A Comedic Practicum: Molière and Terence Revisited

Abstract

Abstract Numerous authors and critics in the seventeenth century compared Molière with Terence, the Roman playwright. However, a close examination of the two authors shows that this comparison is difficult to sustain from the perspective of style or source material. There appears to be a much closer connection in the way that the two playwrights described their role as authors, their approach to compositional rules, and their deliberate use of controversy to solicit interest in their plays. By examining Terence's prologues and Molière's published prefaces, this study argues that Molière did indeed read and imitate Terence, but that Molière's understanding of Terence's work avoided the narrow tangential reading imposed upon the Roman playwright by Molière's contemporaries, using Terence instead as a guide to negotiating classical comedy's paradoxical imperative: to make extensive use of what has already been written in order to celebrate the primacy of present over past. What critics such as Boileau saw as betraying the classical tradition — the combining of farce and high-brow comedy; the disregard for rules in favour of the audience's pleasure; the uninhibited use of source material — actually places Molière in the tradition of classical authorship as Terence defines and describes it.