School for Husbands and the Imaginary Cuckold, or Sganarelle Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  The School for Husbands

  Act One

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Act Two

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Scene 7

  Scene 8

  Scene 9

  Scene 10

  Act Three

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Scene 7

  Scene 8

  Scene 9

  The Imaginary Cuckold, or Sganarelle

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Scene 7

  Scene 8

  Scene 9

  Scene 10

  Scene 11

  Scene 12

  Scene 13

  Scene 14

  Scene 15

  Scene 16

  Scene 17

  Scene 18

  Scene 19

  Scene 20

  Scene 21

  Scene 22

  Scene 23

  Scene 24

  Copyright Page

  For Brian Bedford

  Foreword

  By John Simon

  Literary trends come and go, and yesterday’s favorite may be forgotten tomorrow. But most nations have one supreme author—poet, playwright or novelist—who is the fountainhead of their literature. For England, it is Shakespeare; for Germany, Goethe; for Italy, Dante.

  For France, this role is shared by two superstars: the great tragedian Racine, and the great comedian Molière. Racine stands for purity, a classically restrained vocabulary of great musicality; Molière, whose motto was, “I gather my property where I find it,” offers profusion of motley mirth.

  Most of Molière’s greatest dramatic achievements are in rhymed verse, in the traditional French alexandrine, a rhymed, regular, twelve-syllable line. English verse drama, unlike French, is in an accented language and traditionally espouses the five-beat pentameter line of slightly varied length. It avoids being as regimented as the unaccentual French, lest the monotonously placed drumbeats produce doggerel. The wonder of it is that Wilbur’s translations attain all the lightly tripping elegance of the originals.

  It should be noted that Wilbur is one of our finest poets, but also one of the best—perhaps the best—verse translators into English. As a poet, he has won all possible prizes, but he deserves as many as translator, not only of the verse plays of Molière and Racine, but also of lyrics from various languages. The translations contained in this volume—The School for Husbands and The Imaginary Cuckold, or Sganarelle—should provide ample proof.

  Consider, for example, Wilbur ’s masterly use of enjambment—run-on lines taboo in the strictly end-stopped French—to excellent effect. Take this enjambed couplet, “My name’s no longer Sganarelle, and folk /Will dub me Mister Staghorn, for a joke.” The enjambment both slightly downplays the rhyme and creates a certain suspense: Just what will folk do? It has been argued, that there is some loss of “darkness” in the translations, to which Wilbur replies, in his collection of prose pieces The Catbird’s Song, “English rhyming is more emphatic than French rhyming, so that a translation into English couplets will more often have the whip-crack sound of joke or epigram than the original did.”

  That is a consequence of an accentual language, but, in my view, neither decreases nor increases whatever is meant by “darkness.” What is true and important about the couplets in both French and English is that they add musicality while also acting as a mnemonic aid by making consecutive lines click satisfyingly and memorably into place. They also challenge the actor to the bravura feat of neither emphasizing nor wholly losing the rhyme—or, otherwise put, to reconcile naturalness and artifice.

  There exists a centuries-old toy the French call bilboquet and we call cup and ball. A wooden ball is attached by a fairly extensive string to a long-handled wooden cup; when the ball is propelled into the air, it must be caught by the cup into which it snugly fits. So, too, Wilbur ’s couplets, in which there are no awkward inversions, omissions, flab or obscurities.You might say they snap to.

  Some examples from Cuckold. Sganarelle’s wife, of her husband: “He saves his hugs for other women, the swine, / And feeds their appetites while starving mine.” And he, jealously, to her: “Why, when your mate’s well favored, spry and dapper, / Were you attracted to this whippersnapper?” The maid, to her mistress, Célie, as they look at the locket picture of her would-be lover, Lélie: “He has a faithful lover ’s face, that’s true, / And you’re quite right to love him as you do.”

  Note the monosyllabic, so-called masculine swine-mine rhyme, and the feminine dapper-whippersnapper rhyme handled with equal easefulness, with the utterance perfectly fitted to the characters and situations—everyday language suited to bourgeois speakers and their savvy servants. How aptly the rhymes fall where they do—like the ball into the bilboquet—allowing you to subliminally sense the rhyming without dwelling on it consciously, and so impede the smooth flow of the dialogue.

  Now let us take stock of Molière’s artful construction of the farce in Cuckold, while noting how that entire play, like much of Husbands, revolves around cuckoldry, whether real or imagined. Cuckoldry is a principal topic of the Italian commedia dell’arte, the traditional clown shows that so much of contemporaneous French farce and early Molière imitated.

  Why, we may ask, is this subject all over romance-language theater, whereas, of all Shakespeare’s plays, featured only in Othello and less prominently in Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale? Because in Latin countries, at least in prefeminist times, though a husband was allowed a mistress, absolute faithfulness of the wife was a must. Consequently, the metaphoric horns of the husband, real or merely suspected, become a prime subject of both comedy and tragedy, whether as laughing matter or as cause of bloodshed.

  A farce such as Cuckold depends entirely on plot and language: The characters are as stock as can be: The typical older, bamboozled husband; the typical young lover and married or unmarried—but closely guarded or promised to another—beloved; the typical blustering and draconian father; the typical cunning or rascally servants; and, of course, misunderstandings galore on the way to a glibly contrived happy ending.

  But look how especially intricate the imbroglio is in Cuckold, thanks to nothing much more than Célie’s locket found by the wife of the jealous Sganarelle, a little courtesy of his to the fainting Célie, and the wife’s Samaritan kindness to the crushed Lélie, who mistakenly assumes Célie to have married Sganarelle. There is a kind of geometry to this that a mathematician could diagram, and it takes a maid’s arbitrary common sense and a potential rival’s clandestine previous marriage for the facile disentangling of knots.

  What delights is the way one misapprehension dovetails into another, and also the vengeance-bent Sganarelle’s cowardly tergiversations couched in soliloquy worthy of some tragic hero. Further, the comical quarrels between Sganarelle and wife, and between Lélie and Célie, whose very rhyming names contribute to the comic absurdity.

  There is, clearly, no allowance for the characters to have a certain density beyond serving as instruments of the plot. In The S
chool for Husbands some greater individualization appears, though still a long way short of that in the later masterpieces.

  Between this 1660 farce and the 1661 comedy, the difference does not affect plot. The story is still arrantly contrived. A dying man bequeathed his little daughters to a pair of brothers, his friends, for rearing and, presumably, eventual marrying. Léonor was given to Ariste, now sixtyish; Isabelle to Sganarelle, now forty. Isabelle, kept on a leash by despotic Sganarelle, has fallen in love with young Valère, who has been trailing her and has elicited an exchange of amorous glances. Léonor, whom the wise Ariste brought up tolerantly, is devoted to him. There is thus a sense of how a liberal character begets affection, while a domineering one elicits rebellion.

  Here an autobiographical element enters. In the prime French edition of Molière’s oeuvre, the two volumes in the Pléiade series, the editor, Maurice Rat, gives a detailed account of a major controversy that seems to have no resolution.

  The beautiful redheaded leading lady of Molière’s company, Madeleine Béjart, besides having some aristocratic sugar-daddies also indulged in more fleeting affairs, one of them with Molière himself. Because some key documents are rather suspiciously missing, it is to this day debated whether the eighteen-or nineteen-year-old Armande Béjart, likewise an actress in the company, was Madeleine’s younger sister or illegitimate daughter. When the forty-year-old playwright married her in 1662, his numerous envious enemies rumored that he was in fact her father—given Madeleine’s lifestyle, not impossible.

  In any case, the marriage was a troubled one, what with Armande, too, being an innocent or not-so-innocent flirt (like Célimène in The Misanthrope, modeled on and acted by her), and the spousal quarrels and frequent separations.

  It seems to me more than likely that by the year of writing The School for Husbands, and thus less than a year before their marriage, Molière was already doting on the pert Armande, and worriedly contemplating marrying her. This would then translate into the forty-year-old Sganarelle’s jealousy of Isabelle, just as Ariste’s good treatment of Léonor, played by Armande, would have been a preemptive strategy in the hope that the character’s decency would rub off on the interpreter.

  The success of The Imaginary Cuckold, or Sganarelle was considerable, both in the city and, later, at court. With Molière, dressed in red from top to toe as Sganarelle, it achieved altogether 122 performances, not bad for its time. It also marked the first appearance of the character Sganarelle, whom Molière resuscitated in four more plays in somewhat different guises, but always in some manner louche. However grotesque, though, he remains, as has been duly observed, ever human enough.

  Curiously, Rat writes that “one must concede that [Molière’s] principal merit is not as a versifier, and that all too often he manages rhyme only with the aid of fillers or, at the very least, by small, rather annoying deviations.” And Wilbur corroborates, “He wasn’t really a poet outside of the plays, and inside the poetic plays he’s a very prosaic poet in many respects.”

  I myself am not bothered by any of this, either in the French originals or in Wilbur ’s masterly translations. To the degree that the problem exists, it contributes to the earthy realism of the plays. But let me quote here the opinions of four major men of letters on Molière.

  Paul Valéry—master poet, dramatist, philosopher and critic—wrote: “Molière has largely contributed to basing the French theater on cuckoldry and low elements; by genius, he sanctioned ignoble farces; he gave, through several masterpieces, an authority one may marvel at to the most commonplace things. He set the laughers, which is to say the average, against the exceptional—or, rather, he situated himself among this average.” That is the elitist view.

  Now for Ferdinand Brunetière, one of the most influential nineteeth-century literary historians and critics: “Molière is of the family of Rabelais and Voltaire, like them a free spirit, independent in mood, pagan like them, if you will, and like them adherent of the cult of nature and humanity. [His targets] are all those of whom it may be said that their ridiculousness or odiousness consists essentially of cosmeticizing, disguising, masking or denaturing nature.” That is the practicing critic’s view.

  Next, here is Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the great Austrian poet, playwright, librettist and essayist, who found Molière “capable of producing a discourse flexible and fiery enough to switch around the earth and the heavens; to think up figures and put speeches in their mouths issuing as naturally from them as the meow from a cat; with a wit that tickled the midriff while at the same time making the heart beat faster or slower, and checking in higher up at the brow to awaken human understanding.” This is the enthusiast’s view.

  Finally, the words of Sacha Guitry, a jewel of the twentieth-century French theater as writer, director and performer: “He aimed at making people think without letting them know that he was doing so.” The view of the practical man of the theater, well aware of the public’s unease with ideas.

  It is to be hoped that the reader will not stop at these early works, fun as they are, but pursue his exploration of Molière to a number of his remarkable further plays, culminating in two of the world theater’s highest peaks: Tartuffe and The Misanthrope. And this, if not in the French, then in Richard Wilbur’s translations, which are, in that useful German word lacking in our language, kongenial—meaning not, as in English, congenial, but something bigger: equal in genius.

  New York

  April 2009

  The School for Husbands

  Introduction

  Molière was devotedly familiar, all his life, with the commedia dell’arte, that form of Italian popular comedy in which stock characters like Pantalone (an amorous old miser) and Arlecchino (a foolish servant) improvised their scenes within skeletal plot outlines or “scenarios.” During his thirteen years of touring in the provinces, Molière without question saw and learned from those commedia troupes which, in the seventeenth century, traveled to all of the centers of Europe; and his biographer Grimarest says that the company which he brought to Paris in 1658 was “trained to extemporize short comic pieces in the manner of the Italian actors.” When, in that year, he pleased the court with his farce Le Docteur amoureux, and secured the patronage of the king’s brother, his Troupe de Monsieur was given the use, for half of each week, of the Salle du Petit-Bourbon, sharing that theater with a resident Italian company headed by the great commedia actor Tiberio Fiorelli. Contemporary accounts tell us that it was a happy association, and that Molière never missed one of Fiorelli’s performances.

  An admiring indebtedness to Italian comedy, outweighing all other influences, can be seen throughout Molière’s plays and entertainments, but seems to me particularly visible in his early success The School for Husbands (1661). The single setting of the play is that public square, with its clustered houses or “mansions,” which was the traditional backdrop of commedia performances. The action recalls the commonest of commedia plots, in which the innamorati or young lovers, balked by their elders and aided by clever servants, manage to outwit their oppressors and marry. As for the characters, Sganarelle is one of Molière’s quirky Pantalones, and Lisette and Ergaste are French cousins of those zanni who, in the Italian comedy, represented impudent servants with a taste for intrigue.

  The School for Husbands, however, is a firmly constructed, fully written play in the high mode of verse comedy. Nothing is left to improvisation. Such a farcical bit as Valère and Ergaste’s accosting of the oblivious Sganarelle (Act One, Scene 3), which in commedia would give the actors all sorts of inventive latitude, is here wholly worded and choreographed by the dialogue and stage directions. The chief persons of the play, though behind them loom certain stock figures, are variously individuated by Molière’s art and endowed with a measure of complexity. In the first act of Husbands, we meet two middle-aged brothers, Sganarelle and Ariste, who have promised a dying friend to rear, and perhaps ultimately to marry, his two orphaned daughters. Ariste, an easygoing man of fifty-nine o
r so, has treated his spirited ward Léonor in a considerate and indulgent fashion, thus gaining her grateful affection. Sganarelle, Ariste’s junior by twenty years, is a premature fuddy-duddy who has raised his charge Isabelle with a domineering strictness, and it will of course be the business of the play to rescue her from his tyranny and unite her with her romantic young neighbor Valère. Certain peculiarities of Sganarelle (whose central part was originally played by Molière himself) are conveyed in the play’s early scenes: His cranky opposition to fashion and to urban social pleasures, his extolling of ancestral ways and standards, his crusty bad manners, his mistrustfulness, his ill will toward Ariste. All these things, as the second and third acts proceed, become intelligible aspects of his psychology.

  As Albert Bermel has noted, the second act—in which the cause of Isabelle is advanced by a series of clever deceptions and dodges—has a number of surprises for us. Isabelle, who in Act One was a poor victim with but twenty-nine syllables to say, emerges in Act Two as a mettlesome, resourceful young woman who, horrified by the prospect of a marriage to a bully, drives all the action by improvising one ruse after another. It is surprising, too, that the enamored Valère and his canny valet Ergaste, who at the end of the first act retired to ponder stratagems, are in the second reactive at best, their behavior being largely confined to the divining of Isabelle’s purposes and the abetting of her initiatives. When the figures of a play behave in unexpected and yet credible ways, it increases their dimensionality, and here it is above all the unanticipated actions of Sganarelle which serve to build complex character. The suspicious man of Act One becomes, in Act Two, utterly gullible; the harsh guardian becomes a doting dispenser of pet names; the possessive husband-to-be develops a maudlin sympathy for his young rival. Out of these apparent contradictions we assemble a portrait of an anxious, alienated man, resentful of his brother’s sociable aplomb and out of touch with people in general—a man who, significantly, can be blind to others when they are present (Act One, Scene 3) and can fancy them present when they are not. (“Who goes there? Ah, I’m dreaming.”) His outlandish views and posturings are intended, we perceive, to confer a style upon his isolation and, as Lionel Gossman says, to impress the world by a claim of superiority to it. In his grandiose insecurity, Sganarelle cannot allow others their freedom and their differences; his relation to the world consists in berating it, and in demanding of others that they regard him as a model and embody his values. It is not, after all, surprising that so shaky and fantastic a man should be disarmed by the feigned docility of Isabelle, and duped by the flatteries of Valère.