Molière's beloved comedy features a rising member of the middle class who lusts for social status and higher learning. The strength of the play lies in its rich comic invention and its sure delineation of character. Its underlying themes of social striving, financial greed, and love's ingenuity still resonate. Bernard Sahlins's new adaptation is wonderfully playable.
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Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
The Plays for Performance series is edited by Nicholas Rudall, former artistic director of the Court Theatre at the University of Chicago where he is professor of classics, and Bernard Sahlins, founder and director of the Second City. They both live in Chicago, Illinois.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One of Moliere's Most Popular Plays - Delightful Comedy,
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This review is from: The Bourgeois Gentleman (Dover Thrift Editions) (Paperback)
In seventeenth century class-conscious France a tradesman, even one that had achieved financial success, was not considered a gentleman. The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670), sometimes titled The Would-Be Gentleman, is a comedic tale of a wealthy tradesman, Monsieur Jourdain, that aspires to be a gentleman. His motivation is to gain favor with a beautiful marchioness; his efforts are complicated by the fact that he is already married.
Jourdain hires tutors for singing, dancing, fencing, and even philosophy and also engages a private tailor to dress him fashionably. They all have great fun with the vain, gullible Jourdain, easily persuading him to behave in an outrageously, ridiculous manner. The fast moving plot and snappy dialogue make good reading, but I strongly suspect that The Bourgeois Gentleman is much better in performance than in print. The absurd, hilarious situations must have the audience continuously laughing. The Bourgeois Gentleman is available in an inexpensive Dover Thrift Edition. Also, virtually all collections of Moliere's plays include this delightful comedy. An Unexpected Literary Connection: The Bourgeois Gentleman was still quite popular nearly two hundred years later when Alexander Dumas was writing his swashbuckling adventure stories. Humorously, Dumas utilized Moliere as a minor character in an early chapter of The Man in the Iron Mask. A farcical situation, one in which Moliere is mistaken to be an assistant to King Louis XIV's tailor, is prefaced by Dumas with the comment "Where Probably Moliere Formed His First Idea of The Bourgeois Gentilhomme".
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