Regnard, Jean-François (1655-1709). French comic playwright; a widely travelled author, whose early experiences included eight months of slavery in Algiers, fictionalized in La Provençale (1731). Regnard began his dramatic career in 1688, when his Le Divorce was performed at the Comédie-Italienne. He wrote 11 comedies for the Italiens, including four in collaboration with Dufresny. Their collaboration ended in 1696, when they quarrelled over the paternity of the outline of a play about a gambler. Regnard's Le Joueur, written in five acts in verse (unusual at this time) was accepted and performed by the Comédie-Française, but Dufresny's subsequent play, Le Chevalier joueur, met with little acclaim. Between 1696 and 1708, Regnard wrote eleven plays for the Comédie-Française.
Along with Le Joueur and Les Folies amoureuses (1704), his best-known play is Le Légataire universel (1708). Its form is classical, but like all his plays for the Comédie-Française, it bears the imprint of Regnard's career with the Italiens, such as the use of disguises, puns, lazzi, and scenes tangential to the plot. From his own day onwards, Regnard has been regarded as the best dramatist of his generation, but performances of his plays have dwindled since the mid-19th c. His verse has always been praised for its wit and musicality. But until the latter half of the 20th c. his work suffered from an inappropriate comparison with Molière's, based on the misconception that his disinterested, schematic, and fantasized portrayal of human behaviour, his ludicrous, loosely structured, and often inconclusive plots, his caricatural characters, his ‘borrowings’ and quotations from classical playwrights, and his propensity for including burlesque and (sometimes scabrous) jokes at every opportunity denoted frivolity, cynicism, or an inability (or refusal) to take a moral stance. Recent criticism (e.g. Dorothy Medlin's The Verbal Art of Jean-François Regnard, 1966) has seen his achievement more positively.
— John Dunkley
