MOLIRE

baptized Jan. 15, 1622, Paris, France died Feb. 17, 1673, Paris original name Jean-Baptiste Poquelin French actor and playwright, the greatest of all writers of French comedy. Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France often combined against him, the genius of Molire finally emerged to win him acclaim. Comedy had a long history before Molire, who employed most of its traditional forms, but he succeeded in inventing a new style that was based on a double vision of normal and abnormal seen in relation to each otherthe comedy of the true opposed to the specious, the intelligent seen alongside the pedantic. An actor himself, Molire seems to have been incapable of visualizing any situation without animating and dramatizing it, often beyond the limits of probability; though living in an age of reason, his own good sense led him not to proselytize but rather to animate the absurd, as in such masterpieces as Tartuffe, L'cole des femmes, Le Misanthrope, and many others. It is testimony to the freshness of his vision that the greatest comic artists working centuries later in other media, such as Charlie Chaplin, are still compared to Molire.