The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (14 page)

Molière hardly slackened his theatrical activity, however. Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in 1622 to a prosperous upholsterer, Molière had left home to become an actor in 1643, joining forces with the Béjart family. He cofounded the troupe known as the Illustre Théâtre and toured the French provinces (1645–58), writing plays and acting in them. After his troupe was established in a permanent theatre in Paris under the patronage of Louis XIV, he won acclaim in the court and among bourgeois audiences for his comedy
Les Précieuses ridicules
(1659;
The Affected Young Ladies
). His other major plays include
L'École des femmes
(1662;
The School for Wives
),
Tartuffe
(1664; initially banned by religious authorities),
Le Misanthrope
(1666), and
Le Malade imaginaire
(1673;
The Imaginary Invalid
), among others. His plays represent a portrait of all levels of 17th-century French society and are marked by their good-humoured and intelligent mockery of human vices, vanities, and
follies. Taken ill during a performance in February 1673, he died of a hemorrhage within a day. As he had not been given the sacraments or the opportunity of formally renouncing the actor's profession, he was buried without ceremony.

Racine, after having made off with Thérèse du Parc in 1665, saw her star in his successful
Andromaque
(1667), which explored his theme of the tragic folly of passionate love. The three-act comedy
Les Plaideurs
(1668;
The Litigants
) offered Racine the opportunity to demonstrate his skill in Molière's privileged domain, as well as the occasion to display his expertise in Greek, of which he had better command than almost any nonprofessional classicist in France. The result, a brilliant satire of the French legal system, was an adaptation of Aristophanes'
The Wasps
that found much more favour at court than on the Parisian stage. The great tragedies
Britannicus
(1669),
Bérénice
(1670), and
Bajazet
(1672) followed.
Bérénice
marked the decisive point in Racine's theatrical career, for with this play he found a felicitous combination of elements that he would use, without radical alteration, for the rest of his secular tragedies: a love interest, a relatively uncomplicated plot, striking rhetorical passages, and a highly poetic use of time.

Phèdre
(1677) is Racine's supreme accomplishment because of the rigour and simplicity of its organization, the emotional power of its language, and the profusion of its images and meanings. Racine presents Phaedra as consumed by an incestuous passion for her stepson, Hippolytus. Receiving false information that her husband, King Theseus, is dead, Phaedra declares her love to Hippolytus, who is horrified. Theseus returns and is falsely informed that Hippolytus has been the aggressor toward Phaedra. Theseus invokes the aid of the god Neptune to destroy his son, after which Phaedra kills herself out of guilt and
sorrow. A structural pattern of cycles and circles in
Phèdre
reflects a conception of human existence as essentially changeless, recurrent, and therefore asphyxiatingly tragic. The play constitutes a daring representation of the contagion of sin and its catastrophic results. After writing his masterpiece, Racine retired to become official historian to Louis XIV. His final plays,
Esther
(1689) and
Athalie
(1691), were commissioned by the king's wife, Mme de Maintenon. Racine died in 1699 from cancer of the liver.

(b. 1640?, Harbledown?, Kent, Eng.—d. April 16, 1689, London)

A
phra Behn, an English dramatist, fiction writer, and poet, was the first Englishwoman known to earn her living by writing. Her origin remains a mystery, in part because Behn may have deliberately obscured her early life. One tradition identifies Behn as the child known only as Ayfara or Aphra, who traveled in the 1650s with a couple named Amis to Suriname, which was then an English possession. She was more likely the daughter of a barber, Bartholomew Johnson, who may or may not have sailed with her and the rest of her family to Suriname in 1663. She returned to England in 1664 and married a merchant named Behn; he died (or the couple separated) soon after. Her wit and talent having brought her into high esteem, she was employed by King Charles II in secret service in the Netherlands in 1666. Unrewarded and briefly imprisoned for debt, she began to write to support herself.

Behn's early works were tragicomedies in verse. In 1670 her first play,
The Forc'd Marriage
, was produced, and
The Amorous Prince
followed a year later. Her sole tragedy,
Abdelazer
, was staged in 1676. However, she turned increasingly to light comedy and farce over the course of the
1670s. Many of these witty and vivacious comedies, notably
The Rover
(two parts, produced 1677 and 1681), were commercially successful.
The Rover
depicts the adventures of a small group of English Cavaliers in Madrid and Naples during the exile of the future Charles II.
The Emperor of the Moon
, first performed in 1687, presaged the harlequinade, a form of comic theatre that evolved into the English pantomime.

Though Behn wrote many plays, her fiction today draws more interest. Her short novel
Oroonoko
(1688) tells the story of an enslaved African prince whom Behn claimed to have known in South America. Its engagement with the themes of slavery, race, and gender, as well as its influence on the development of the English novel, helped to make it, by the turn of the 21st century, her best-known work. Behn's other fiction includes the multipart epistolary novel
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
(1684–87) and
The Fair Jilt
(1688).

Behn's versatility, like her output, was immense; she wrote other popular works of fiction, and she often adapted works by older dramatists. She also wrote poetry, the bulk of which was collected in
Poems upon Several Occasions, with A Voyage to the Island of Love
(1684) and
Lycidus; or, The Lover in Fashion
(1688). Behn's charm and generosity won her a wide circle of friends, and her relative freedom as a professional writer, as well as the subject matter of her works, made her the object of some scandal.

(b. 1644, Ueno, Iga province, Japan—d. Nov. 28, 1694,
Ō
saka)

B
ash
ō
is the supreme Japanese haiku poet. He greatly enriched the 17-syllable haiku form and made it an accepted medium of artistic expression.

Interested in haiku from an early age, Bash
ō
—in full Matsuo Bash
ō
, a pseudonym of Matsuo Munefusa—at first put his literary interests aside and entered the service of a local feudal lord. After his lord's death in 1666, however, Bash
ō
abandoned his samurai (warrior) status to devote himself to poetry. Moving to the capital city of Edo (now Tokyo), he gradually acquired a reputation as a poet and critic. In 1679 he wrote his first verse in the “new style” for which he came to be known:

On a withered branch

A crow has alighted
:

Nightfall in autumn
.

The simple descriptive mood evoked by this statement and the comparison and contrast of two independent phenomena became the hallmark of Bash
ō
's style. He attempted to go beyond the stale dependence on form and ephemeral allusions to current gossip that had been characteristic of haiku, which in his day had amounted to little but a popular literary pastime. Instead he insisted that the haiku must be at once unhackneyed and eternal. Following the Zen philosophy he studied, Bash
ō
attempted to compress the meaning of the world into the simple pattern of his poetry, disclosing hidden hopes in small things and showing the interdependence of all objects.

In 1684 Bash
ō
made the first of many journeys that figure so importantly in his work. His accounts of his travels are prized not only for the haiku that record various sights along the way but also for the equally beautiful prose passages that furnish the backgrounds.
Oku no hosomichi
(1694;
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
), describing his visit to northern Japan, is one of the loveliest works of Japanese literature.

On his travels Bash
ō
also met local poets and competed with them in composing the linked verse (
renga
), an art in which he so excelled that some critics believe his
renga
were his finest work. When Bash
ō
began writing
renga
the link between successive verses had generally depended on a pun or play on words, but he insisted that poets must go beyond mere verbal dexterity and link their verses by “perfume,” “echo,” “harmony,” and other delicately conceived criteria.

One term frequently used to describe Bash
ō
's poetry is
sabi
, which means the love of the old, the faded, and the unobtrusive, a quality found in the verse

Scent of chrysanthemums
…

And in Nara

All the ancient Buddhas
.

Here the musty smell of the chrysanthemums blends with the visual image of the dusty, flaking statues in the old capital. Living a life that was in true accord with the gentle spirit of his poetry, Bash
ō
maintained an austere, simple hermitage that contrasted with the general flamboyance of his times. On occasion he withdrew from society altogether, retiring to Fukagawa, site of his Bash
ō
-an (“Cottage of the Plantain Tree”), a simple hut from which the poet derived his pen name. Later men, honouring both the man and his poetry, revered him as the saint of the haiku.

The Narrow Road to Oku
(1996), Donald Keene's translation of
Oku no hosomichi
, provides the original text and a modern-language version by Kawabata Yasunari.
The Monkey's Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry of the Basho School
(1981), a translation by Earl Miner and Hiroko Odagiri, presents a celebrated linked-verse sequence in which Bash
ō
took part, along with a commentary.

(b. Nov. 12, 1651?, San Miguel Nepantla, Viceroyalty of New Spain [now in Mexico]—d. April 17, 1695, Mexico City)

T
he poet, dramatist, scholar, and nun who came to be known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was an outstanding writer of the Latin American colonial period and of the Hispanic Baroque.

Juana Ramírez de Asbaje was born out of wedlock to a family of modest means in either 1651 or, according to a baptismal certificate, 1648. Her mother was a Creole and her father Spanish. Juana's mother sent the gifted child to live with relatives in Mexico City. There her prodigious intelligence attracted the attention of the viceroy, Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, marquis de Mancera. He invited her to court as a lady-in-waiting in 1664 and later had her knowledge tested by some 40 noted scholars. In 1667, given what she called her “total disinclination to marriage” and her wish “to have no fixed occupation which might curtail my freedom to study,” Sor (Spanish: “Sister”) Juana began her life as a nun with a brief stay in the order of the Discalced Carmelites. She moved in 1669 to the more lenient Convent of Santa Paula of the Hieronymite order in Mexico City, and there she took her vows.

Convent life afforded Sor Juana time to study and write and the opportunity to teach music and drama to the girls in Santa Paula's school. She also functioned as the convent's archivist and accountant. In her convent cell, Sor Juana amassed one of the largest private libraries in the New World, together with a collection of musical and scientific instruments. The patronage of the viceroy and vicereine of New Spain, notably that of the marquis and marquise de la Laguna from 1680 to 1688, helped her maintain her exceptional freedom. They visited her, favoured her, and had her works published in Spain. For her part,
Sor Juana, though cloistered, became the unofficial court poet in the 1680s.

Sor Juana was the last great writer of the Hispanic Baroque and the first great exemplar of colonial Mexican culture. She employed all of the poetic models then in fashion, including sonnets, romances (ballad form), and so on. She drew on a vast stock of Classical, biblical, philosophical, and mythological sources. She wrote moral, satiric, and religious lyrics, along with many poems of praise to court figures. Though it is impossible to date much of her poetry, it is clear that, even after she became a nun, Sor Juana wrote secular love lyrics. She also authored both allegorical religious dramas and entertaining cloak-and-dagger plays. Notable in the popular vein are the
villancicos
(carols) that she composed to be sung in the cathedrals of Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca.

Sor Juana celebrated woman as the seat of reason and knowledge rather than passion. Her poem
Hombres necios
(“Foolish Men”) accuses men of the illogical behaviour that they criticize in women. Her many love poems in the first person show a woman's
desengaño
(“disillusionment”) with love, given the strife, pain, jealousy, and loneliness that it occasions. Sor Juana's most significant full-length plays involve the actions of daring, ingenious women. Sor Juana also occasionally wrote of her native Mexico. The short play that introduces her religious drama
El divino Narciso
(1689;
The Divine Narcissus
, in a bilingual edition) blends the Aztec and Christian religions. Her various carols contain an amusing mix of Nahuatl (a Mexican Indian language) and Hispano-African and Spanish dialects. Sor Juana's most important and most difficult poem, known as the
Primero sueño
(1692;
First Dream
), is both personal and universal. The date of its writing is unknown. It employs the convoluted poetic forms of the Baroque to recount the torturous quest of the soul for knowledge.