Molière authorship question

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Molière authorship question - Wikipedia

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The Molière authorship question has been the subject of some dispute since 1919, when Pierre Louÿs, in two articles entitled respectively Corneille est-il l'auteur d'Amphitryon ?^[1] and L'imposteur de Corneille et le Tartuffe de Molière,^[2] announced that he had uncovered a literary trickery. According to him, Molière had only been Corneille's pen name, according to a practice that Louÿs believed to be common, but which was in fact only found in 17th century literature pamphleteer and in certain collections of scholarly farces from the beginning of the century.

Louÿs was thus following in the footsteps of Abel Lefranc, who had just contributed to the questioning of the paternity of William Shakespeare's works by publishing, in 1918 and 1919, two volumes of an essay entitled Sous le masque de William Shakespeare : William Stanley, VI^e comte de Derby. Throughout his career Louÿs had himself multiplied publications under different pseudonyms;^[3] he had even made himself famous by passing off his Chansons de Bilitis as an original collection of Greek poetry translated by him, but never yet had he mentioned, in his extensive correspondence, a possible connection between Corneille and Molière.^[4] The fuss surrounding the publication of Abel Lefranc's essay enabled him to transpose to Molière the doubt that some English-speaking authors, long before Abel Lefranc, had insinuated about Shakespeare and thus to lend Corneille the same taste for pseudonymity.

This controversy, which was taken up again from time to time in the 20th century after the outburst of Pierre Louÿs, has been renewed and intensified since the beginning of the 2000s, notably with the publication of two articles inspired by statistical methodology, and seeking to prove the proximity between the vocabulary and syntax of Corneille and Molière.^[5]^[6]

As in the case of Shakespeare, this theory is considered inconsistent by Corneille specialists^[7] and Molière,^[8] and more broadly by all historians of French literature and theatre, who do not even allude to it.^[9] The most recent textual analysis work confirms, using methods from stylometry, that Molière's plays and Corneille's were written by two different authors^[10]

References

^ Published in the review L'Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux, August 1919.
^ Published in the review Comœdia, November 7, 1919, available on Gallica.
^ His most recent biographer, Jean-Paul Goujon, insisted on this astonishing feature of his personality: Jean-Paul Goujon, Pierre Louÿs, Fayard, 2002, 872 pp.
^ On Louÿs's sudden invention of this theory, in the aftermath of the publication of Lefranc's book on Shakespeare, see again Goujon's Pierre Louÿs, pp. 745 ff
^ Dominique et Cyril Labbé, « Inter-Textual Distance and Authorship Attribution : Corneille and Molière », Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, vol. 8, n° 3, 2001, p. 213-231.
^ Mathematical Methods for Attributing Literary Works when Solving the “Corneille–Molière” Problem, Mikhail Marusenko, Elena Rodionova, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 17(1):30-54 · February 2010
^ See for example the conclusion of André Le Gall in the most recent biography of Corneille (Flammarion, 1997): 'It is not inconceivable that Molière entrusted his manuscripts to Corneille so that he could take a look at them. [This hypothesis, which is purely hypothetical, but in keeping with the nature of the links that can be forged between an author and his director, does not in any way detract from Molière's authorship of his works. (p. 473); see also, in 2011, the protest issued by the community of Corneille specialists: http://www.corneille.org/index.php? lng=en
^ See for example the conclusion of Roger Duchêne in his biography of Molière (Fayard, 1998): "Faced with this web of inventions, approximations and errors that convince only those who love sensationalism and let themselves be carried away by the imagination and eloquence of a writer of novels, one remains confused when one sees that the idea continues to make its way and to find defenders over time." (p. 162); see also in 2011 the site "Molière auteur des œuvres de Molière" opened by those responsible for the new edition of Molière's Œuvres complètes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade published in 2010.
^ See the most recent history of the French theatre: Charles Mazouer, Le Théâtre français de l'âge classique, Paris, Champion, 2 vols. (2006 and 2010).
^ Cafiero, Florian; Camps, Jean-Baptiste (2019), "Why Molière most likely did write his plays", Science Advances, 5 (11): eaax5489, arXiv:2001.01595, Bibcode:2019SciA....5.5489C, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax5489, PMC 6881153, PMID 31807702, S2CID 208639437.

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