Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622 – 1673), known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. I knew there was a spanking scene in at least one of his plays as I had a picture from The Imaginary Invalid (the black and white shot below) and I’d heard some reports about others. So I asked Harry if he knew anything about this subject and received the following typically brilliant response:
“The three Moliere plays in which I can securely document spankings are as follows:
Le Malade Imaginaire (The Hypochondriac/The Imaginary Invalid), which was his last play. In the course of the action, Argan, the hypochondriac of the title, decides he is going to chastise his daughter Louison.
She gets into position, but pretends to have died of fright and so evades punishment (or, preferably, has it cut short).
This is usually done as caning rather than spanking, with the girl bent over, but there is a sort of OTK version in this German production of 1999:
This is a video of another one in the same vein, but obviously very much better is the 2010 Australian student production at Rosny College!!
And this one wins the prize for cuteness!
Le Medecin Malgre Lui (The Doctor In Spite of Himself) is an earlier comedy. The first scene features Sganarelle the woodcutter and his wife Martine, who scolds him all the time until finally he takes a stick to her. In a 2009 US student production, this was done in the manner we best enjoy; the attractive photo was used on the college’s website to publicize the show.
And here is a rather feeble video version of the Medecin Malgre Lui spanking
But (IMO) the best of the lot is the spanking scene in this 2005 Italian production of Moliere’s penultimate play, Les Femmes Savantes, (The Learned Ladies) also known as Le Intellettuali.
I’ve had the above shot for a while but have only just found it in good quality.
The spanking seems to be an interpolation into the production, directed by Arture Cirillo: the characters are Clitandre (Michelangelo Dalisi) and Amanda (Monica Piseddu, below) and the production toured Italy for two and a half years before closing, with the same cast throughout at least as far as the spanking is concerned.
This shot comes from a 2007 performance which I think may show understudies.
A feature of the production was the absurdly elaborate wigs the characters wore.
But when Amanda is spanked, her wig is off: it’s a bit like raising a girl’s skirt to spank her on her panties, revealing her in deshabille. (No doubt we would all like it if he raised her skirt too, but you get the point…)
A further selection of Le Medecin Malgre Lui pictures.
The Spank Statement 
‘Bottoms Up’, to that great French playwrite Moliere, for giving us at least three scenes of ‘spanking delight. “Vive La France.!
Wonderful collection and excellent research. Thanks for the link, Harry.
There are two parts to this comment, the first of which is specific to the Moliere post.
I’ve been doing some more research on the Malade Imaginaire (Imaginary Invalid) scene, in the hope of finding more versions which are done as OTK spanking rather than bent-over caning. Investigating this play turns out to have its perils, since some productions cast an obviously underage girl in the role of Louison (Louise in English language versions). I do not recommend these to anyone and I hope nobody who reads this will go looking for them (unless it’s purely and simply because they want to see a Moliere play, of course). Then there is one production where… well, we’ll come to that later.
Here’s a trailer for a 2013 production at Novgorod. It’s a collage of quick snippets, so you don’t get the whole scene, but it’s of interest because it the spanking, if it happened (and if we saw any more of the scene), would be an underarm carry and administered on Louison’s bloomers. Go directly to 1.30 for the spanking moment:
Here’s a full-length recording of a French production from Picardy in 2011. This is a well-posed OTK scene, but shot from a distance which rather dampens its impact. Go to 1.19.30 for the spanking sequence:
My last find also comes from France, from Tavaux in the east of the country. The production dates from 2003, and the video is even grainier. At one level the scene is an absolutely outstanding father-daughter spanking. Yes, this is one production where Louison does actually get spanked: it’s OTK with all four limbs off the ground and vigorously kicking legs, and it lasts for more than 30 seconds (and around 40 spanks, by hand) before she feigns dead – whereupon her father lifts her skirt and spanks her some more on her panties in an attempt to revive her! But DO NOT FOLLOW THE LINK until you have absorbed this prior warning that there is a major and obvious drawback in the casting of the role of Louison, and DO NOT FOLLOW THE LINK AT ALL if you think you may have difficulty suspending your disbelief:
What a shame: that would have been quite superb! But don’t say I didn’t warn you…
The second part of this comment is to express my growing concern about Valdor’s whereabouts and wellbeing. I last heard from him on February 6, and this blog was last updated on February 14. It is now around two months since I sent him some excellent new Fille material to post (some of which has since then left the internet), and it has been more than a month since my comment on the Fille post in which I asked him to get in touch to let us know he is OK. I guess that means he isn’t, which I’m very sorry to have to think.
Personal feelings aside, I’m also concerned about the future of this blog, which is about the only place on the net which is seriously dedicated to the intelligent coverage of spanking in the mainstream media: it’s not adulterated by the promotion of specialist commercial interests, nor by a (to me) excessive and uninteresting attention to ‘the scene’ as a lifestyle choice, and it’s not in any significant sense a vehicle for anyone’s ego like some other blogs. As things stand, its continued existence depends on Valdor alone, so if Valdor is unable to go on with it or is no longer interested, then we have lost something valuable.
If the Spank Statement is dead (and I very much hope it isn’t), then it might be worth our while to consider creating something that will fulfill a comparable function, but will not be dependent upon the continuing enthusiasm and vitality of any one person. I shall not have time to give this any serious thought until later in the summer, but if Paul, Martyn or Michael (to name the obvious people) have any thoughts or ideas, I would be interested in hearing from them. You can contact me at my yahoo.com email, where my username is solicitus.
However, I should make it clear from the outset that I don’t wish to hear from, and will not enter discussions with, anyone wanting to set up (for example) some kind of private offline trading network. My bottom line is that, if we do need to create a successor to this blog, it should be something that is free of charge, accessible by all, contributed to by all who have something to offer and for the benefit of all whether or not they have anything to contribute.
Harry
Vive la fessee, indeed, Moliere or otherwise! I second that. Sorry to hear that the future of Spanking Statement is precarious. Let’s hope that someone springs to the rescue. I always look forward to the occasional titillation it brings on my morning inbox.
FJ
I now take the further opportunity to post some updates on the husband-wife spanking in Le Medecin Malgre Lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself). Again this is a scene that is often played as a cudgelling but sometimes as a spanking.
This is one case where modern sensibilities may work for us. In Le Malade Imaginaire, the spanking is often glossed over because father-daughter spanking is now frowned upon (I have even seen the business replaced with tickling), but in this play a spanking arguably makes better sense than any more extreme beating, because when another character intervenes to stop it, Martine retorts that she wants her husband to beat her. So it’s partly marital play, rather like Zerlina’s ‘Batti batti’ in Don Giovanni, which is also sometimes interpreted nowadays as ‘Spank me, spank me’!
And so to my Moliere finds, which begin underwhelming and get even more underwhelming, but hold on and you’ll be rewarded eventually…
This is from a 2010 production at the Gymnase, a theater in Paris whose stage previously featured another spanking scene (in a modern play) in 1954. That was a good OTK scene, whereas this spanking is an underarm bent-over job, and though the husband is initially armed with a carpet beater, he throws it down and uses the good old flat of the hand on the seat of her skirt. Go directly to 1.30 for the spanking action:
Here’s one from Nice in 2012, another underarm job, from 1.00:
Now for an amateur production from California, with English dialogue, and a singularly inept spanking at 3.30:
After that mess you’ll want to see it done properly, won’t you? Well, you won’t see any spanks land in this extract from a very recent (May 2014) production from Mantes-la-Ville not far from Paris. It’s only about a second long, but it’s still a very, very exciting second! Go to 0.32:
Now that’s a version I’d like to see in full!
As an antidote to the ‘blink and you miss it’ effect, let’s finish with a still photograph, adorning a review of another 2012 production, and again Martine is being properly spanked across Sganarelle’s knee:
http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2012/08/07/1414511 caussade le medecin malgre lui revu et corrige.html
I don’t think there will be a third follow up on Les Femmes Savantes, because that excellent spanking scene with Monica Piseddu was only a bit of business added to the Italian production.
Harry
And I’ve just noticed that, in the final link, the hyphens have all been mysteriously converted to blank spaces, with the result that (a) only the first part of the link is coded as a link, and (b) it leads to ‘Page introuvable’. Cut and paste the two lines into your browser and insert hyphens before the words ‘caussade’ through to ‘corrige’; this should take you to the desired page.
Sorry!
Harry