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.
Second, after choosing the type of character, Molière would create certain situations which would illustrate the absurdities of this type. He exposes the character to situations which demonstrate the character's deviation from the normal, socially accepted behavior. By this method, the audience soon becomes aware of both the nature of the type and the nature of his incongruity with society. One of the most apparent uses of this technique would be in Tartuffe or The Bourgeois Gentleman. In both plays, here is a series of scenes in which the actions of the main character are seen to be totally absurd and totally in opposition to the general accepted behavior of the society at large.
These situations must continue until the audience is able to completely evaluate both the type arid his deviations from the norm. On this point, there is critical disagreement as to how successfully Molière accomplishes his aim. For example, in The Misanthrope, the full extent of Alceste's absurdity is not completely revealed until the final and closing scenes. However in The Bourgeois Gentleman, the absurdity of the type is fully revealed by the midpoint of the play, and it is questionable whether the last part of the play can be justified as necessary in terms of this theory.
Fourth, in continuation of the above point, the play should end when the characters have been fully exposed and we can sufficiently evaluate their absurdities. In a play like Tartuffe, however, Molière, for varied reasons, continues the play for an entire act longer than is often thought necessary. The fifth act of Tartuffe contributes little or nothing to the total view of the play and is a blatant piece of flattery to the king.
Last, since Molière's aim was to reveal characters in exemplary situations and expose their absurdities, he never included any background on the characters. All we know of the person consists of those basic traits seen operating at the moment on the stage. Molière's purpose, then, was to have characters who exemplify certain human traits and no additional background material is necessary. For example, in Misanthrope, we know that there is an impending lawsuit which later in the play is decided against Alceste, but we are never given any clear notion of what the suit is all about.
