The Critique of the School for Wives

Overview

About forty pages, a one-act prose comedy by Molière, first performed in 1663, written in reply to the attacks on The School for Wives. In a Paris salon a prude, a fop, a pedantic poet and their more sensible hosts argue about whether the earlier play is indecent, badly built and beneath the rules of art.

Molière’s spokesmen answer that the point of comedy is to please, that the rules are only common sense, and that the audience in the pit is a better judge than the critics. The play is the closest Molière came to writing a theory of his own comedy.

What happens

The salon gathers. A Paris salon assembles a mixed company, including a prude, a fop, a pedantic poet and their more sensible hosts, setting the stage for the debate over The School for Wives that will occupy the entire one-act comedy.

The critics attack. The prude, the fop and the pedantic poet argue in turn that The School for Wives is indecent, badly built and beneath the rules of art, voicing the actual criticisms leveled against Molière’s earlier play by contemporary attackers.

The hosts defend the play. The more sensible hosts respond to each specific charge, defending The School for Wives against claims of indecency and poor construction, establishing the play’s central dramatic conflict between critics and defenders.

Comedy’s purpose is to please. Molière’s spokesmen argue that the whole point of comedy is to please its audience, reframing the standard against which the earlier play should properly be judged away from abstract formal correctness.

The rules as common sense. The spokesmen argue that the rules critics invoke are only common sense rather than fixed law, undercutting the pedantic poet’s appeal to formal authority as the proper standard for judging comedy.

The pit’s superior judgment. The play concludes by arguing that the audience in the pit is a better judge of a play’s worth than professional critics, staking out a democratic theory of theatrical value against more academic standards.

How to read it

Read this play as Molière’s defense staged in the very medium under attack, a comedy about comedy, rather than a separate polemical essay; the play demonstrates its own argument through the pleasure it gives even as it makes that argument explicitly.

Pay close attention to how the prude, the fop and the pedantic poet turn Molière’s actual critics into comic characters; the audience is invited to see through their pretensions to authority, a sharper rebuttal than direct argument alone could achieve.

Notice how the central claim, that comedy’s point is to please and that the pit judges better than critics, stakes out a genuinely democratic theory of theatrical value against more aristocratic and academic standards of taste fashionable in Molière’s period.

Consider this play as the closest Molière came to an explicit theory of his own comedy; read together with the plays it defends, it offers rare direct access to how a major comic playwright understood his own art’s purpose.

Read this play alongside Molière’s own School for Wives to see the original comedy this piece defends, and alongside his later Tartuffe to compare how he handled subsequent controversies over his work’s propriety and purpose.

Questions it raises

• Does staging a defense of comedy within a comedy successfully demonstrate the argument it makes, that comedy’s point is to please, or does this self-referential structure risk undercutting the seriousness of the critical points Molière wants to make?
• How persuasive is the claim that the pit’s ordinary audience judges a play’s worth better than professional critics? Does this democratic standard of theatrical value hold up, or does it risk dismissing legitimate critical objections as mere pedantry?
• What does turning actual critics into comic characters, the prude, the fop, the pedantic poet, accomplish rhetorically that direct argument could not? Does this satirical strategy fairly represent the substance of the criticisms Molière is answering?
• How does the claim that critical rules are only common sense rather than fixed law relate to Molière’s broader practice as a playwright? Does his own comic technique bear out this rejection of formal authority in favor of practical effect?
• Given that this play defends The School for Wives specifically, how well does it function as a general theory of comedy applicable beyond that particular controversy? Do its arguments extend naturally to comedy’s purpose more broadly?
• What does this play’s continued relevance to debates about art’s purpose, to please versus to instruct, suggest about the durability of Molière’s specific arguments? Do his claims about audience judgment still offer useful resources for contemporary critical debates?