Moliere

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Paris, January 15, 1622-ibidem, February 17, 1673), called Molière, He was a French playwright, actor and poet, widely considered one of the greatest writers of the French language and universal literature. His existing works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more. His works have been translated into all major living languages. Considered the father of the Comédie Française, his works are performed more frequently than those of any other current playwright.^{[citation needed ]}

Rithless with the pedantry of false scholars, the lies of ignorant doctors, the pretentiousness of wealthy bourgeois, Molière exalts youth, which he wants to free from absurd restrictions. Far removed from devotion or asceticism, his role as a moralist ends in the same place where he defined it: "I don't know if it isn't better to work on rectifying and softening human passions than trying to eliminate them completely", and his main The objective was to "make honest people laugh." It can be said, therefore, that he endorsed the motto that appeared on Italian traveling theaters from the 1620s in France, with respect to comedy: Castigat ridendo mores , "Correct customs by laughing", taken from the French Neo-Latin poet Jean de Santeul (1630-1697).

Youth

Molière in the role of Caesar in The Death of Pompeyby Nicolas Mignard (1658).

Molière's life was documented very early; and Voltaire wrote an early biography, which accompanied each of his works with comments. Son of the royal upholsterer Jean Poquelin and Marie Cressé, his uncles are attributed (without this being certain) the reason for his interest in art. theater, as he was often taken to see plays performed.

He lost his mother at the age of 10 (1632) and, although he does not seem to have been particularly fond of his father, he lived with him on a top floor in the Pavillon des Singes, on rue Saint-Honoré, located in a wealthy neighborhood of Paris; his father remarried and was widowed again in 1636. Molière had begun his studies in 1633, at the age of eleven, at the Jesuit college in Clermont, now the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he rubbed shoulders with the rebellious French nobility, subjected to with an iron fist by Cardinal Richelieu, trusted by Louis XIII, until 1639. He studied law in Orleans between 1640 and 1642 and, once graduated, he joined the college, although only for six months. At that time he frequented the libertine circle of the Epicurean philosopher Pierre Gassendi, Claude-Emmanuel Luillier, known as Chapelle, Cyrano de Bergerac and Charles Coypeau de Assoucy. He then replaced his father (1642) in the trade of upholsterer to King Louis XIII, and was related to the Béjart family of comedians.

Difficult beginnings

But he longed to dedicate himself only to show business and on June 30, 1643 Jean-Baptiste signed with the Béjarts the charter of constitution of L'Illustre Théâtre / The Illustrious Theater. The director will be Madeleine Béjart, with whom he was in love; they begin a long period of tours through the provinces, especially in the south of France and even appear in Paris on January 1, 1644; Molière's role is not only to act, but to write farces and from 1644, already with the nickname of Molière, he even directs the company, something that he will do again in 1650.

However, success was long in coming and, with luck, they only reaped moderate collections with a repertoire of tragedies by Pierre Corneille and other authors, as well as farces and pantomimes in the style of the Commedia dell'Arte in the form of intermissions in tragedies, in order to attract all kinds of audiences. After a string of various failures, the company accumulated so many debts that the director Molière was imprisoned for several days in 1645. Once released, the company merged with that of Charles Dufresne, protected by the Duke of Epernon, and made a tour of Nantes, Toulouse, Albi, Poitiers, Toulouse, Narbonne, Agen and Pézenas.

Between 1645 and 1658 he trained as an actor and playwright; he wrote sketches of farces as well as his first two comedies, The Reckless or the Mishaps (L'Étourdi ou les Contretemps), premiered in Lyon in 1655, and Loving Spite (Le Dépit Amoureux) in which he introduces the character of Crascarilles, performed for the first time in Béziers in 1656. But the important thing was that since 1653 the powerful prince of Conti, who had a wing of his own next to that of his brother, the Grand Condé, in the Palace of Versailles, and had just been appointed Governor of Guyenne and Languedoc, had begun to protect the company, and had even granted it a pension of 6,000 livres in 1655.

This protection did not last long: suddenly De Conti converted to an intransigent Catholic religiosity, and on December 20, 1656 he withdrew not only that assignment, but also became an enemy for moral reasons of all forms of show business and theatrical spectacle; the company then became dependent on the Governor of Normandy. In Rouen Molière met Corneille.

The beginning of glory

When he returned to Paris in October 1658, protected by Philippe I of Orleans, brother of the king, he performed before Louis XIV a tragedy by Corneille, Nicomedes, which bored him, and a farce written and performed by himself, The Doctor in Love, which amused, but has not been preserved. Molière had great comedic talent and his voice and mimicry triggered laughter. Soon the company achieved an unrivaled reputation for comedy with Love Disappointment and above all with the first of Molière's great comedies, Les precieuses ridicules (Les précieuses ridicules, 1659), which achieved enormous success and confirmed the favor of the young King Louis XIV to the point that he installed them in a stable theater at the Petit-Bourbon, where they performed alternately with the Italian company Scaramouche, named after the typical black-clad Italian comic character.

In 1659 Molière's company had undergone a major restructuring: Charles Dufresne retired, Du Parc and Marquise joined the company of the Theater du Marais, and La Grange, future publisher of Molière, the famous actor, entered show business of farces Julien Bedeau, nicknamed "Jodelet" for the character of Scarron, and his brother L'Espy, as well as Du Croisy and his wife. Sganarelle ou le Cocu imaginaire / Sganarel or The Imaginary Cuckold (1660) confirms Molière's good comic fame (it was his most performed piece during the author's lifetime), who, however, is not enough to compete with companies specialized in the tragic genre; in this comedy he created the famous character of Sganarelle, which he would recover many times in other works and which he always played himself. However, the Petit-Bourbon was demolished in 1660 to build the colonnade of the Louvre and, after a difficult winter without work, in which the rival companies of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais tried to break up Molière's company by making different propositions to his comedians, all remained faithful and united around the playwright. The king transferred them in 1661 to the Palais-Royal or Royal Palace, where on November 4 he premiered Les facheux (The inopportune ones) with music by Lully and an overwhelming success: 39 performances followed. Molière still tried to stand out in tragedy, and his swan song in the genre was Don García de Navarra, a failure from which he got even with the success of the comedy The School of Husbands, premiered in June of that year in the luxurious palace of Superintendent Fouquet, who will fall after a short time and be replaced by Colbert.

Louis XIV invites Molière to share his dinnerby Gérôme (1863).

The death of Cardinal Mazarin strengthens the King's power. On February 20, 1662, Molière married Armande Béjart, daughter of Madeleine, who was about twenty years his junior. The same year he tackled an unusual topic at the time: the condition of women, and The Women's School ( L & # 39; École des femmes ) was a great success. But the dévote or devotee party and above all his secret society, the Company of the Holy Sacrament, protected by the Queen Mother Anne of Austria, considered Molière a libertine or disbelief and feared the influence he could exert on the king, especially after Molière represented in Versailles between May 8 and 14, 1662 and December 26 The School for Women, for which reason this work was declared obscene and irreligious. In addition, the King's protection had aroused jealousy in other theater companies and it is gossiped with interest, for example, that his wife Armande is nothing other than the daughter he had with Madeleine Béjart.

Edmé Boursault, a friend of the Corneilles, had Le Portrait du peintre ou la Contre-critique de L'École des femmes / The Portrait of the Painter or the Counter-Criticism of The School for Women performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne , followed by the sad Chanson à la coquille, an obscene and ordinary work directed against Madeleine Béjart and Molière himself.

Molière counterattacked by ridiculing his adversaries in The Critique of the Women's School (La Critique de l'École des femmes), performed in August 1663, and at the Impromptu de Versailles (L'Impromptu de Versailles), which was held in October. The war between Molière and his devoted detractors has begun and the King, for the moment, despite his favorable inclination towards the comedian, has not yet intervened. By then he was already concocting his Tartuffe, and in 1663 he performed the first three acts before the king.

In 1664 Molière was appointed responsible for court entertainment, and even King Luis himself and Henriette or Henriette of England sponsor their first son, Luis, who will die a few months later. Molière launched The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island and represented The Princess of Élide / La Princesse d' Élide , in which he mixed text, music and dance and resorted to machinery sophisticated scenic.

That same year Molière finished his Tartuffe / Tartuffe, where he denounced religious hypocrisy; Tartuffe appeared dressed as a priest and with a cilice. The scandal that arose among the blessed was of such a caliber that the king prohibited the work for five years. Despite this, Molière gave some private performances and rewrote the work at least twice to get around the qualms; This piece therefore has an abundant subtext.

On February 15, 1665, his work Don Juan (Dom Juan) was premiered, inspired by El burlador de Sevilla, attributed to Tirso de Molina, through the Festin de Pierre ou Le fils criminel by Nicolas Drouin, called Dorimond (1659), but it only reached fifteen performances, because after the Lenten closure of the theaters the party dévote presses Molière so hard that he himself does not replace the work. In it, the figure of the libertine is criticized, whom Molière knows so well and whom Sganarelle makes his servant say the following:

No one is embarrassed about behave like this: hypocrisy is a fashion. And a vice that is fashionable comes to be like a virtue. The best role that can be played in these times is that of man of good. And prophesying hypocrisy offers admirable advantages. It is an art whose imposture is always respected. And even if it's discovered, no one dares to criticize it. All other vices are exposed to censorship and everyone is free to attack them openly. But hypocrisy is a privileged vice that gags all mouths with its strong hand and enjoys in peace sovereign impunity. The hypocrite, by force of mojigatry, becomes a close union with the men of the devout party who touch with one is to cast them all on top, even those who work in good faith, according to the general opinion. Even those, I say, of whose religious feelings no one can doubt, they are always deceived by others, they fall full in the bonds that the sanctimonious tend to them and blindly support those false ones with their deeds. How many do you think I know that, thanks to this stratagem, they managed to cleverly repair the disorders of their sorcery, they got drunk in the layer of religion and, with such respectful habit, they have preserved the right to be the most perverse in the world? As long as they know their intrigues and are known as they are, they do not stop enjoying the general esteem. With humiliation from time to time, throwing some other sigh of mortification or putting their eyes blank, they find all commissible demise forgiven. So favorable ceiling I intend to find my salvation, putting my business to good care [...] And, if I lived to be discovered, I would see how, without taking a step, all the brothers were interested in me and they were going out to defend me against whoever it was. In short, this is the true way of doing unpunished as I wish: I will become a censor of the actions of others; I will all judge evil and only have good opinion of me. [...] I will harass my enemies: I will accuse them of wickedness [...] That's how you have to take advantage of the weaknesses, that's how a judicious man fits the vices of his time..

It was Dom Juan, after Tartuffe, Molière's most censored and persecuted comedy. The work was not revived until 1677, and then only in an expurgated version and versified by Thomas Corneille. As for its edition, it was necessary to wait until the year 1683 for a bookseller in Amsterdam to publish the full text. Instead of "God" the word "Heaven" and instead of "Church", "temple". However, the company finally receives the support of the king, who grants a pension of 7,000 pounds to his comedians and authorizes it to be called the 'Royal Company'. On December 14, 1665, he premiered a traditional farce, The Medical Love, but Molière fell seriously ill.

In 1666, he premiered two masterpieces, The Misanthrope (Le Misanthrope) and The Beaten Doctor / Le Médecin malgré lui. In The Misanthrope he expresses his bitterness after separating from Armande and introduces a new type of fool, a man of high moral principles who constantly criticizes the weakness and foolishness of others and yet is unable to see the defects of Célimène, the girl with whom he has fallen in love and who embodies that society that he condemns.

Latest works

Statue of Molière, on the corner of the Rue de Richelieu and the Rue Molière in Paris, France.

Tomb of Molière, in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, Paris.

In the years that followed, Molière tried desperately to recover from his tuberculosis, then an almost always fatal disease, and went through periods of recovery and relapse. Apart from the fact that Colbert created a Police Council in 1666 that increased the pressure of censorship in all orders, he also had to deal with a reinforced opposition to his theater on the part of the pious party: the prince de Conti, who allied himself against him, in a posthumous Trait de la comédie / Treatise on Comedy (1666) he accused him of making the theater fall into libertinism; Jean Racine, and the scholar François Hédelin, Abbe D'Aubignac, whom everyone listened to. Molière continued acting irregularly, but he did not stop writing, and in December 1666 he returned to Versailles to premiere his Ballet des Muses and perform Melicerte and The Sicilian, or The Painter Love / Le Sicilien ou l'Amour peintre..

In 1667 he suffered a six-month relapse, but wrote and managed to release the second version of Tartuffe under the title Panulfo or The Impostor; However, the Archbishop of Paris Hardouin de Péréfixe convinces the first president of Parliament to ban the work the day after its premiere. The king cannot prevent him, because he is in the Flanders campaign, and although Molière asks for his intercession, he achieves nothing. In 1668 he premiered two minor works with apparatus: on January 13 and at the Palais Royal, Host / Amphitryon, which has seen 28 performances, and, on July 18 and in Versailles, Georges Dandin . A new masterpiece is The Miser (L'Avare), premiered on September 9 of the same year at the Palais Royal. At last the ban on the third version of Tartuffe was lifted, which premiered on February 5, 1669, in five acts and with a happy ending, and achieved enormous success: forty-four successive performances, quite a mark or record then. False devotion is presented there as the great corrupter of customs. And this is how Tartuffe proclaims it to the married woman he intends to seduce:

I know the art of removing scruples. Indeed, Heaven forbids certain delights; but arrangements can be found with it. (A criminal is speaking.) According to the different needs, there is a science that teaches to relax the rigor of conscience and to correct the evil of acts with the purity of intention. We will instruct you in these secrets; it is enough for now that you let yourselves be guided. Satisfy my desire and do not be afraid. I answer everything and take evil for me [...] Evil resides only in the advertising given to it. The public scandal is the one who offends Heaven, and sinning in silence is like not sinning [...] Your husband is a Juan Lanas (Molière, Tartufo, act IV, scene fifth).

In the prologue to the third edition of Tartuffe, Molière makes us see the struggle he had to maintain to premiere his comedy. If some fathers of the church support comedy, others denigrate theater: "The only conclusion that can be drawn from that divergence of opinions in spirits inspired by the same truth is that both considered comedy differently, and while some contemplated it in its purity, others saw it in its corruption... What it is about is discussing things, not about words... We must never confuse the misuse of art with the purpose of himself... If the end of comedy is to correct the vices of men, I don't see why there should be privileged vices". And at the end he mentions an important anecdote:

At eight days of its prohibition, a work entitled Scaramouche hermit. When the King came out, he said to the great prince of the sea: "I would like to know why people are scandalized with Molière's comedy and say nothing of Molière's. Scaramouche". to which the prince answered: "The cause is that the comedy of Scaramouche He mocks Heaven and religion, which matters very little to those gentlemen, while Molière's mocks them, and this is what they cannot suffer".

Molière's father passed away on the 27th of the same month; On October 6 of the same year, Molière premiered Mr. de Pourceaugnac at the Château de Chambord.

Molière's detractors did not rest. In 1670, the comedy by an illustrious unknown premiered, Le Boulanger de Chalussay, perhaps a pseudonym, intended to defame the private life of Molière and his actors, Élomire Hypocondre, ou Les médecins vengués, where the The playwright's name is easily recognizable in the form of an anagram. But, as the King's power has strengthened, Molière, in partnership with the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, becomes the provider of shows for the Court. The Magnificent Lovers premiered on February 4, 1670 in Saint-Germain and The Gentleman Bourgeois on October 14 in the Guardians' Room on the first floor of Chambord Castle. It is a comedy-ballet with music by Lully, where the rich and naive merchant Monsieur Jourdain is ridiculed, who aspires to be received at court and is swindled by an unscrupulous man who deceives him with false promises, so that the future is ignorant gentleman prepares to be received by taking classes in music, dance, fencing and philosophy; The scene in which Monsieur Jourdain finds out that he is speaking prose without knowing it has become cliché. Then, on May 24, 1671, he premiered Les entrenos de Scapin / Les Fourberies de Scapin . Inconsequential and hasty comedies, such as The Countess of Escarbagnas, and Psyché (written in a hurry in collaboration with Pierre Corneille and Philippe Quinault) prepare The Wise Women , one of the author's best high comedy, premiered in 1672. But the one who was everything for Molière (friend, lover, founding partner rather than resigned mother-in-law) died: Madeleine Béjart, and she also died a few days later. of the birth of their second child.

The imaginary sick of Honoré Daumier

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His last work is The imaginary patient / Le Malade imaginaire , premiered on February 10, 1673 and the truth is that he did not have to force himself to play the main role: he suffered an acute attack of hemoptysis in the course of the fourth representation, on February 17, 1673, and they took him to his home; His wife did not find a priest to give him last rites and he died without denying his profession as an actor, considered immoral by the Church. Under French law at the time, actors were not allowed to be buried on the hallowed ground of a cemetery. However, Molière's widow, Armande, asked the King that her spouse could have access to a normal funeral "at night, and without any pomp or courtship." The king agreed and Molière was buried in the part of the Saint Joseph cemetery reserved for the now or unbaptized children. The following year his wife remarried, and to appease the greed and envy of his heirs, the king founded the Comédie Française or French Comedy on October 21, 1680, an institution that still exists today devoted to representing classical French theater. The presumed grave where the great playwright was buried was found empty in 1792 by the revolutionary patriots, who were also trying to recover the mortal remains of the fabulist La Fontaine.

Generally in theater performances it is said that it is bad luck to wear green in France, since Molière supposedly suffered the attack while in the theater dressed in this color. But this is controversial; Although superstition exists, Molière was then dressed in amaranth, and each country has its own prohibitive color in the theater: in Spain it is yellow, in England blue, and in Italy it is purple.

Influences

Molière was a great reader; his library inventory lists some 180 volumes of history and literature, of which 40 are French, Italian, and Spanish comedies.Molière's plots are often unoriginal, something Shakespeare could also be accused of; he often he takes them from some lesser author. L'Étourdi, for example, is an imitation of L'Inavertito by Niccolò Barbieri (Turin, 1628). Le Dépit amoureux is inspired by Nicolo Secchi, L'Interesse (1581). It has already been discussed how the Dom Juan comes from Tirso de Molina through Le Festin de pierre ou le Fils criminel (1659) by Dorimond, but from the Adelfos borrows some elements from L'École des Maris and its Phormion the structure of Scapin's Fourberies. Dom Garcie de Navarre ou le Prince jaloux is also an adaptation of Le gelosie fortunate del principe Rodrigo by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini, while La Princesse d'Élide It is from a piece by Agustín Moreto. L'École des maris combines a Spanish comedy by Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza with an Italian farce; L'École des femmes contaminates a novel by Paul Scarron (by the way, a great plagiarist of Hispanics) with an Italian farce; the Tartuffe draws above all from Flaminio Scala, Vital d'Audiguier and Antoine Le Métel d'Ouville, as well as, more incidentally, from another Scarron novel, Les Hypocrites, which contaminates with Italian scenari and, according to some, with Pietro Aretino's piece Lo ipocrito. In Les Précieuses ridicules, Molière particularly exploits a work by Charles Sorel on Les Lois de la galanterie, but taking the plot from L'L'Héritier ridicule (1649) by Scarron. For Le Misantrophe, Molière himself admitted having been inspired by the preserved fragments of the homonymous work by Menander, the great author of the new Greek comedy.

Among his more general influences, Plautus' comedies stand out, especially Host, inspired by the Latin author's comedy of the same name, and El avaro, which derives from a character of the Aulularia plautina. He also appears to have misused one of Cyrano de Bergerac's plays, The Pedant Outwitted (Le Pédant Joué), from which he copied a scene near the bottom of the letter.

Molière's theater

Molière had hardly any friends and many enemies. It has been shown that his underlying philosophy comes from Gassendi, as Voltaire already warned. One of his few friends was King Louis XIV's powerful tutor, the skeptical philosopher François de La Mothe Le Vayer, and it is true that there is much carefully concealed Lamothian skepticism and Pyrrhonism in Molière, as a violent (and anonymous) Lettre sur la Comédie de l'Imposteur.

Molière brings comedy of manners and comedy of character to their culmination, although he also used the genres of farce, comedy of intrigue and comedy-ballet; for the latter he worked alone with the musicians Jean-Baptiste Lully and later Marc-Antoine Charpentier. And although his characters are taken from nature and are the result of a careful observation of reality, they are at the same time universal, as Horace recommended; they always have some diminished and exaggerated trait that constitutes the root of their comedy, so that the general theme of their theater is moral and comes down to an attack against all excess: the excessive frankness of The Misanthrope, the inordinate desire to look good in society of The bourgeois gentleman, the immoderate desire to treasure of The miser, the abundant piety and hypocrisy of Tartuffe and, along with this, a defense of moderation and balance that advocated a healthy classicism. He assumes all the Aristotelian units of action, time and place, and also adds style, which is why his theater is considered an extension of classical Greco-Roman comedy. His concept of the comic appears expressly in the Lettre sur la comédie de l'Imposteur, published anonymously in 1667:

To know the comic, it is necessary to know the rational, of which the comic points out absence; and we must see what the rational is... Incongruity is the heart of the comic... And from this it follows that every lie, disguise, deceit, disguise, all that on the outside shows different from reality, any factual contradiction between actions that come from the same source, all this is in comic essence.

But Molière has been globally interpreted in three ways: as a libertine, as a naturalist or as a master of common sense, and it is true that all these perspectives come together in him and it is difficult to judge him without any of them. On the other hand, its classicism makes it adaptable to any ideology, aesthetics or ancient or modern era. And, although Pierre Louÿs tried ingeniously to prove in 1919 that his work was actually written by Pierre Corneille, the arguments of the editor of his Complete Works Georges Forestier and the studies of computational stylistics, with six different methods of analysis, have ruled that only Molière is the author of his works; What's more, Corneille is the author who strays the furthest from his language and style.

Because of the influence exerted on Molière by the Italian farces of the Commedia dell'Arte, his works have an abundant non-verbal subtext, which is why they require highly trained actors who can guarantee an adequate representation.

He uses verse in some works and prose in others, and resorts to all forms of visual, situational, and verbal comedy; of this last type, he uses ambiguity, repetition, asides, the quid pro quo, misunderstandings, the dialogue of the deaf, paradoxical or ironic praise (in the Dom Juan, the valet Sganarelle praises tobacco, while his master praises loving infidelity and hypocrisy), antiphrases and parodies, and manages to harmonize different styles or registers in the The same character playing above all with hyperbole (the main characters are often affected by a mania that leads to the extreme of the grotesque or improbable, giving rise to comedy), but also with repetition and symmetry. It also resorts to amphigouri or bernardina.

And although in his time they reproached him for having resorted to a genre considered low and vulgar as farce, his friend, the classicist Nicolás Boileau, attended its premieres and laughed heartily at them, although he denounced in his L&# 39;Art poétique the disparities of tone and what he judged to be weaknesses in the work of Molière.

The reiterated structure of his comedies focuses on the single failure of a hero, isolated in his imaginative delusion (imaginary illness, greed, devotion, snobbery, etc.), who causes problems within a family and becomes, according to the literary convention, an obstacle to the marriage of lovers; Consequently, another novelty, the character of the character directly determines the plot.

Translations into Spanish and other Spanish languages

The versions that Molière's theater had in Spanish were early; already in 1680 he took to A performance was held at the Real Sitio del Retiro before Carlos II and María Luisa de Orleáns, in which, together with the comedy by Pedro Calderón de la Barca Fate and currency of Leonido and Marfisa, they performed the farce The Gentleman Farmer, copied from Le Bourgeois gentilhomme by Molière.

Already in the 18th century there were multiple translations and adaptations; to mention just a few, those of Manuel de Iparraguirre (El avariento and El enfermo imaginario, 1753), Ramón de la Cruz (Las preciosas ridiculas, among nine other pieces), Juan José López de Sedano (El misántropo, 1778) and Cándido María Trigueros (Juan de Buen Alma, or El prudido / Tartufo, 1768). Leandro Fernández de Moratín and José Marchena were the most regulars. The first made versions of The School for Husbands (1808) and The Beaten Doctor (1814), and published some Selected Works of Moliére in French and in Spanish, translated by D. Leandro de Moratin, and continued by Estanislao de Cosca Vayo (Madrid: Imprenta de Repullés, 1834), and the latter tried to translate all his theater, although only his free translations have come down to us. The Hypocrite (Tartuffe, 1811) and The School for Women (1812).

In the XIX century, translations of El avaro by Dámaso de Isusquiza (Madrid, 1800) and Juan de Dios Gil de Lara (Segovia, 1820). More recently, in 1897 a young Jacinto Benavente dared to stage the first Spanish version of Dom Juan at the Teatro de Princesa in Madrid. Julio Gómez de la Serna (1895-1983), Ramón's brother, translated his Complete Works (Madrid: Aguilar, 1945; reprinted in 1951, 1957, 1961, 1966, 1973, 1987 and 1991) with a preliminary study and a census of characters, although His version has been discussed in modern times, and Francisco Javier Hernández translated Three comedies (The school for husbands, The school for women, Tartufo or El hipócrita) , Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1977, for no to speak of the innumerable individual translations, among which it is worth mentioning those by Carlos Princivalle, the one by Enrique Llobet that served as the basis for the Tartuffe edited by Adolfo Marsillach in 1970 and those by Mauro Armiño, José Escué, Carlos R. Dampierre, Carlos Ortega, Luis Martínez de Merlo and Encarnación García Fernández, among many others.

Translations into Catalan were also very early, beginning in the XVIII century with those of the enlightened and polyglot Pedro Ramis. Alfons Maseras translated practically his complete works for the Barcino publishing house in eight volumes published between 1930 and 1936.

The first translation of Molière into Galician was that of Le médecin malgré lui, made by the priest and writer Xosé Manuel Carballo Ferreiro in the 1960s and published in the collection O Moucho from Ediciones Castrelos. In 1986 Manuel Guede and Eduardo Alonso Rodríguez translated Le malade imaginaire, which has been published three times since then. Henrique Harguindey translated Le Bourgeois gentilhomme in 2007 and Tartuffe in 2010.

His works

• The atolling or the setbacks (L'Étourdi ou les Contretemps1655).
• The doctor in love (Le Docteur amoureux1656) — lost farce that was represented before Louis XIV.
• The beautiful ridiculous (Les précieuses ridicules1659).
• Sganarelle(1660).
• Don García de Navarra (Dom Garcie de Navarre), 1661).
• The school of husbands (L'école des maris, 1661).
• The School of Women (L'École des femmes1662).
• The Critique of Women’s School (La critique de l'école des femmes1663).
• Forced marriage (Le Mariage Forcé1664).
• The Princess of Elide (The Princesse d’Elide1664).
• Don Juan (Dom Juan, 1665).
• The Misanthropist or The lover (Le Misanthrope ou l'Atrabilaire amoureux1666).
• The doctor sticks (Le Médecin malgré lui1666).
• Georges Dandin (1668).
• The avaro (L'Avare1668).
• Host (Amphitryon1668).
• Tartufo (Tartuffe ou l'imposteur1669).
• The Lord of Pourceaugnac (Monsieur de Pourceaugnac1669).
• The Gentile bourgeois man (Le Bourgeois gentilhomme1670).
• The entanglements of Scapin (Les Fourberies de Scapin, 1671).
• The Countess of Escarbañás (The comtesse d'Escarbagnas, 1671).
• The wise women (Les Femmes savantes, 1672).
• The imaginary sick (Le Malade imaginaire1673).