School for Wives November 10, 2006

Arnolphe has amused himself for years watching the men around him fall victim to the wiles and deceptions of their clever wives. He's having none of it. His brilliant plan, many years in the making, is to raise his young ward Agnes to be his wife. To that end he locked her away in a convent with a bare-bones education designed to keep her as innocent and ignorant as possible. Now he's ready to reap his reward and nothing -- not bumbling servants, a gallant young suitor, not even Agnes' awakening passion -- will stand in his way. Written just months after the playwright married a girl 20 years younger than himself, Moliere's 'School for Wives' (1662) reveals an artist and a man who has learned, perhaps the hard way, that youth and innocence are no guarantee of marital bliss.