BOOK LAUNCH - Les Oeuvres complètes de Molière (Gallimard - La Pleiade)

Wednesday 20 April at 6.30pm

BOOK LAUNCH
Les Oeuvres complètes de Molière (Gallimard)

Presented by Edric Caldicott (Emeritus Professor of French at UCD and member of the Pléiade editorial team)

In continuous publication since 1660, whether in pirated or legal form, or in individual or collective editions, the work of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73), known to the world as Molière, has always excited admiration mixed with controversy. Unlike Corneille and Racine, his illustrious contemporaries, he was also an actor, assumed to attach more importance to the performance of his thirty-one plays than to their published form – which is perhaps why he was afflicted in his own lifetime with so many illegal editions of his work. Unknown to subsequent scholars, or perhaps just ignored, his protests against literary piracy failed to secure for him the privilege of his own edition of his own complete works. In this respect his fate is not unlike that of Shakespeare whose Folio and Quarto editions have, until the work of Lukas Erne, created deep controversy with regard to their bibliographical authenticity.

It was in this context, and to address these issues, that Georges Forestier, Claude Bourqui, Edric Caldicott, and Anne Piéjus signed a contract with Gallimard in 2003 to produce a new edition of Molière’s works in the Collection de la Pléiade.

Presentation in English. Q & A in French and English.
Admission free – In the library – RSVP: info@alliance-francaise.ie