I cannot post anything that requires more than one screen. In fact, I must use a keyboard that is placed on my screen. I cannot even scroll down properly.  In short, I must wait for the new computer to be formatted. I may be away for a few days.

My post on the Molière’s Princess of Ellis has been written. As a wrote, the princesse’s father has invited three princes in the hope his daughter would fall in love with one of them. She falls in love with the prince d’Ithaque who must ignore her in order to be loved by her. But her view of marriage prevents marrying. She compares marriage to death, which it is if a husband forces his wife into intercourse and pregnancies.

There is nothing wrong with making love and having children, but Molière recognized that marriage enslaved a woman unless a husband was very respectful of his wife’s privacy and intimacy.

Yet, most of us are almost nothing without “the other” and our beloved little ones.

So, we have at least two main themes:

1. love as jealousy.
2. marriage as enslavement and death.

The interludes feature an attack by a boar and an attack by a bear, but at the very beginning of the play, Molière has placed a carpe diem, or seize the day, as illnesses could be overwhelming and death was Pascal’s “last and bloody act.” “Le dernier acte est toujours sanglant.” The play is embedded in interludes: dancing, singing, and the start and the end are Les Plaisirs de l’Île enchantée (The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island).

La Princesse d’Élide is rooted in a play by Spanish author Moreto entitled Scorn for Scorn (El Desdén, con el desdén), (le dédain, le mépris).

Let this little post be.

Love to everyone

Jean-Baptiste Lully, Aria de “La Princesse d’Elide”
Carlos Jaime (violín barroco)

© Micheline Walker
11 October 2019
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