12 | 2023
Scènes de médecine chez Molière : Fortune et modèles européens
The topics of disease and medicine offer a singular take on the works of Molière, through which one may assess their possible topicality and consider whether the French playwright may help us think about our present. Between 1660 and 1673, Molière wrote four comedies (Le Médecin volant, or The Flying Doctor; L’Amour médecin, or Love is the Doctor; Le Médecin malgré lui, or The Doctor in Spite of Himself; and Le Malade imaginaire, or The Imaginary Invalid) in which medicine is a structuring motif, providing characters and dramatic action as well as topical scenes. Alongside those four ‘medical comedies’, two other plays include medical sequences of varying importance, Le Festin de Pierre, or The Stone Banquet (later known as Dom Juan) and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. Whether ballet-comedies or plays that are exclusively spoken, or whether one-act or three-act plays, those comedies constitute a whole and indeed a perfectly recognisable cycle, the coherence and unity of which rest on thematic and dramatic reasons. They open up a debate on contemporary conceptions of medicine, and offer their audiences comedic configurations as well as types of scenes and characters that originate in Spanish and Italian drama and which adaptors and imitators of Molière in France, Great Britain, and throughout Europe turned to for inspiration or to emancipate themselves.
It therefore appears relevant to try and assess the extent to which Molière was indebted to earlier theatrical traditions for his medical scenes as well as the influence he exerted after his death on medical plays or plays staging doctors and patients in France and, more widely, Europe. It also seems worth probing the distinctiveness of what Molière has to say about medicine and disease in comparison with his contemporaries, as well as the reasons behind the proliferation in France and throughout Europe of plays with medical themes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the extent to which they offer insights into contemporary medical debates and medicine.
The originality of this volume lies both in the European dimension of this investigation and in the scale of analysis chosen by several contributions in their study of medical plays, namely the scene, more specifically what may be defined as a medical scene. Another feature of this volume is its focus on Molière as a mediator between pre-existing theatrical traditions and a European corpus which emerged after his death right up to the end of the eighteenth century.
This volume grew out of exchanges between academics and performers, which took place in Pézenas and Montpellier from 26–28 May 2022, during the festival-conference ‘Scènes de médecine chez Molière. Fortune et modèles européens’ (‘Medical scenes in Molière: Afterlives and European models’).
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Introduction [Full text]
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1. Un paysage médical en mutation
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Le Paysage médical au temps de Molière [Full text]
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Conçu par Béla Czuppon et Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore pour la compagnie Perles de verre/La baignoire, dirigée par Béla Czuppon
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Ouvrages et instruments sélectionnés et réunis par Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore et Pascaline Todeschini
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2. Les scènes médicales dans le théâtre européen avant Molière
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3. La comédie médicale chez Molière et ses contemporains
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L’aventure éditoriale du Malade imaginaire [Full text]
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Table ronde « Molière historiquement informé : Le Malade imaginaire et L’École des femmes » animée par Bénédicte Louvat, avec Mickaël Bouffard, Pierre-Alain Clerc et Georges Forestier
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L’École des Femmes par le Théâtre à la Source [Full text]
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4. L’héritage moliéresque dans le théâtre médical européen
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Le potentiel réparateur de la scène de médecine dans la comédie de la Restauration anglaise
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