Molière’s life and works offer numerous parallels with the commedia dell’artie, which goes some way towards explaining the profound singularity of his plays and scenic practices in the context of seventeenth-century French theatre. For roughly fifteen years, Molière rubbed shoulders with the Italians and undertook various adaptations of original works derived from the commedia dell’arte, as is demonstrated by several of his plays that are based on famous soggetti. Molière also borrowed a number of his characters from the commédia dell’arte, reproducing both their names and their behaviour. The similarities are not only textual but also in his acting style: physical and verbal virtuosity, and above all the use of facial expressions to demonstrate his characters’ emotions. Molière’s plays were constructed around such lazzi, which gave him a certain flexibility in the elaboration of his shows. Finally, it is in his qualities as an author, actor and company leader, and also in his way of practising theatrical activity as a true entrepreneur that Molière can be seen to have been influenced by the commedia dell’arte more generally.

This chapter looks at the evolution of acting styles in Molière’s time, paying particular attention to the creation of a ‘regular acting’ that matched the emergence of the classical rules, and also to the competition between the two main playhouses of the time. Molière prioritised variety. Stage business became a crucible of several traditions and a means of experimenting with new comic effects: from vulgar gestures, beatings and mimicry to lazzi and rodomontades; from provincial accents to stuttering and an uncontrolled emotional hiccup; from cross-dressing to disguise. In the 1660s, Molière sought to differentiate his company from the Hôtel de Bourgogne, whose forte was tragic, oratorical acting, and whose actors may not all have been as physically agile on stage as Molière was himself. He sparked controversy, promoting his hybrid acting ‘brand’, which probably consisted of a combination of an attenuated declamatory style and a faster flow in the tragic and, conversely, an exaggerated and excessive body language style accompanied by extreme contortions in the comic. Molière triumphed on the comic stage, becoming a model and marking the next generations of actors.