(Author’s Note: This is a long, rambling, almost random set of musings on some of the comedies of two of the greatest dramatists in western letters. As it turns out, I have heavily leavened my own “thoughts” with long quotations from both authors, which may strike some readers as excessive. Well, if you don’t like great poetry, go elsewhere. And if don’t care for quixotic quibbling from a half-educated autodidact, well, you might consider going elsewhere too.)
So who’s better, Bill or Jean-Baptiste? Well, not to keep you in suspense, but it’s Bill, hands down. Fortunately, however, comparisons, while frequently odorous, can also be enlightening. So let’s consider the two in some detail.
Bill and Jean-Baptiste were born about 60 years apart, Bill coming in first in mid-16th century (1564), while Jean-Baptiste, to use his “real” name, arrived in the early 17th (1622). But in literary terms they were worlds, not decades, apart.
For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll be treating Bill as a comic poet only, unless I think of something really clever that simply has to go in. For both poets, the essence of comedy was the triumph of procreation, of youth over age, but for Shakespeare the plots he chose turned almost obsessively on discord—very often between brothers, and very often one brother casting the other out in a display of all too human ingratitude,1 with the castaway finding first escape and, ultimately, redemption, in the “natural world”—however unlikely in fact a woodland court could be—before returning to a human society that has now been made whole again.
For Molière, on the other hand, the disruptive force that has to be overcome is almost invariably a willful individual who seeks to, well, impose his will on the natural order and flow of human affairs, an order and flow, as all wise people know, that is to be accepted rather than commanded. Molière’s troublemakers range from the lovable, as in the case of M. Jourdain in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, to the scabrous—Alceste in Le Misanthrope.
I must confess, however, that my generalization is less than air-tight: in plays like Love’s Labour Lost and Much Ado About Nothing, it is an absurd will to celibacy on the part of the protagonists that must be overcome. And Molière wrote so many plays, most of them unread by me, that my glib generalization is surely woefully incomplete as well.
Shakespeare is notoriously “difficult” for modern readers to approach. The Elizabethan vocabulary and diction are significant barriers in themselves, but there’s more, much more. To understand him at all, you first have to acquaint yourself fully with the trappings of an intensely self-conscious and artificial literary world. In Shakespeare, everyone is “witty”, even the wrestlers. Vide this exchange in As You Like It between the evil “Oliver” and the wrestler “Charles”:
OLIVER: Good Monsieur Charles, what's the new news at the new court?
CHARLES: There's no news at the court, sir, but the old news.
Ha! Ha! I see what you did there! In Shakespeare, any verbal exchange can serve as the vehicle for wit, with the speakers frequently departing from the topic at hand—and the “matter” of the play—to engage in an extended detour and frolic where word play, abstruse allusions, poetic flourishes, and tendentious moralizing are pursued as ends in themselves, regardless of the coherence of the play or the consistency of the characters themselves. Consider the speech of “Hero”, the child bride (ultimately) of Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, a virtual cipher/plot device of a character—she’s young, she’s pretty, she’s ready for love! And that’s about all we know about her, because that’s about all that Shakespeare gives us, but not quite all. As part of the plot to convince Beatrice that Benedict is in love with her, Hero sends her “gentlewoman” Margaret with a message for Beatrice:
Say that thou overheardst us,
And bid her steal into the pleachèd bower
Where honeysuckles ripened by the sun
Forbid the sun to enter, like favorites,
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride
Against that power that bred it.
What has the dear girl been reading? Tacitus? Plutarch? Seneca? And what has this observation on court intrigue have to do with either honeysuckle or fooling Beatrice?
It was accepted in Shakespeare’s time that “literature” must echo the ancients. His literary and theatrical world was shaped by the “University Wits,” the founders of sophisticated, secular English theater who immediately preceded him, men anxious to show off their classical learning and marinated in the elegant prose of Cicero and the elegant poetry of Vergil, Horace, and Ovid. Everyone literate was expected to have the full panoply of the classical world at their fingertips, in order to grasp the endless allusions to the great pagan past. In A Midsummer’s Night Dream Hermia swears her love to Lysander “by that fire which burn’d the Carthage queen”—with the expectation that listeners would be able to understand the deliberately veiled reference to the love of Dido for Aeneas given in Vergil’s Aeneid—though presumably not suggesting that Hermia wished that she would come to a similar fate.
Shakespeare also requires us to be familiar with Ptolemaic astronomy/astrology—there is nothing more poetic than the heavens, after all—though Shakespeare is not above rearranging the heavens to make them more poetical—as well as the “natural history” of medieval bestiaries. Both the classical and Christian worlds saw reality as inherently qualitative and packed with endless morality tales—everything from the “purity” and constancy of the heavenly spheres to the self-sacrificing pelican, which feeds its chicks with its own blood—thus serving the poet as an endless source of similes and metaphors.
When we turn to Molière, all of this disappears. Though he ended up writing for one of the most aristocratic courts in history, and had a much more complete education than Shakespeare, in his early years Molière was working in, though going beyond, the heavily improvisational tradition of Italian commedia dell’arte, without all the fuss and feathers that, to Shakespeare, constituted the essence of “art”. Both men achieved success through the aristocratic world—the only way success could be achieved back in those days—and in fact Molière’s patrons were much more highly placed than Shakespeare’s2—but the Frenchman never took up the ponderous classical armor, not to mention the extravagant wit and self-indulgent word play, that can make Shakespeare seem so daunting to the novice. Chronologically a product of the Baroque, Molière seems somehow to have skipped ahead to the Enlightenment, writing the plays that Voltaire must have wished he had written. All is quickness and polish; Molière never dawdles, while Shakespeare rarely met a digression he wouldn’t pursue.
I confess that I know Shakespeare much better than Molière, because I can’t speak French. More than that, while Molière is produced for television incessantly in Europe, no one seems to think there’s a market for his films in the U.S. One would think that the BBC would have produced a “canonical” set of his greatest plays, but no. Instead, for English speakers, drama on video is basically wall to wall Shakespeare. Even the Greeks are almost completely ignored. Intolerable, yet true.
Fortunately, Molière’s intense playability, and accessibility, means that there is lots of Molière on Youtube—of astoundingly variable quality, of course, but it’s there.3 Molière can hold a high-school audience, as Shakespeare never could, because they can understand him, and because he’s funny, and because he gets you in and out in an hour and a half.
Shakespeare’s comedies are full of magic, of some sort. Sometimes the magic is explicit, like (of course) A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream or The Tempest, or, more often, rationally explained when we learn that a “man” was actually a woman in disguise—As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice—or that a person magically revived from the dead wasn’t really dead to begin with—Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. In several of the plays—As You Like It, most specifically—there is the sense that the play is a ritual, one that briefly pulls heaven and earth together, so that they touch—and then, of course, “our play’s done”, and we come back to mundane reality with both a touching and a painful bump, for Shakespeare often likes to remind us that the supposed consolations of philosophy and art are no defense against the terrible emotions of despair that can sweep over us when we suffer an irreparable loss. When Antonio attempts to console Leonato over the death of his daughter Hero, Leonato replies in a typically Shakespearian explosion of rage:
I pray thee, cease thy counsel,
Which falls into mine ears as profitless
As water in a sieve: give not me counsel;
Nor let no comforter delight mine ear
But such a one whose wrongs do suit with mine:
Bring me a father that so lov'd his child,
Whose joy of her is overwhelm'd like mine,
And bid him speak to me of patience;
Measure his woe the length and breadth of mine,
And let it answer every strain for strain,
As thus for thus and such a grief for such,
In every lineament, branch, shape, and form:
If such a one will smile, and stroke his beard;
Bid sorrow wag, cry 'hem' when he should groan,
Patch grief with proverbs; make misfortune drunk
With candle-wasters; bring him yet to me,
And I of him will gather patience.
But there is no such man; for, brother, men
Can counsel and speak comfort to that grief
Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it,
Their counsel turns to passion, which before
Would give preceptial medicine to rage,
Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,
Charm ache with air and agony with words.
No, no; 'tis all men's office to speak patience
To those that wring under the load of sorrow,
But no man's virtue nor sufficiency
To be so moral when he shall endure
The like himself. Therefore give me no counsel:
My griefs cry louder than advertisement.
Yes, that is a long quote, but, hey, it’s also Shakespeare. And the fact that Hero really isn’t dead, and that both Leonato and we ourselves know it does not detract, I think, from the “honesty” of Leonato’s argument. That is to say, I think Shakespeare is having Leonato say what Shakespeare thinks is the truth, rather than a self-conscious ruse on Leonato’s part to “sell” the story of Hero’s supposed death.
For a full millennium before Shakespeare’s birth, Europeans had witnessed “mystery” and “miracle” plays, depicting the world of Catholic theology. Many of them, of course, told the story of the ultimate mystery of Christian faith, the death and resurrection of Christ,4 but many others featured the dead being revived by saints. These plays had been banned in England, thanks to the Reformation, so it’s quite possible that Shakespeare never saw one—though, presumably, possible that he did. But he was surely familiar with the dramatic possibilities of using theater to show the natural human dream of reversing the ultimate tragedy of life that hangs over us all.
Going even further back in time, to the ancient Greeks, is a related theme, recovery of lost status, and happiness, through some near miraculous return or revelation—for example, Penelope escaping the tyranny of her suiters through the return of Odysseus after twenty years, as well as the revelation of Odysseus’ true identity as he arrives in Ithaca. Shakespeare’s first comedy, The Comedy of Errors, is very largely a knock-about farce, yet ends with the reunion of two pairs of long-lost twins, based on the ancient Roman comedy by Plautus, Menaechmi. This theme of “restoration” runs through many of Shakespeare’s comedies, including the “exiled” plays like As You Like It and The Tempest, and the reunion of twins (again) in Twelfth Night.
There is little magic in Molière. We leap suddenly from Renaissance fantasy to Enlightened common sense, somehow skipping right over Baroque grandeur, which I guess Molière decided wasn’t funny. The great lesson of Molière, repeated over and over again, is to stay in one’s place, and not to desire more than one’s share, no matter how large or how small—with the one very big exception—also a constant in Shakespeare, of course—that one always marries the one one loves, pretty much the opposite of what occurred in real life—though fortunately one always falls in love with an appropriate partner, and the opposition of obtuse and selfish elders is silenced, either comically or gracefully.
Throughout Molière’s plays—and for most of Shakespeare’s—the young lovers are “young lovers”, and scarcely developed beyond that, panting for the first pretty face—as long as it’s accompanied by the appropriate social rank and income, which, of course, it invariably is. If either wrote a play where social status/income are a barrier to the match, I’ve never read it—except of All’s Well that Ends Well, of course.
Almost all of Molière’s play rely on “types”, which means that it’s the twists of the plots, and the elegance of the couplets—which I can only appreciate through Richard Wilbur’s excellent verse translations5—that very largely make the plays work. Sometimes the plots are driven by an elaborate series of unlikely coincidences and misunderstandings—The Imaginary Cuckold, for example, where no one actually gets cuckolded or betrayed—but more often from the efforts of an old bungler—most often, a father, of course—who wants the world to stop its natural progression and obey his commands, only to outwitted by a clever, well, someone—Molière often isn’t too fussy as to agency—although even in these, outrageous coincidences and misunderstandings play a major role.6
Comedy is all about release of tension, loss of control—well, much of it, anyway7—and who better to write about such loss than those who fear it most? And what makes men lose control? Women. And there’s no doubt that both authors had more than their share of the standard male obsession with cuckoldry—though Shakespeare, particularly in his tragedies,8 tends to make Molière look like a piker—most of the time, at least—with the striking exception of Alceste, aka “Le Misanthrope”, who can sound as scornful of—though far more susceptible to—the bewitching charms of the eternal feminine as Hamlet himself.
In Shakespearean tragedy, the sexual act itself is often regarded with fear and loathing—and, as many have noted, the fury of Shakespeare’s poetry in such plays as Hamlet and Othello often suggest that he is speaking for himself—and women almost always get the worst of it, held responsible for the “crime of Eve”, wantonly provoking and therefore responsible for sexual desire, which is wicked in and of itself because it is during sexual intercourse that we experience the ultimate loss of control, other than that of death itself. Yet in his comedies Shakespeare often —indeed, very often—reverses his field, making women, very often disguised as men, the “strong” characters who take charge of the action and direct it to its “proper” end, the most spectacular being, of course, Rosalind in As You Like It. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that in comedy everything is “upside down”, but the women do such a good job of running things in Shakespeare’s comedies that one is left to wonder. When the men do take over, as in the early play The Taming of the Shrew, the results are pretty grim—we get “Stoic Shakespeare”, where reason triumphs over passion, and women are put in their place—Shakespeare willfully bending reality to make it comply with his fears, with painfully ugly results.9
For the most part, Molière takes a more “rational” approach to the dangers and uncertainties inherent in the sexual realm—just accept them! Only a fool tries to control the uncontrollable. A classic example of this attitude occurs in one of Molière’s most satisfying plays, The School for Husbands. Sganarelle, the requisite meddling old fool, is actually a bit more than the standard meddling old fool, speaking very much with the voice of Alceste, “Le Misanthrope”, a man consumed by his hatred of “society”, which raises vanity to an art form, and indeed the very end of life, taking particular aim at the obvious, fashion itself, responding harshly when his elder brother Ariste tries to explain to him that if one wants to be accepted, one must be acceptable, “even” in dress:
I see: I mustn’t wear what clothes I please,
But must submit to fashion’s wise decrees!
Do you propose, by precepts so bizarre,
Dear elder Brother—for that is what you are
By twenty blesséd years, I must confess,
Although of course it couldn’t matter less—
Do you propose, I say, to force me to
Adorn myself as your young dandies do?
To wear those little hats which leave their brains,
Such as they are, exposed to winds and rains,
And those immense blond wigs which hide their features
And make one doubt that they are human creatures?
Those tiny doublets, cut off at armpit level,
Those collars hanging almost to the navel,
Those sleeves that drag through soups and gravy boats,
And those huge breeches, loose as petticoats?
Those small, beribboned slippers, too neat for words,
Which make them look like feather-footed birds?
Those rolls of lace they force their legs to wear
Like the leg irons that slaves and captives bear,
So that we see each fop and fashion plate
Walk like a pigeon, with a waddling gait?
You’d have me dress like that? I note with loathing
That you’re attired in just such modish clothing.
Ariste responds with a burst of Molièrian common sense, repeated, I am sure, in virtually every one of his plays:
It’s best at all times to observe convention
And not, by being odd, attract attention.
For all extremes offend, and wise men teach
Themselves to deal with fashion as with speech,
Accepting calmly, with no fuss or haste,
Whatever changes usage has embraced.
I’m far from recommending those whose passion
Is always to improve upon the fashion,
And who are filled with envy and dismay
If someone else is more extreme than they:
But it is bad, on any ground, to shun
The norm, and not to do the thing that’s done;
Better by far to join the foolish throng
Than stand alone and call the whole world wrong.
For the rest of the play, however, Sganarelle’s savage indignation, as one might call it,10 more or less disappears, and he becomes a stock character, the old fool hoping to use his wealth and social position to force a young woman to marry him. The young woman he has in mind, Isabelle, is rather too conveniently his ward, whom he has been raising since she was four years old. Molière reduces the creepiness of this arrangement—unfortunately not all that uncommon back in the day—to the level of farce by having Ariste having a ward as well, Léonor, Lisabelle’s sister. Sganarelle has naturally raised Isabelle apart from the world, trained to be pious and innocent and dutiful, with no will of her own, as is proper for a woman, so that when the time comes—as it has come—she will of course consent to be his wife, resistless to his will and unstained by the banalities of society. Once she is his wife, he will continue to keep her in this blissful (for him) ignorance of the ways of the world, indifferent to “fashion” an attentive only to him, thus ensuring that he will be safe from the certain fate of the “foolish throng”, the horns of the cuckold.
Ariste, of course, has done the opposite with Léonor, has joined the foolish throng and has allowed her to have her own way and to explore the fashionable world, with all its wantonness. He, like his brother, wishes to marry his ward, but she is free to marry whom she will, an approach that strikes Sganarelle is nothing more than an invitation, if not indeed the guarantee, of the dreaded horns of cuckoldry, for which, he is sure, he has found the only true preventative.
Following this extended setup, we meet, located conveniently across the town square, Valère, the requisitely handsome and suitable young suitor, accompanied by his valet/confidante, Ergaste, to whom he despairingly confesses his hopeless love for Isabelle, so fiercely guarded by such a “a fierce, sharp-eyed dragon”. Fortunately, Ergaste has knowledge appropriate for such matters, though garnered by observation only, “knowledge” that, of course, reflects Molière’s unshakeable devotion to the media via as the wise man’s—or, here, rather the cunning man’s—only true path, for harsh extremism—the hunger for control—only unbalances Nature, thus guaranteeing a correction, a correction at the extremist’s expense:
Why, that’s to your advantage; the situation
Should fill your heart with hope and expectation.
Cheer up; you have no cause to feel undone.
A woman closely watched is halfway won,
And a harsh husband or a crabbed sire
Is just what any lover should desire.
I don’t chase women; for that I have no talent;
And I do not profess to be a gallant;
But I’ve served woman-chasers by the score
Who told me often that nothing pleased them more
Than meeting with those fractious husbands who
Come grumbling home and scold all evening through,
Those brutes who groundlessly mistrust their wives,
Checking on every moment of their lives,
And act proprietary and unpleasant
When young admirers of their wives are present.
“All this,” they said, “is favorable to us.
The lady’s pique at being treated thus,
And the warm sympathy which we then express,
Can pave the way to amorous success.”
In short, if you have hopes of Isabelle,
Her guardian’s cranky ways may serve you well.
After all this masculine thrust and counter-thrust, so to speak, that dominates Act One, it’s more than a bit of a surprise that in Act Two it is Isabelle, who spoke scarcely a word during her brief appearance in Act One, who takes matters into own hands and directs almost the entirety of the action for the remaining four acts of the play, devising one ploy after another that both convinces Sganarelle of her own perfect innocence and converts the self-regarding fool into a hapless cat’s paw, a comic Oedipus, the unwitting author of his own doom—the moral apparently being—for Molière, a bit surprisingly, does not underline it—the more we try to control women, the more cunning and malicious they become. In fact, Isabelle is so shrewd and supple, adjusting effortlessly to every obstruction that chance and her guardian might throw in her path, that it is “well” that her goal is marriage, for if it were only attention—from handsome young men, of course—we would be more than half way to the maddeningly desirable Célimène, the ultimate coquette, whose diabolical combination of perfect desirability and perfect unavailability—each, of course, reinforcing the other—will drive Alceste to more than fury five years later in Le Misanthrope.
The cleverness of Isabelle’s plotting is enjoyable in itself, but what really makes the play sing is her ability to improvise quick fixes to keep her little barque of matrimony headed for the right port, despite the many obstacles to her goal unwittingly thrown up by the thick-witted, and thick-fingered, masculine fools with whom she is forced to deal. Yet The School for Husbands is by no means a feminist tract of any sort, not even the old “half and half” sort that shows women running the world by allowing men to think that they’re in control. Isabelle displays the sort of cunning usually ascribed to the “clever servant” who solves all his master’s problems for him yet asks for nothing more than to continue in his servant’s role. Similarly, Isabelle seems to have no higher goal than to be a submissive, “good” wife to Valère, who, to be brutally frank, appears to be as mentally negligible as Bertie Wooster himself. I mean, he’s young, handsome, well appointed, and thoroughly in love with Isabelle. What woman could ask for anything more?
In Molière’s plays the sort of cunning Isabelle here displays will often burst forth from one character or another without warning or preparation on Molière’s part, more in accordance with the needs of the plot than as a reflection of “character”. The School for Husbands is most notable for both the constant high level of Isabelle’s ingenuity and the fact that it drives the whole action of the play. The School for Husbands is all of piece, which isn’t true of many of Molière’s plays, which can often have a bit of a thrown together quality.
A year later, Molière followed School for Husbands with a longer, less funny (in my minority opinion) rewrite, L’Ècole des femmes (The School for Wives), once more describing the folly of a forty-something man unwisely attempting to force a young woman to marry him.11 By writing the play, Molière both invited and obtained an extraordinary load of calumny from his legion of envious enemies, because early in 1662, forty-something Molière had married 17-year-old Armande-Grésinde-Claire-Élisabeth Béjart, whom Molière supposedly believed to be the sister of his long-term theatrical partner, and sometime lover, Madeleine Béjart, despite the 22-year difference in the two women’s ages. Since Molière was quite likely Madeleine’s lover about 18 years before Armande was born—well, you can do the math, and so could a lot of people in 17th-century Paris. The fuss raised was enough to goad Molière into writing an elaborate “rebuttal play”, La Critique de l'école des femmes, which I haven’t seen but suspect I wouldn’t much like, since Molière’s appetite for literary payback, as I’ve sampled it in plays like Le Misanthrope and Les Femmes savants (The Learned Ladies), is much greater than mine. Ultimately, Louis XIV agreed to be the god father of the newlyweds’ first-born son, which quickly silenced any and all criticism on that count.
Perhaps more than any other writer, Molière has been praised as a “master” of satire, but I find much of his satire both dated and unfunny, as in Les Précieuses ridicules (The Affected Ladies) and Les Femmes savants (The Learned Ladies), both taking aim at women affecting high-falutin’ learning, as opposed to the sort of stay on the beaten path common sense praised in virtually every one of his plays. Surprisingly, Les Précieuses ridicules, an earlier play, has some very funny satire, directed, not a learned ladies but rather at aristocrats, who smugly explain to the ladies that their superior breeding allows them instant success at any endeavor, without all that tedious practice and, you know, hard work so praised by the bungling, bumbling bourgeoise, who wouldn’t know an epee if it bit them on the derrière. But then Molière stupidly takes it all back, “revealing” the two to be imposters, mere servants mocking their betters, giving us no reason to imagine why they would undertake anything so rash, something more or less guaranteed to earn them a beating, which is exactly what they do get, because, well, audiences always laugh at the spectacle of someone getting their ass kicked—surely just about every commedia dell’arte performance ended in such a manner.
Les Femmes savants, one of his last plays, and one of his most successful, lacks even a beatdown, but does feature some more unfunny literary business, the literary pretensions of the learned ladies being so trivial—they fire a servant for her bad grammar—as to reflect more on Molière than on themselves. Much of the play turns on a rivalry between two men of letters, the principled Ariste and the shallow pretender Trissotin. Since I’m getting all this second-hand, via translation, it’s pretty hard for me to judge who is the true talent, but the shocking fact is that many seriously distinguished men of letters—Voltaire, for example12—led scarcely virtuous private lives. In fact, it’s a lot harder to find a great artist who didn’t, at times, act like a self-entitled egomaniac than one who did.
The most famous of Molière’s satirical works is of course Tartuffe, which has added several words to the dictionary, both “Tartuffe” itself and Tartuffery, not to mention Tartuffian, Tartuffish, Tartuffishly, and Tartuffism.13 Yet, as a satire on religiosity, and the way religion can serve as a vehicle for the will to power, particularly the way that it can do so unconsciously, Tartuffe really isn’t all that. Tartuffe isn’t a religious man at all; he’s simply a cunning fraud who uses the pose of religious fervor to advance his highly worldly goals of wealth, social position, and sexual gratification, with the added fillip of betraying his benefactor. He isn’t, like, well, Martin Luthor King, Jr., a man who uses his true religious faith and leadership to put himself in a position where he can indulge himself privately with sexual partners who, sometimes, at least, are willing to oblige him, though the Catholic Church affords ample examples of the very worst sorts of sexual oppression—of the sort, of course, that no 17th century playwright would dream of touching.
There is one point in Tartuffe where Molière makes all-but-explicit fun of the Jesuits’ “easy route to heaven”, ridiculed very explicitly nine years before in Blaise Pascal’s famous Provincial Letters, when Tartuffe, attempting to seduce his host’s wife, Elmire, explains to her that a new science, “lately formulated”, allows one pleasure both here on earth and in the hereafter.
Elmire: Must one not be afraid of Heaven's wrath?
Tartuffe: Madam, forget such fears, and be my pupil,
And I shall teach you how to conquer scruple.
Some joys, it's true, are wrong in Heaven's eyes;
Yet Heaven is not averse to compromise;
There is a science, lately formulated,
Whereby one's conscience may be liberated,
And any wrongful act you care to mention
May be redeemed by purity of intention.
I'll teach you, Madam, the secrets of that science;
Meanwhile, just place on me your full reliance.
Assuage my keen desires, and feel no dread:
The sin, if any, shall be on my head.
It is more than a little surprising—to me, at least—that Molière was willing to take on the Jesuits as explicitly as he did—Pascal went into hiding once the letters started being published, and of course denied authorship. The twelfth letter explicitly criticized the pope himself—Alexander VII—who naturally condemned them. Of course, Pascal and Molière were attacking the Jesuits from opposite sides of the fence—Pascal the most famous spokesman for the Jansenist sect, arguing for a more personal and more austere faith, while Molière, with his frequent talk of “following Nature”, cast a cold eye on both Jansenist ecstasy/hysteria and Jesuit guile. In either case, of course, the Jesuits were not amused, but Louis XIV, still in his twenties, and no stranger to the joys of adultery, didn’t seem to mind.
In any event, once Tartuffe’s attempted seduction of Elmire is foiled, he reverts to the role of a stock villain. He ruthlessly pursues the utter destruction of his host and benefactor, Orgon, but there’s no “depth” to his malignity. It isn’t the rage of the outsider, determined to punish those who have everything he hasn’t, and it isn’t the corruption of the will of the man who discovers he has the power to move others, to awaken hope in their lives, and then, feeling he has done “so much” for others, feels it his right to do a little for himself, often pushed on by the adrenaline rush that so often accompany great triumphs only achieved after long struggle—the “I’m king of the world!” feeling, one might say, that afflicts so many of the world’s most illustrious movers and shakers.14 Instead, Tartuffe simply comes out of nowhere and used his pose of extreme piety to gull and despoil poor Orgon.
It’s notable—and more than a bit disappointing—that Tartuffe’s religious posturing is more often described than depicted, Molière for some reason keeping him off stage for the first half of the play. In fact, much of the “anti-religiousness” of the play comes from what other characters say about Tartuffe, most notably Dorine, Elmire’s maid, one of Molière’s many talky servants—the precise opposite, of course, of real servants15—skeptical, humane, and always sure that a great show of virtue is only a show, and, in fact, is a sure indicator of a hidden sin, one far greater than the one it denounces—a very direct assault on the “parti des Dévots”, a group of strict, traditional Catholics entirely separate from the Jansenists, and considerably more powerful politically. Early in the play, Dorine offers a tart portrayal of one such, which they surely could not have enjoyed:
Oh, yes, she's strict, devout, and has no taint
Of worldliness; in short, she seems a saint.
But it was time which taught her that disguise;
She's thus because she can't be otherwise.
So long as her attractions could enthrall,
She flounced and flirted and enjoyed it all,
But now that they're no longer what they were
She quits a world which fast is quitting her,
And wears a veil of virtue to conceal
Her bankrupt beauty and her lost appeal.
That's what becomes of old coquettes today:
Distressed when all their lovers fall away,
They see no recourse but to play the prude,
And so confer a style on solitude.
Thereafter, they're severe with everyone,
Condemning all our actions, pardoning none,
And claiming to be pure, austere, and zealous
When, if the truth were known, they're merely jealous,
And cannot bear to see another know
The pleasures time has forced them to forgo.
Furthermore, it is very “arguable” that Dorine’s frequent advocacy of Molière’s favorite moral, the wisdom of “following Nature,” smacks of paganism, for Christianity is very clearly “unnatural”, and Catholicism, with its long emphasis on the mortification of the flesh and the superiority of the otherworldly life, very explicitly so. This is particularly true when Dorine, like Ergaste in School for Husbands, asserts that adultery is a very “understandable” sin, often more the fault the husband than the wife. For who can blame us, after all, for “following Nature”?16
It is a measure of Molière’s casualness as a plot-maker that Dorine, so often both the author’s mouthpiece and “stage manager” for the first half of the play, almost disappears when we approach the climax, Elmire engineering the gulling of Tartuffe entirely on her own, while it is only the King himself (acting off stage, of course) who has both the knowledge and the power to actually thwart Tartuffe’s corruption. It would have been far more satisfying if the “good” characters had achieved this all on their own, rather than relying on an all too convenient royal “miracle”.
Predictably, Tartuffe caused another “Molièrean” scandal, and performances were suspended. For some reason, Molière chose to follow it with Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre (loosely, “Don Juan or the Statue Who Came to Dinner”), a “bold” choice, certainly, since the emphasis is not much on the Don’s sexual appetite as his specific rejection of religious truth. I found it a very tedious play, written in prose rather than verse, utterly lacking in the sparkle of his verse. Molière often seemed to court controversy, and he certainly got it, this time with a bad play, whose performances were also suspended, though Louis XIV came to his rescue even as he had rescued Orgon in Tartuffe, becoming the official sponsor of Molière’s troupe.
Molière quickly stopped writing “controversial” plays, for a while, waiting a little more than a year before producing Le Misanthrope, though once again I am a naysayer, finding fault with both the characters and the plot, though the play is significantly “rescued” by, of course, the sparkle of Molière’s verse. In fact, my very favorite of Molière’s tropes comes early in the play, in the course of some very witty banter between the ostentatiously misanthropic Alceste, and his friend Philinte, who enrages Alceste by feigning delight in meeting someone he hardly knows:
My God, you ought to die of self-disgust.
I call your conduct inexcusable, Sir,
And every man of honor will concur.
I see you almost hug a man to death,
Exclaim for joy until you're out of breath,
And supplement these loving demonstrations
With endless offers, vows, and protestations;
Then when I ask you "Who was that?", I find
That you can barely bring his name to mind!
Once the man's back is turned, you cease to love him,
And speak with absolute indifference of him!
By God, I say it's base and scandalous
To falsify the heart's affections thus;
If I caught myself behaving in such a way,
I'd hang myself for shame, without delay.
It’s a little hard to believe that Alceste has never observed Philinte showing himself more obedient to the dictates of good manners than “Truth”, but, well, a play can’t start itself. Alceste is, clearly, Sganarelle from The School for Husbands, one who, unlike the original, will not forsake his uncontrollable impatience with the falsity of human nature. Molière very unwisely engages in a little proscenium-breaking by having Philinte make an explicit call-out to the earlier play:
This philosophic rage is a bit extreme;
You've no idea how comical you seem;
Indeed, we're like those brothers in the play
Called School for Husbands, one of whom was prey...
Fortunately, Alceste shuts him off—“Enough, now! None of your stupid similes”—but it’s still painful to see the great Molière stoop so low for an easy laugh, especially a laugh that isn’t a laugh at all, but rather a thorough groaner. Fortunately, the quality of the raillery improves, and after more back and forth, very funny and, unusually for Molière, often short exchanges rather than one speech after another, Philinte finishes with the trope of which I lately spoke so highly, which I will give both in the original French and Wilbur’s translation:
Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils sont;
J’accoutume mon âme à souffrir ce qu’ils font,
Et je crois qu’à la cour, de même qu’à la ville,
Mon flegme est philosophe autant que votre bile.
I take men as they are, or let them be,
And teach my soul to bear their frailty;
And whether in court or town, whatever the scene,
My phlegm's as philosophic as your spleen.17
This really ought to finish Alceste, but it doesn’t. He longs, it seems, to extract himself entirely from this wicked world, but he’s dragged back by one thing—le femmes, naturellement. And not only that, the very worst of them! As Philinte thoughtfully explains for us
It much surprises me that you, who seem
To view mankind with furious disesteem,
Have yet found something to enchant your eyes
Amidst a species which you so despise.
And what is more amazing, I'm afraid,
Is the most curious choice your heart has made.
The honest Eliante is fond of you,
Arsinoe, the prude, admires you too;
And yet your spirit's been perversely led
To choose the flighty Célimène instead,
Whose brittle malice and coquettish ways
So typify the manners of our days.
Alceste can only confess his own helpless guilt:
My love for that young widow's not the kind
That can't perceive defects; no, I'm not blind.
I see her faults, despite my ardent love,
And all I see I fervently reprove.
And yet I'm weak; for all her falsity,
That woman knows the art of pleasing me,
And though I never cease complaining of her,
I swear I cannot manage not to love her.
Her charm outweighs her faults; I can but aim
To cleanse her spirit in my love's pure flame.
A big problem with the play—and this is “typical” of Molière—is that the characters emotions are too often confessed rather than dramatized. Alceste will sourly and helplessly confess his love for Célimène, both to her and to others, but he never “shows” it. This is in contrast to Shakespeare, in “Much Ado About Nothing”, my fave rave of his comedies, when Benedict and Beatrice, his most elegant lovers, struggle to ward off the mating urge—struggle to maintain “control”—by endlessly denouncing and ridiculing each other each time they meet, which they somehow contrive to do quite frequently, despite supposedly not being able to endure each other’s presence. Furthermore, once they start talking they have a very hard time stopping, each struggling to have the last word, to “win”, though Beatrice, “My Lady Tongue”, usually emerges the victor—though what each is “winning” is mere isolation, which, eventually, each will realize is the emptiest of prizes.
Shakespeare affords many other examples—Rosalind, in As You Like It, in disguise as “Ganymede” , so merrily instructing the simple, earnest Orlando in how to woo his Rosalind, pushing and teasing him ever onwards, or Olivia in Twelfth Night, again (of course) disguised as a man, suffering as she listens to Count Orsino, the man she loves, give her the “sensible” advice that a man should always woo a woman younger than himself, leading to the following exchange:
Orsino: Then let thy love be younger than thyself,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent.
For women are as roses, whose fair flower,
Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.
Viola: And so they are. Alas, that they are so,
To die even when they to perfection grow!
Le Misanthrope is often praised for the “roundness” of the characters, but again I can’t see it. Alceste certainly never changes, endlessly railing against the falseness of humanity, sighing over the good old days, when men were simple and honest, one of the most tedious complaints—and one of the most often made, particularly in plays—asserting the decadence of the times. He is very reminiscent of the Melancholy Jaques in As You Like It . Both men really do not belong in a play, because they do not “grow”, or indeed “act” in any sense of the word, Hamlets who never come to “accept the Universe”, in the terminology of pioneering American feminist/transcendentalist Margaret Fuller.18 Both Alceste and Jaques renounce society at the play’s end, Alceste because men fall short of the honesty and honor that they should display in every second of their everyday lives, while Jaques, more cynical, departs not because men fail to display the level of virtue of which they should be capable but rather because men are not capable of virtue in the first place. Both are, in effect, too proud of their virtue/isolation to ever consider abandoning it, and, for Molière especially, we have the sense that the author feels he has been too “hurt” by life ever to forgive it and join with the common run of humanity. Both Alceste and Jaques are ungainly characters, their “truth” essentially undramatizable, and one senses that their creators thrust them into their plays because they felt their truth was too important to be ignored, despite the fact that it doesn’t really belong in a play. True pessimists, after all, don’t write plays. They commit suicide.
In his bitter complaints about the endless self-seeking in society, the endless struggle for position and precedence, the war of all against all conducted not with broadswords but epigrams, and all the more vicious for it, Alceste strikes a note that we will hear again in Paris in the next century—the voice of Rosseau. And Alceste’s “vision” of how men ought to conduct themselves—and, more or less, supposedly did conduct themselves in the past—sounds very similar to Rosseau’s revolutionary vision of a society subject to the General Will, where no one seeks advantage over the others because everyone realizes that their advantage—their “true” advantage, the priceless advantage of being a free and moral being—depends for its existence on the others and their enjoyment of a freedom equal to that of his, the difference being that, unlike Rosseau, Alceste/Molière did not see the admittedly corrupt nature of French society as being near collapse, or the possibility of its replacement by something radically different and radically better. My own deeply phlegmatic skepticism rejects the notion that the world ever has been, or ever will be, “honest,” though life, all things considered, is much better now than it ever has been before, except for, you know, all the things I complain about, not too phlegmatically, in all the rest of my posts on this blog.19
It is a good measure of Molière’s deep sourness that his portrait of Célimène is so unattractive. She is not simply a charming but compulsive flirt, whose awareness that her ability to charm places herself “above the rest” and heats her animal spirits in a way that compels the pre-moral—“pagan”—admiration of her fellow animals—that is to say, “us”. “She’s so alive!”20 Célimène is not merely emboldened by her matchless charm and wit but corrupted by it, for her greatest pleasure is to ridicule the hypocrisy of others, delighting her breathless coterie with her elegant deconstructions of others’ failings—much like Dorine’s critiques of the Dévots, with the important difference that Dorine is complaining of “types” while Célimène is dissecting the characters of her supposed friends, sometimes behind their backs and sometimes to their faces. Compare the speech of Dorine’s that I quoted earlier to Célimène’s response to a Dévotish lecture she receives from “Arsinoé”, a lady unfortunately guilty of the most unforgivable of feminine crimes—age:
Madam, I haven't taken you amiss;
I'm very much obliged to you for this;
And I'll at once discharge the obligation
By telling you about your reputation.
You've been so friendly as to let me know
What certain people say of me, and so
I mean to follow your benign example
By offering you a somewhat similar sample.
The other day, I went to an affair
And found some most distinguished people there
Discussing piety, both false and true.
The conversation soon came round to you.
Alas! Your prudery and bustling zeal
Appeared to have a very slight appeal.
Your affectation of a grave demeanor,
Your endless talk of virtue and of honor,
The aptitude of your suspicious mind
For finding sin where there is none to find,
Your towering self-esteem, that pitying face
With which you contemplate the human race,
Your sermonizings and your sharp aspersions
On people's pure and innocent diversions—
All these were mentioned, Madam, and, in fact,
Were roundly and conceitedly attacked.
"What good," they said, "are all these outward shows,
When everything belies her pious pose?
She prays incessantly; but then, they say,
She beats her maids and cheats them of their pay;
She shows her zeal in every holy place,
But still she's vain enough to paint her face;
She holds that naked statues are immoral,
But with a naked man she'd have no quarrel."
Of course, I said to everybody there
That they were being viciously unfair;
But still they were disposed to criticize you,
And all agreed that someone should advise you
To leave the morals of the world alone,
And worry rather more about your own.
They felt that one's self-knowledge should be great
Before one thinks of setting others straight;
That one should learn the art of living well
Before one threatens other men with hell,
And that the Church is best equipped, no doubt,
To guide our souls and root our vices out.
Madam, you're too intelligent, I'm sure,
To think my motives anything but pure
In offering you this counsel—which I do
Out of a zealous interest in you.
Good advice, most of it, but delivered not to enlighten but to injure. Célimène’s wit is almost always unkind, and Molière’s “portrait” of her selfishness is merciless to the point of compulsion, and it is not surprising that Molière was unable to “dramatize” Alceste’s love for her, which, to exist, would surely bear within it a strong element of masochism, considering her constant cruelty, her habitual betrayal of other people’s confidences, her constant pleasure in in using her wit to inflict pain so charmingly that the victim is powerless to protest. Still, her “punishment” in the play’s denouement, when her two-faced nature is so conveniently revealed in the form of identical love letters to a variety of suiters—unlikely as it would be for anyone as cunning as Célimène to compromise herself in such a tangible manner—we again feel that Molière is working out a personal grudge rather than functioning as an artist—setting up Célimène for the pleasure of running her over.
Célimène is possibly unique among Molière’s female characters for being, well, actively evil. There are any number of fussy old prudes and addlepated wannabe savants, but none, from my admitted limited sampling of his plays, is as calculating as she is. Since it is almost always old fools like Sganarelle who set Molière’s plots in motion, it is usually the women who set things right, but they always do so via a shrewd combination of adroit trickery and simple common sense. In Shakespeare, it is usually the women as well who set things right, but they do so in a grander manner, descending from above, as it were, and providing the moral center of the play, as in the case of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Rosaline in As You Like It, or Lady Rosaline in Love’s Labours Lost, correcting Berowne’s male pretentiousness—“sans ‘sans’, I pray you”—and then, when her Lady, the Princess of France, shockingly injects “reality” into a play by demanding that the impending weddings be delayed a year and a day due to the death of her father, returning to Shakespeare’s favorite theme of the inability of art to transform reality:
Rosaline: Oft have I heard of you, my Lord Berowne,
Before I saw you; and the world’s large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks,
Full of comparisons and wounding flouts,
Which you on all estates will execute
That lie within the mercy of your wit.
To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain,
And therewithal to win me, if you please,
Without the which I am not to be won,
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse
With groaning wretches; and your task shall be,
With all the fierce endeavor of your wit,
To enforce the painèd impotent to smile.
Berowne: To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be, it is impossible.
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.
When the ladies insist on the moratorium, Berowne can only respond, in a famous proscenium-breaker, “That’s too long for a play”—the sorrows of this life can’t be contained within the compass of art. Still, in defense of men, it could be pointed out that it is Berowne who gives the most passionate speech in behalf of the power of love, pointing out to his fellow would-be monkish scholars, who all find themselves, most embarrassingly, in love, that they should feel no shame, for while there may books in brooks, there are better ones in looks:21
O, ’tis more than need.
Have at you, then, affection’s men-at-arms!
O, we have made a vow to study, lords,
And in that vow we have forsworn our books.
For when would you, my liege, or you, or you,
In leaden contemplation have found out
Such fiery numbers as the prompting eyes
Of beauty’s tutors have enriched you with?
Other slow arts entirely keep the brain
And therefore, finding barren practicers,
Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil.
But love, first learnèd in a lady’s eyes,
Lives not alone immurèd in the brain,
But with the motion of all elements
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye.
A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.
A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious head of theft is stopped.
Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.
Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste.
For valor, is not love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides? Subtle as Sphinx,
As sweet and musical As bright Apollo’s lute strung with his hair.
And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were tempered with love’s sighs.
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire.
They are the books, the arts, the academes
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.
Else none at all in ought proves excellent.
Or as Benedict, more pithy, explained first his renunciation of renunciation—“The world must be peopled”—and then why his “inconstancy” should not be faulted: “For man is a giddy thing.”
Afterwords
I have previously discussed Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Would-be Gentleman), an elaborate presentation, available on DVD, of one of Molière’s most famous works, a joint project with composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, and also took a deep dive into nine film versions of Hamlet for the Bright Lights Film Journal back in the day.
The Borough of Manhattan Community College has an excellent contemporary production and verse translation of Le Misanthrope available on YouTube, “adapted” (I guess that means translated) by Liz Kash-Stoppel. YouTube has several other English-language-accessible versions of le Misanthrope, as well as some of Molière's other plays . If you can speak French, there’s a lot more.
There is a “decent” Broadway Theatre Archive version of Tartuffe, dating from the 1970s, starring Donald Moffat, Victor Garber, Tammy Grimes, and Patricia Elliott, available on DVD, literally the only Molière on DVD in English (or with English subtitles) that I found to be “tolerable”, except for the Molière/Lully collaboration mentioned above..
A serious Molière buff, Tim Mooney, maintains a YouTube site, the Tim Mooney Repertory Theatre, starring Tim Mooney, which is very largely dedicated to Molière. Check out, for example, his post, Shakespeare versus Molière, which I fortunately had not stumbled upon until after I finished this piece, but which I recommend highly.
1. Shakespeare complains, “obsessively”, one might say, about ingratitude, but I don’t know if this is based on personal experience—I’m one of those “Reader, look, not at his picture, but his book” kind of guys—or just his personal conclusion about human nature.
2. Molière’s first sponsor was “Monsieur”, Louis XIV’s younger brother, Phillippe, the Duke of Orlèans, but ultimately the King himself took over.
3. Since the recordings are almost always done by amateurs, the miking is often so poor that they’re useless. Sad!
4. Traditional Christian services could be quite dramatic as well. A woman I knew who attended services in the Russian Orthodox Church in Pittsburgh back in the sixties told me that on Good Friday all the statues would be draped in black, with a bare altar and illumination kept to an absolute minimum. On Easter Sunday the statues would be undraped and polished and the church would be filled with flowers and candles. The links to earlier, “pagan” rites of ritual death and rebirth, held in the spring of the year and preserved by the Jewish celebration of Passover, including the ritual slaughter of the Paschal Lamb, are obvious.
5. However, it’s important to remember, as Wilbur explains for us, “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.” So the “real” Molière, I would guess, has perhaps a subtler elegance than Wilbur’s translations.
6. In Shakespeare, such things are more likely the stuff of tragedy—for example, Horatio’s summary of the events leading to Hamlet’s death:
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on the inventors’ heads: all this can I
Truly deliver.
7. I remember Buddy Hackett, not an introspective man, describe his experiences as a young comic eager for the show biz life: a few drinks, a few laughs, and maybe even a few broads! And people would come to him backstage and say things to him like “Mr. Hackett, I want to thank you so much. You see, two years ago, my daughter was killed in a car crash, and until tonight I’ve been unable to laugh.”
8. I discussed Hamlet and his obsession with women, at some length here. Othello takes sexual obsession to extraordinary heights as well, and it’s also more than present in such plays as Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure.
9. In my review of the film version of Cole Porter’s classic musical Kiss Me, Kate, I claim that Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel, as Katherina and Petruchio, do the impossible and convert the more than base metal of Shakespeare’s ghastly “step on me” into more than gold : “But Grayson makes Katherine’s surrender so gentle, and Keel makes Petruchio’s joy at her return so genuine, that we get a real happy ending after all! Hey, it’s not the first time actors have saved an author’s ass!”
9. Jonathan Swift, Great Britain’s crankiest man of letters, had inscribed on his epitaph that he now lay “where savage indignation could no longer tear his heart”. I discuss Polite Conversation, one of Swift’s less misogynous works, in some detail here.
10. No one seems to notice that, in the first play, Léonor ends up marrying Ariste, his reward for not trying to control her, despite the fact that he’s 60, as we’re repeatedly told in the first act, making him 20 years older than Sganarelle.
12. The rejection of “Whiggery” led by T.S. Eliot back in the early twentieth century, part of the general rejection on both the left and right of anything “bourgeoise”, has resulted in an unfair devaluation of Voltaire, in my opinion. Despite all the sneers, the author of Candide was not a shallow optimist, and was, I believe, a better friend of humanity than the theatrically austere Mr. Eliot. Both men had interesting things to say about Hamlet.
13. Word recognized the first two only. The rest are courtesy Webster’s Second Unabridged.
14. However aroused, adrenaline, once in the bloodstream, will, like water, seek its own level.
15. Servants never speak in Jane Austin’s novels, probably because she didn’t consider them to be human.
16. Sir Kenneth Clark, speaking of medieval romances, remarked that “where there is marriage without love, there will be love without marriage”.
17. The ancient Greeks believed that psychology recapitulates physiology, in the sense that an excess of certain fluids, or “humors”, shape a man’s personality. An excess of phlegm made one, well, phlegmatic, while an excess of green bile, secreted by the spleen, made one bilious or splenetic (or “choloric”, since the Greek work for bile is “khole”). Since Alceste also describes himself as “melancholy”, this means he also suffers from an excess of black bile, in Greek “melas khole”. In his introduction to Tartuffe, Wilbur surprises me by apologizing for using such “archaic” terms as “phlegm” and “spleen”, since the whole theory of the humors was endemic in Western literature until the Romantics. I don’t see how anyone who reads much poetry would be unfamiliar with it.
18. Margaret found it necessary, at some point, to announce that she “accepted the Universe”, leading Carlyle to exclaim “By God! She’d better!”
19. I say this despite the fact that the disruptive impact of “globalism” seems to press ever harder with each passing year. I am an optimist largely because 1) there has been a great deal of progress in many areas and 2) the “future” certainly looked darker in the thirties and forties than it does today.
20. “They that have power to hurt, and will do none”— Célimène is surely not one of those. This is the first line of Shakespeare’s famously ambiguous (or incoherent) 94th sonnet. The succeeding lines of the sonnet, “That do not do the thing they most do show,/ Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,/ Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow”, suggest that what Shakespeare “really” meant was “They that have power to move, and will do none”, but, when I was not so young, I knew a strikingly beautiful young woman who did not use her beauty to advance herself—in fact, she deliberately refrained from doing so, though she was quite conscious and proud of her beauty—and I always thought of her as exemplifying the “true” meaning of Shakespeare’s line.
21. Yes, it’s from another play, but no matter.
