Moliere - The Misanthrope and other plays (10 books)

MOLIÈRE, the stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-1673), was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. Among Molière's best known works are The Misanthrope (1666), The School for Wives (1662), Tartuffe (1664), The Miser (1668), The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670), and The Imaginary Invalid (1673) -- some of the most durable and penetratingly satirical full-length comedies of all time.

Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France often combined against him, the genius of Molière finally emerged to win him acclaim. He employed most of the traditional forms of comedy but succeeded in inventing a new style that was based on a double vision of normal and abnormal seen in relation to each other -- the comedy of the true opposed to the specious, the intelligent seen alongside the pedantic. An actor himself, Molière seems to have been incapable of visualizing any situation without animating and dramatizing it, often beyond the limits of probability; though living in an age of reason, his own good sense led him not to proselytize but rather to animate the absurd. It is testimony to the freshness of his vision that the greatest comic artists working centuries later in other media, such as Charlie Chaplin, have been compared to Molière.


The following books are in PDF or ePUB format as indicated:

* Bungler, The (Theatre Communications Group, 2010). Translated by Richard Wilbur. -- PDF

* Four Plays (Branden Books, 1999). Translated by Carl Milo Pergolizzi. -- ePUB

* Misanthrope, The (Dover, 1992). Edited by Shane Weller. -- ePUB

* Misanthrope & Other Plays, The (Penguin Classics, 2000). Translated by John Wood and David Coward. -- ePUB

* Misanthrope & Tartuffe, The (Harcourt, 1993). Translated by Richard Wilbur. -- ePUB

* Misanthrope, Tartuffe & Other Plays (Oxford World's Classics, 2008). Translated by Maya Slater. -- PDF

* Miser, The (Nick Hern, 2004). Translated by Martin Sorrell. -- ePUB

* Miser & Other Plays, The (Penguin Classics, 2000). Translated by John Wood and David Coward. -- ePUB

* School for Husbands / The Imaginary Cuckold, or Sganarelle (Theatre Communications Group, 2009). Translated by Richard Wilbur. -- ePUB

* Tartuffe (Hackett, 2008). Translated by Prudence L. Steiner. -- PDF