Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as Moliere, is an important figure in European literature and drama, whose plays are still taught and performed throughout the world. Locating his life and work in the social, literary and theatrical contexts of the period, Virginia Scott offers a narrative account of Moliere's life and an overview of his plays in the wider setting of the development of seventeenth-century French drama. This full-length biography is the first to be written about Moliere in English since 1930.