Molière was a master of the neoclassical comedy. He possessed a wide knowledge of the society in which he lived, and had long training in the theater before he ever began writing. As an actor, he knew the various technical difficulties connected with acting and he understood all the various problems connected with staging a play. His sense of theater was unsurpassed.
As a peak representative of neoclassical comedy, Molière apparently accepted the importance of society and emphasized throughout his plays a concern for man in the social order of things. He was also a shrewd observer of the varying manners of his age and was able to present his plays with an intellectual
detachment and sanity which has preserved the plays through the centuries. To use terms associated with the period, Molière possessed that "sweet reasonableness" and "critical serenity" which allowed him to view mankind with enough detachment to see both the comic foibles inherent in the individual and the flaws also inherent in the society in which man must function.
Molière's technique, therefore, grows out of those qualities emphasized for all neoclassical comedy. First, his characters were chosen to represent types of people or some generalized aspect of human nature. Thus, in his plays we have the "misanthrope" or the man who despises people, the "religious hypocrite" in Tartuffe or the new enthusiastic convert in the same play, the miser as a type, or the middle-class bourgeois who has pretensions to being a gentleman.
