ANTIQUE PRINT CIRCA 1890s SGANARELLE & PANCRACE AFTER MOLIERE’s LE MARIAGE FORCE

Description

ANTIQUE PRINT CIRCA 1890s SGANARELLE & PANCRACE AFTER MOLIERE’s LE MARIAGE FORCE
Molière and Lully’s Le Mariage forcé (The Forced Marriage), is a farce and a comédie-ballet, in prose. It was first performed on 29 January 1664 in the Queen Mother’s apartments, at the Louvre. On 15 February 1664, it was performed at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, where it proved less popular. It closed after 12 performances. It was performed again on 12 May 1664 during festivities known as Les Plaisirs de l’Île enchantée, The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island. Louis XIV wanted to show Versailles at an early date. He had hired architect Louis
Le
Vau, landscape
architect André
le
Nôtre, and the painter-decorator Charles
Le
Brun. These gentlemen had built Nicolas Fouquet‘s castle at Vaux-le-Vicomte. Molière’s La Princesse d’Élide and Tartuffe also premièred during Les Plaisirs de l’Île enchantée, on 8 May 1664. In its original form, The Forced Marriage was a three-act comédie-ballet, by Molière and Lully It did not use figures from a mythology in which it differed from earlier comédies-ballets. At Versailles, King Louis XIV and other aristocrats performed in the comedy. In 1664, Louis was very much in love with Louise de La Vallière who lived at Versailles, in the small castle used as a hunting-lodge by the very private Louis XIII.
Molière transformed Le Mariage forcé into a one-act play in 1668, which is Le Mariage forcé as we know it. However, it was reborn as a comédie-ballet in 1672. Lully having broken with Molière, the music was composed by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.
In his Preface to the Forced Marriage, Henri van Laun provides information concerning the posterity of the play. Sganarelle is Sir Toby Doubtful in Love’s Contrivance, a play by Mrs. Carroll, born Susanna Centlivre (c. 1667–1670 – 1 December 1723).
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