The French career of Marivaux’s dramatic work relied to a great extent on the situation of commedia dell’arte in the country – reopening of the official Italian stage in 1716 was not so much meant for the previous triumphs of the Comédie-Italienne to continue but rather to contribute to a complete reform of the genre: it was an erudite and yet fully professional theatre that anticipated in certain respects the development of comedy enterprises of the 19th century. Awareness of the change, however, did not reach Poland which remained under a strong influence of the old Comédie-Italienne (closed in 1697) and as a result the most interesting 18th-century plays associated with the Parisian stage of commedia dell’arte were related to the fairground shows, rather than erudite theatre. What complicated the situation even further is the fact that the European quarrel of the ancients and the moderns had a weak impact on the Polish intellectual life; Polish reformers of the 18th century, although resembling the French moderns of the previous century, were inconsistent in their aesthetic choices. Molière (representing the ancients who opposed the moderns under the aegis of Richelieu) in Poland was interpreted from the modern standpoint of utility, which limited the scope of what was to be expected from the comedy in general; the genre was meant mostly for didactic purposes and often served as a handy means to meet some urgent need; this was also how the plays by Marivaux were perceived in Poland.
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The eighteenth century, postulating the bourgeoisie rebel against the privileges of the king and aristocracy, opposing the Church and religion, rejecting classicism, court art and bienséances (decorum), should have – or so it seems – reserved a place of prominence for Molière, who had criticised them all in his plays. Yet it was not so. Molière was played in the 18th century, to be sure, but much less than, for example, Voltaire, whose dramatic work is now obsolete. The censorship of the period regarded Molière with high suspicion. Marivaux did not like Molière; Rousseau condemned his works. Voltaire and Diderot wrote about him ambiguously. The most paradoxical was the position of the revolutionaries who admired Molière theoretically but did not put on his plays. One may, therefore, ask why those committed to the Enlightenment turned away from Molière. The number of factors that side-lined Molière’s comedies in theatre life is so great that it is difficult to name them all. Presentation of several fields of research that deal with the changes within the social, religious, and economic consciousness that were underway at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, factors affecting the way in which theatre licenses were granted in Paris in the Regency period and under the reign of Louis XV and Louis XVI, as well as the evolution of dramatic genres and performing arts bring us closer to providing such an answer, even though it obviously does not explain the issue fully.
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