Word: dandin
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...Dandin, while not one of Moliere's crowning achievements like Doin Juan and Tartuffe, is still a masterpiece of its own kind. Betterton, the foremost English actor of the Restoration, thought is worth translating as a vehicle for himself; and Gounod was going to make an opera...
...French culture, since it saw also the birth of Couperin and the publication of the fables of La Fontaine; and it gave us Les Plaideurs of Racine, who, then at odds with Moliere, made fun of him by naming one of the judges in his play George Dandin...
Moliere's Dandin does not so much tell a story as examine a set of related topics. Its three acts are essentially a series of analytical variations on a theme. The central situation is easily stated: a rich bourgeois tradesman is married to a beautiful young noblewoman, who cuckolds; him by striking up with a passing youth but is always clever enough to make her husband seem in the wrong...
...make up the eight personages in the play. Moliere's chief concern, as usual, was the portrayal of character rather than the construction of plot. And rarely does one of his characters change in the course of a play (like Orgon in Tartuffe). Here, there is no real denouement; Dandin finally exclaims that the best thing for him to do would be to go drown himself head first. But of course he won't and he will go right on being outwitted by his wife. For it was Moliere's thesis -- and a highly tenable one -- that fools...
...writing in Dandin is rather loose, but Moliere was careful that each act would top the previous one. He noted down a good deal of the comic byplay; but, just as certainly, he intended the performance to be decked out with a lot of improvised farce, in the tradition of the Italian commedia dell'arte, for which French Baroque court circles had an overwhelming passion...