This section contains 6,785 words (approx. 23 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |
SOURCE: "Moral Instruction and Comedy," in The Theatre and Its Critics in Seventeenth-Century France, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980, pp. 131–50.
In the following excerpt, Phillips examines the debate between the religious moralists and the dramatic theorists concerning the morality of seventeenth-century comic drama.
Against the religious moralists' conception of drama as morally and socially harmful the dramatic theorists held that drama fulfilled a didactic function and that man was led thereby to moral improvement. Not surprisingly, the moralists were highly sceptical of this claim. This was particularly so in the case of comedy where, according to dramatic theorists, the source of instruction lies in the correction of vice by its exposure to public ridicule. The moralists utterly reject comedy with its particular concern for ridicule and laughter as a means of moral improvement, especially when they consider Le Tartuffe which, in its portrayal of the hypocrite, is alleged to...
This section contains 6,785 words (approx. 23 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |