Antoine Jacob (1639, in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

– 1685, in Aix), known as Montfleury, was a French

actor An actor or actress is a person who portrays a character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek term is (), li ...

, playwright and a rival of

Molière Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (, ; 15 January 1622 (baptised) – 17 February 1673), known by his stage name Molière (, , ), was a French playwright, actor, and poet, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the French language and worl ...

Life and works

Antoine Jacob was the son of

Zacharie Jacob Zacharie Jacob (died 1667), known as Montfleury, was a famed French actor and playwright of the 17th century. Jacob was born in Anjou during the last years of the 16th century. He was enrolled as one of the pages to the duc de Guise, but he ...

, who was the first to adopt Montfleury as a stage name and had achieved great fame as an actor and playwright himself. Both were associated with the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre troupe, an institution supported by King

Louis XIV , house = Bourbon , father = Louis XIII , mother = Anne of Austria , birth_date = , birth_place = Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France , death_date = , death_place = Palace of Ver ...

, and Antoine was to marry Marie-Marguerite de Soulas, daughter of the comedian

Floridor Josias de Soûlas, known as "Floridor", Sieur de Prinefosse (c.1608-14 August 1671) was a French actor.J. Fransen, Les Comédiens français en Hollande au XVII* et au XVIII «siècle. Paris, librairie Honoré Champion, 4925. JSTOR "Mais ce que l'on ...

in same troupe in 1665. Antoine worked as a lawyer at first and turned to drama in 1660. His first productions, ''Le Mariage de rien'' (The void marriage) and ''Les Bestes raisonnables'' (The Reasoning Beasts), were the kind of one act farces that were fashionable at the time. The latter allowed him to satirise contemporary society. On the isle of

Circe Circe (; grc, , ) is an enchantress and a minor goddess in ancient Greek mythology and religion. She is either a daughter of the Titan Helios and the Oceanid nymph Perse or the goddess Hecate and Aeëtes. Circe was renowned for her vas ...

, Ulysses encounters the beasts she has transformed from humans: an ass that was once a doctor, a lion that had been a valet, a female doe and a horse, all of whom denounce the decadence of the times and resist being changed back. For the ass there are asses everywhere, ::::Asses in the town square, asses in the suburbs, ::::Asses in the provinces, asses proud at court, ::::Asses browsing in the meadows, military asses trooping, ::::Asses tripping it at balls, asses in the theatre stalls. To drive the criticism home, in the end it is only the horse, formerly a courtesan, who is willing to return to her former state. His first play to bring him to notice, however, was another satirical one-act verse drama, ''The Impromptu of the Hôtel de Condé'' (1663), written as a tit-for-tat response to one by Molière that had mocked his father Zacharie. The latter would subsequently deepen the feud, shortly before his own death, by accusing Molière of

incest Incest ( ) is human sexual activity between family members or close relatives. This typically includes sexual activity between people in consanguinity (blood relations), and sometimes those related by affinity (marriage or stepfamily), adopti ...

. Antoine went on to make his name as a playwright with ''La Femme juge et partie'' (1669), which ran simultaneously with ''

Tartuffe ''Tartuffe, or The Impostor, or The Hypocrite'' (; french: Tartuffe, ou l'Imposteur, ), first performed in 1664, is a theatrical comedy by Molière. The characters of Tartuffe, Elmire, and Orgon are considered among the greatest classical thea ...

'' and was accorded the respect of an equal work by contemporaries, although Montfleury remained committed to the situational comedy of Spanish theatre styles while Molière was recreating the Italian

comedy of manners In English literature, the term comedy of manners (also anti-sentimental comedy) describes a genre of realistic, satirical comedy of the Restoration period (1660–1710) that questions and comments upon the manners and social conventions of a gr ...

in a French mold. Having produced a play more or less annually between 1660 and 1678, he turned tax collector in Provence with such success that in 1684 he was recalled to Paris to receive the post of Farmer General but died on the journey.Much biographical information is taken from the introduction by Elodie Bérenard to ''Le Gentilhomme de Beauce'', Sorbonne University 2004/5
pp. 2–6
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References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Jacob, Antoine 1640 births 1685 deaths Male actors from Paris French male stage actors Writers from Paris 17th-century French dramatists and playwrights 17th-century French male writers 17th-century French male actors French male dramatists and playwrights