SOURCE: "Molière's Comic Vision," in Molière: A Playwright and His Audience, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 244-57.

Howarth is an English educator and critic whose works on French literature include Life and Letters in France: The Seventeenth Century (1965), and Sublime and Grotesque: A Study of French Romantic Drama (1975). In the following essay, he discusses Molière 's view of human nature, the problems of contemporary production of Molière 's plays, and the moral function of Molière 's drama. Howarth concludes that "the cathartic function" of the Molière 's comedies was "to preserve a healthy view of the relationship between the individual and society."

Before Molière's day, as we have seen, French comedy was lacking anything that could be called 'comic vision'. The world of the farces, and of Scarron's Jodelet plays, was a world of two-dimensional theatrical characters, a world of fantasy whose...