Antoine Jacob, known as Montfleury, wrote plays for a brief, twelve-year period during the golden age of French comedy. Louis XIV reigned absolutely on the throne, and Moliere, less absolutely but no less brilliantly, on the stage. As a writer of comedies, Moliere had several serious rivals in his day. Of these, Montfleury was, for a time, the most serious.
He was the principal playwright for the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the prestigious troupe that predated Moliere's, and which was also funded directly by the king. He wrote some fifteen plays, all comedies, with the exception of one well-received tragedy (which incidentally, bears a good deal of resemblance in plot to Hamlet, Montfleury having used the same source material as Shakespeare). Of his comedies, several were superior, enjoyed great success in their day, and were played regularly on a French stages well after the playwright's death. Among these were Le Mari sans femme (The Husband Without a Wife), La Fille capitaine (The Girl Soldier), and his masterpieces, La Femme juge et partie.
Montfleury came from a prestigious theater family. His father, Zacharie Jacob, also known as Montfleury, was a sometime-playwright and renowned actor, one of the great stage performers in a culture that took its theatre very seriously, debated it hotly, and supported it assiduously. Montfleury père was a big presence, literally. He was a mammoth figure, rotund with a powerful, booming voice and given to exaggerated stance and delivery, a style then much appreciated, although not universally: Zacharie Montfleury's chief detractor was Moliere. When the latter lampooned Montfleury in The Impromptu of Versailles, the rivalry turned to bitter enmity. To the defense of his father leapt the son, then aged 24 and a lawyer who had written a half dozen plays. Antoine penned The Impromptu of the Hotel de Condé, a deliberate counter-attack that lampooned Moliere in the same fashion. The family honor, at least, was intact.
Shortly thereafter, Zacharie Montfleury made the mistake that earned him the disdain of generations of French literary historians and theatre critics: he denounced Moliere to the king, accusing the great playwright of having married his own daughter, a rumor that plagued Moliere throughout his later years. The King did nothing directly about the charge. Montfleury père died a short time later, having been mortally injured, the story goes, by a portion of his stage costume, the metal belt he was forced to wear to support his enormous belly.
Antoine's breakthrough as a playwright came just after his father's death.La Femme juge et partie was a resounding success and something of a scandal, due to its controversial subject matter. Playing on stage a few blocks away was another scandal, Moliere's Tartuffe. It is said that Montfleury's play was considered by his contemporaries to be the equal of Moliere's. History has disagreed.
Montfleury fils admired above all else the Spanish model--the great dramatists Lope and Calderòn. He could speak Spanish fluently. Better, according to the Queen of Spain, whom he knew, than many Spaniards of her court. Many of his own plots were borrowed, in the common practice of the day, from Spanish plays. At a time when Moliere was inventing a French comedy of manners, using the Italian model as a jumping-off point, Montfleury remained devoted to the romantic, florid and often bawdy material of Spanish theater. As a result -- in a curious, geography-defying twist of literary fate -- Montfleury's work is closer in style to Elizabethan theater than to the new French style Moliere was establishing.
-- John Strand
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