Molière

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris early in 1622. Only his baptism is on record, on 15 January, at Saint-Eustache. The son of an upholsterer to the King, he studied at the Collège de Clermont and then law, and in 1643 gave up his father's royal post to devote himself to the theatre.

He began by acting, not writing. His first comedy, The Blunderer (L'Étourdi), opened in Lyon in the mid-1650s, after years of touring the provinces; the Bibliothèque nationale de France traces it to an Italian play, L'inavertito by the actor Beltrame. His first printed book came later still: The Pretentious Young Ladies came off the press on 29 January 1660, when Molière was 38.

In June 1643 he founded the Illustre-Théâtre with Madeleine Béjart and eight other actors, and it was then that he took the name Molière. The company drew small audiences and ran into debt. In August 1645, aged 23, he spent a few days in prison for debt and got out only because his father paid what he owed. He left Paris and spent twelve years on the road with Charles Dufresne's company, under the protection of noblemen who could withdraw it: in 1657 the Prince de Conti forbade the troupe to bear his name.

Success did not end the obstacles. On 11 October 1660 the Petit-Bourbon theatre was demolished without the actors being told. Tartuffe, first performed at Versailles on 12 May 1664, was immediately banned from both stage and print. A revised version, The Impostor, was played once, on 5 August 1667, and banned the next day. Molière sent three petitions to the King, and the ban was lifted only in 1669, when he was 47.

On 24 October 1658 the company played before Louis XIV at the Louvre. It then settled at the Petit-Bourbon, which it shared with the Italian players: it performed there on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and paid them 1,500 livres. On 18 November 1659 it opened The Pretentious Young Ladies. Molière was 37, and it was his first great success.

The success drew a bookseller, Jean Ribou, who on 12 January 1660 obtained a licence to print the play without its author's consent, probably from a stolen copy. The bookseller Guillaume de Luyne got his own licence on 19 January and split the printing between three workshops to save time: the play came out on 29 January, with a preface in which Molière complained that he was being printed against his will. In 1663 the King granted him a pension as a "bel esprit et excellent poète comique", a fine wit and an excellent comic poet.

Molière wrote for a company in which he was at once author, actor, director and manager. According to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, he shaped his parts to the talents of his actors: René du Parc even appears in the plays under his stage name, Gros-René. The troupe shared hardships and profits alike.

Most of his comedies were performed at court at the King's request, on dates that would not move. For the fête the finance minister Fouquet gave at Vaux-le-Vicomte on 17 August 1661, he wrote The Bores, his first comedy-ballet. In the note to the printed play he says it was planned, written, learned and performed in a fortnight, and that there was no time to put in all the bores he knew. He went on to write comedy-ballets with the composer Lully, among them The Bourgeois Gentleman in 1670, then with Marc-Antoine Charpentier for The Imaginary Invalid.

Nothing of this work survives in his hand: no manuscript of a play, no letter, only his signatures at the foot of notarial deeds.

Molière lost his mother in 1632, when he was ten. On 20 February 1662 he married Armande Béjart. In 1665 his company became the King's Troupe at the Palais-Royal, with a pension of 6,000 livres. In 1672 Madeleine Béjart died, and Molière fell out for good with Lully, to whom the King had granted a monopoly on music.

On 17 February 1673 he played the title role of The Imaginary Invalid for the fourth time, was taken ill on stage and died that evening at home on the rue de Richelieu, aged 51. The priest of Saint-Eustache refused him a religious burial; after Louis XIV intervened, he was buried in the Saint-Joseph cemetery on 21 February. The Comédie-Française, founded in 1680, inherited the way his company was organised.