France’s master of comedy, creator of the "hypocrite"
France’s greatest comic playwright, who was in one person dramatist, director, and actor. He used laughter as a scalpel to lay open the absurdities of human nature: the sham-pious swindler of Tartuffe, the miser mad with greed in The Miser, the obsession and vanity of The Misanthrope. His satire was so sharp that it repeatedly angered church and nobility — yet it also gave comedy, for the first time, a serious critical power. He is said to have collapsed while performing The Imaginary Invalid, dying hours later — almost on the stage itself.
Molière, gravely ill, performed The Imaginary Invalid — a play mocking quack doctors — coughing violently on stage yet forcing his way to the end, and died that night. A man who spent his life mocking false doctors and false piety collapsed at last while playing a sick man — the ending fate handed him was itself like a scene he might have written.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.