SOURCE: “Reading Molière in the Theatre: Mise en Scène and the Classic Text,” in Rereading Molière: Mise en Scène from Antoine to Vitez, University of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 1-23.

In this excerpt, Carmody develops a methodology for interpreting Molière's works through the lens of twentieth-century stagings. Carmody's interest is in how these stagings address issues of historical distance and Molière's status as a classic author.

Since the 1949 publication of Will Moore's seminal book, Molière: A New Criticism, English-speaking critics of Molière have accepted the premise that Molière's texts should be interpreted in the context of the theater. In France, René Bray's 1954 book, Molière: homme de théâtre, exerted a similar kind of influence.¹ Although Moore and Bray were pursuing very different, even fundamentally opposite, intellectual agendas, they agreed that the theatrical aspects of the plays had been far...