Joseph Harris
At the end of Molière’s masterpiece Le Misanthrope (1666), the irascible anti-hero Alceste storms off the stage, resolved to spend the rest of his life in a remote wilderness rather than to spend another moment mixing with corrupt Parisian society. Molière’s comedy is thus, in an important sense, unfinished, and various writers over the centuries, from Fabre d’Églantine in the eighteenth century to David Ives in the twenty-first, have written sequels – works that aim simultaneously to exploit the popularity of the original play, to resolve its narrative, and to lay to rest some of its more troubling implications about society. This volume brings together two of the first sequels. As their titles imply, both Jean-François Marmontel’s ‘moral tale’ Le Misanthrope corrigé (1765) and its dramatic adaptation, Charles-Albert Demoustier’s three-act verse comedy Alceste à la campagne, ou le Misanthrope corrigé (c.1790), follow the gradual rehabilitation of Molière’s bad-tempered misanthrope. This critical edition traces the two plays’ complex relationships both to each other and to Molière’s original comedy. It situates them both in the context of Molière reception in the Enlightenment, and particularly in relation to Marmontel’s debates with Jean-Jacques Rousseau about the ethics and aesthetics of Molière’s original play.
