Product Overview
The Learned Ladies was the last-but-one of Molires plays and the last of his great rhyming-couplet comedies. Its predecessors had used the artificiality of the style to add point and irony to some of Molires most trenchant examinations of aspects of the human condition. For lighter-hearted satire, sending up specific behaviour rather than the general human condition, Molire tended to use prose. The Learned Ladies has the best of both worlds: it satirises a specific fad (intellectual pretension) but perhaps because its subject requires an appropriately high style is written in rhyming verse. Targeting cultural snobbery, The Learned Ladies mocks the fashion, current among upper-class ladies, for holding salons to discuss such learned matters as the arts, philosophy and science. The joke, to Molires audience, was not merely intellectual snobbery, but that the snobs were women. This was an age when matters of the mind were, in theory, still the province of men; upper-class women were expected to be charming, witty, interested in the world and its doings, but not scholars. The majority of the aristocratic ladies in Molires own audience probably took this view and shared the opinion of the men, that learned ladies and their gatherings were fools, fit targets for the pedants, charlatans and other confidence-tricksters who preyed on them. The Learned Ladies played for a couple of dozen performances (a successful run for court plays at the time) and attracted none of the hostility and scandal of Molires more contentious works. This French-to-English translation is by A. R. Waller and is scrupulously accurate to Molires meaning.
