SOURCE: "Illusion and Reality: A New Resolution of an Old Paradox," in Molière and the Commonwealth of Letters: Patrimony and Posterity, Roger Johnson, Jr., Editha S. Neumann, Guy T. Trail, eds., University Press of Mississippi, 1975, pp. 521-26.

Mould is an American educator and critic who specializes in seventeenth-century French theater. In the following essay, he examines Molière 's treatment of the paradoxical relationship between illusion and reality in his plays.

Molière is the first French dramatist to use the paradox of illusion and reality to express a sophisticated world view. His work transformed a dramatic device into a powerful statement of belief in man's ability to create his own universe. The distinction between illusion and reality forms the basis of theatrical experience, implicit in all drama, and explicit at certain moments in dramatic history. The earliest Greek plays used masks and other visible exaggerations partially...