SOURCE: "Molière's Reactionary Theater," in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, Vol. 13, 1986, pp. 115-22.

Knutson is an American educator and critic whose writings on French literature include Molière: An Archetypal Approach (1976). In the following essay, he examines Molière's portrayal of social hierarchy and asserts that his theater may be considered "reactionary."

Tragedy conveys its political message through the prism of exemplary history and its royal protagonists. The comic dramatist usually mirrors the affairs of lesser mortals, normally in their own time setting. To grasp the political significance of comedy, then, we must perforce look at the social fabric which it purports to replicate. We are thus led to social history and the uses that a literary scholar—in this case the Molière specialist—can make of it.

Our view of seventeenth-century social history in France has changed dramatically...