Twentieth-century literary critics have lingered over what Molière’s theatre did or did not owe to farce. This chapter will demonstrate that it was above all as company leader that Molière inherited from a tradition governing actors’ training and the organisation of theatrical work that had been in place since the fifteenth century. The legal structure that framed the commercial activity of his troupe as well as its professional practices was that of the medieval societas, used by farce players to organise their activity from the end of the Middle Ages onwards. In the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the companies thus constituted were also places where actors were trained. Numerous contracts have survived relating to the apprenticeship of a young person to an actor or a troupe established as a societas. From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, the other place where training in performance was given was in the Basoche: a professional community of legal clerks who learned techniques of eloquence, rhetoric and verbal expression. And Molière inherited too from this cultural heritage that was shared by the legal and theatrical worlds.

Brothers often chose to remain together after their father's death, sharing the house and its furnishings, while pursuing common or separate enterprises. Such practices accorded well with advice and aspirations for continued family sharing. However, brothers' contributions were not so easily balanced, and eventually many fraternal households came to a division of assets, for which legal personnel, notaries and lawyers, were essential. Liabilities, which had nominally been shared while together, were also subject to division or denial. Jurists demanded an absolute standard (no separate accounting of holdings, earnings, and expenses) in order to hold liabilities in common. Here the legal presumptions of individual ownership proved deep-seated.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book. It discusses the idea of kinship as a political concept within the specific context of modern civil war.