“The Learned Ladies” was the last-but-one of Molière’s 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 Molière’s most trenchant examinations of aspects of the human condition. For lighter-hearted satire, sending up specific behaviour rather than the general human condition, Molière 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 Molière’s 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 Molière’s 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 Molière’s more contentious works. This French-to-English translation is by A. R. Waller and is scrupulously accurate to Molière’s meaning.

The Learned Ladies (Las Femmes Savantes)

Literature & Fiction

Jean Baptiste Poquelin De Molière

Dramas & Plays

Harcourt, Brace. Jovanovich

An adaptation, in rhymed verse, of this classic play.

The School for Wives: Comedy in Five Acts, 1662

The translation into English verse of one of Molière’s most masterful and most popular plays. “A continuous delight from beginning to end” (Richard Eberhart). Introduction by Richard Wilbur.

Tartuffe, by Moliere

Harvest Books

“I came to see that a line that simply says ‘I love you,’ at the right point in the show, is entirely adequate, that a great deal of verbal sophistication is not necessarily called for. . . . Speak-ability is so important. That’s something I slowly had to learn about poetry, and something I had to work on always with Molière.”—Richard Wilbur
Lovers’ Quarrels is Molière’s second full-length verse play, animated with deception and tangles of love.
Richard Wilbur is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former Poet Laureate of the United States. His verse translations of Molière’s plays have been performed for audiences throughout the world.

Lovers' Quarrels

Theatre Communications Group

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jean Baptiste Poquelin De Molière. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jean Baptiste Poquelin De Molière

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jean Baptiste Poquelin De Molière. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Learned Ladies (Las Femmes Savantes)

The School for Wives: Comedy in Five Acts, 1662

Tartuffe, by Moliere

Lovers' Quarrels