Customer Reviews

The Bourgeois Gentleman (Plays for Performance Series)

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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".