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 TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: January 15
Birth of Moliere [Jean Baptiste Poquelin]

One of his characters has become shorthand for a certain kind of person. Just as Dickens gave the world Scrooge for all tight-fisted misers and Shakespeare gave us Romeo as the name for all romantic male lovers, so Molière has given us Tartuffe, a person defined by the OED as a ‘hypocritical pretender to religion, or, by extension, to excellence of any kind’ (first cited in 1688).

 

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