When Moliere and his company of actors first performed Les Precieuses Ridicule before the court in 1659, they were relatively unknown. They had spent the last twelve years traveling the provinces, performing original dramas and commedia dell'arte scenarios in taverns, inns, market places, and the occasional barn. It was this play that brought them widespread public acclaim and led to their receiving royal patronage from King Louis XIV.

Le Marriage Force came five years later, after Moliere was already established as one of Louis' favorite dramatists. This play is closer in spirit to the commedia plays of the troupe's itinerant days. It was also performed in the Louvre, but this time in the Queen Mother's apartment. As was typical of the day, Louis XIV and his court joined the actors on-stage for the ballet interludes. The King even went so far as to accompany them on a tambourine.

Two Precious Maidens chronicles the comeuppance of a pair of provincial cousins drunk on aristocratic airs and courtier romances. In reprisal, their snubbed suitors disguise their valets as fobs and send them a-wooing.

In The Forced Marriage, a middle-aged bourgeois attempts to escape from his young fiancé after realizing he's doomed to be a cuckold. He stumbles through a maze of babbling philosophers and conniving fortune-tellers before his betrothed's deranged brother offers him a choice: marriage or death.