassicism is new classicism, or returning to the classical era of ancient Greece and Rome. The rules of neoclassicism are based on those set forth in Aristotle’s Poetics, a treatise on the proper structure and guidelines for a well-written Greek tragedy, and Horace’s Ars Poetica about poetic technique. French Neoclassicism began around 1550, but the Académie Française established five rules for neoclassical plays after its founding in 1636:
- verisimilitude, which means that the action must be believable or at least within the realm of possibility;
- decorum, or the upholding of morality, so that good people must win, and bad people must lose, while all of them act within the conventions of their station;
- purity of genre, or the idea that comedies and tragedies must not deviate from genre conventions;
- the three unities—time, place, action—so that the action should be limited to one place, occur within one day, and follow one storyline; and
- five acts.
The Imaginary Invalid has only three acts, but it can be construed as having five with the inclusion of the Eclogue and interludes. The play adheres to the unities of time, place, and action and retains purity of genre. As for decorum, people are punished and rewarded according to their morality, but characters like Toinette speak outside the decorum of their class. This demonstrates Molière’s pushing of the limits of neoclassicism, often for the sake of social commentary. He believed in using the stage to reflect society back on itself, so his verisimilitude often included criticism, as is apparent in the portrayal of doctors in The Imaginary Invalid. The notion of verisimilitude, which excludes unrealistic actions like soliloquies and supernatural elements, seems to forbid the musical numbers in The Imaginary Invalid that occur in the eclogue, the interludes, and in the middle of Act II. It isn’t realistic for the characters to start singing and dancing, although there is a semblance of verisimilitude in the way the musical numbers are integrated into the action. But Molière knew the tastes of his mostly bourgeois audience, especially those of King Louis XIV, his patron and most significant fan. Molière presented his first comédie-ballet in 1661 at an event in honor of the first year of King Louis XIV’s rule in France. Therefore, the new genre became linked to Louis XIV’s reign.
Molière’s social criticisms also supported King Louis XIV’s political ideology, which allowed him greater creative license in terms of form and rules. Louis XIV’s patronage of the arts meant that he had power and control over Parisian culture. Molière’s primary collaborator on these comédies-ballets was a composer named Jean-Baptiste Lully. In 1661, the king appointed Lully master of the king’s music; in 1665, he named Molière the official playwright of the court. Molière and Lully wrote 12 comédies-ballets together, each one premiering at Versailles for King Louis XIV and his court as a private audience. Molière’s particular talent was bringing together the elements of song, dance, and comedy into a cohesive whole in which the parts worked together to complement and comment on one another. Conflict erupted between the collaborators over power and publishing rights, and Lully, as the person in charge of musical entertainment, banned Molière from the court. Molière had to seek another composer, and The Imaginary Invalid premiered at the Palais-Royal in Paris instead of Versailles. It might have marked a new era in collaboration, but Molière died after its fourth performance.
Sociohistorical Context: Practicing Medicine in the 17th Century
When viewed through a 21st-century lens, Molière’s mocking of doctors amounts to what seems like an anti-intellectual, anti-science stance, which might give some theaters pause when considering whether to produce the play in light of the cultural tensions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, it’s important for audiences and readers to understand that the practice of medicine was vastly different in Molière’s time. There was a hierarchy of three vocations within the medical profession: the doctor, the apothecary, and the surgeon-barber. The doctors, such as this play’s Lillicrap, Purgeon, and soon-to-be-doctor Thomas Lillicrap, were at the highest level in this system, but their education was largely theoretical and had no practicum. The doctor wrote a thesis, as Thomas has in the play, defended it in an oral examination, and became a doctor in a ceremony much like the one lampooned at the end of the play. Apothecaries were more akin to an artisan or a chemist; they made medical treatments and administered them based on doctors’ orders. Mr. Florid serves as an example of an apothecary in the play. The lowest level, which doesn’t appear in the play, is the surgeon-barber, who does the hands-on tasks of the doctor, such as setting bones or performing a bloodletting, but is considered more menial than skilled.
Additionally, the study of anatomy was essentially devoid of internal medicine. In the play, Thomas offers to take Angélique to see a woman’s body dissected, which is not only a ghoulish proposition for a young 17th-century society woman but also a hotly contested practice in that era. Today’s medical students spend hours in cadaver labs even in their first year of study, but cadaver dissection was a rare occurrence in Molière’s era. Only executed criminals were legally permitted on the dissection table, although grave robbers also sold cadavers to medical schools. Thomas’s invitation is likely a reference to a scandal that occurred in 1667, a few years prior to the play’s opening, in which a grave robber stole the body of a respected member of French society. The cadaver was publicly dissected, leading to outrage and a tightening of restrictions on the educational use of cadavers. Incidentally, the dissection of a cadaver was performed by a surgeon-barber and observed by a doctor, as doctors rarely dirtied their hands. Medical practices in the late 17th century were based on medieval understanding of the body, as well as superstitious belief systems with such purported cures as bloodletting, purging, the application of herbal remedies, and, as shown in the play, enemas. There were no thermometers, and the microscope was rarely used as a medical tool. There was also no systemic approach to diagnostics or treatment, and practices were not based on empirical evidence. In context, Molière’s mistrust of doctors is understandable.
