Chapter 9 - The Survival of Medieval and Renaissance Professional Practices

Summary

Twentieth-century literary critics have lingered over what Molière’s theatre did or did not owe to farce. This chapter will demonstrate that it was above all as company leader that Molière inherited from a tradition governing actors’ training and the organisation of theatrical work that had been in place since the fifteenth century. The legal structure that framed the commercial activity of his troupe as well as its professional practices was that of the medieval societas, used by farce players to organise their activity from the end of the Middle Ages onwards. In the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the companies thus constituted were also places where actors were trained. Numerous contracts have survived relating to the apprenticeship of a young person to an actor or a troupe established as a societas. From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, the other place where training in performance was given was in the Basoche: a professional community of legal clerks who learned techniques of eloquence, rhetoric and verbal expression. And Molière inherited too from this cultural heritage that was shared by the legal and theatrical worlds.