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Abstract
No literary study of Moliere's comedies-ballets has appeared since 1914. Scholarly attention paid to these plays, using elements of dance and music as well as of literature, contributes to a new view of the Moliere canon.
The Preface is an analysis of the preface to Moliere's first comedy-ballet, Les Facheux, where he expresses interest in the genre he created and awareness of its entertainment potential.
Part One contains chapters on areas important for our analysis of the comedy-ballets: (1) Criticism: Review of the limited critical attention paid to these plays shows that most has treated certain thematic elements of the comedy, ignoring the ballet, while omitting many comedy-ballets. (2) Genre: Comedy, ballet, music and decor (including machines, and the garden as theatrical space) are delin- eated in a context of the comedy-ballet as a genre; 'comedy' and 'ballet' are defined and discussed. (3) Moliere, Lully, Louis XIV: Special attention is given to the rapport between these three and to Lully's music monopoly, that favored expansion of opera while virtually ending performances of comedy-ballets.
Part Two is an analysis of the fourteen comedy-ballets, with close attention being paid to several aspects: (1) Actuality abounds; it both situates the comedy-ballet in a clearly-defined historical context and permits Moliere to draw upon his milieu for dramatic material. (2) Moliere consistently adopts and adapts a great variety of come- dies: farce, comedies of manners and character, romantic comedies, pastorales and tragedy. (3) Seeing the genre as a means of commu- nication on several levels--between elements of the comedy-ballet, characters on stage, himself and audiences--Moliere creates strik- ingly new types of plays where, most significantly, main characters are left out of information disseminated to all except them.
In the Conclusion, we see that hierarchy in literary genres has affected the posterity of the comedy-ballets, and although it also contributed to decline in performances of comedy-ballets, the idea of providing 'total' entertainment survived and took many forms over the centuries: opera, vaudeville, opera-comique, ballad opera, Singspiel, operetta, musical comedy, etc., in genres where interplay of elements--their balance, continuity and simultaneity--exists alongside the interplay of thematic elements.
Comedy-ballets deserve to be performed integrally, because with- out the 'ballet' elements, the reader-spectator confronts a comedy that can be vastly different from the work Moliere originally intended.
