Lecture on the French Play.

Professor Bocher delivered a lecture on "Le Medecin Malgre Lui" yesterday afternoon. He said that Moliere compounded the plot from two stories that were current in his boyhood. Similar tales were common even as far back as the Sanskrit. The names of the characters are thoseth at Moliere kept on hand, and used in various plays for persons of the same general character: thus Geronte was always a disagreeable old man.

In the Cercle production the play is to be staged as Moliere himself produced it: There will be but one stage setting throughout and this will represent three different scenes at different times. At the right and left are the houses of Sganarelle and Geronte respectively, and at the back centre a woodland scene. According, then, as the actors enter from the back or from one of the houses, the scene will be the woods, or the interior of one of the houses. This stage setting, as has recently been discovered, was made necessary by the technical rules which governed French dramatists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but which were falling into disuse when Moliere wrote.