A Study Guide to the Tartuffe
The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to be an educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any production at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival s stages. Insights is published by the, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, communications director and editor; Phil Hermansen, art director. Copyright 2011,. Please feel free to download and print Insights, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the. For more information about Festival education programs: 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah 84720 435-586-7880 www.bard.org. Cover photo: Michele Farr (left) and Robert Machray in Tartuffe, 1993
Tartuffe Contents Information on the Play Synopsis 4 Characters 5 About the Playwright 6 Scholarly Articles on the Play Slithering Between Illusion and Reality 8 A Memorable Imposter 9 Attacking Hypocrisy, Not Religion 12 3
Synopsis: Tartuffe Madame Pernelle is visiting her son Orgon s house and uses the opportunity to criticize all the members of the household and to praise their boarder, Tartuffe, because he is a man of such holiness and zeal. The others object to Tartuffe, maintaining that he is false and hypocritical, but Madame Pernelle will not entertain such thoughts. Instead, as she leaves, she admonishes everyone to follow Tartuffe s precepts. After Madame Pernelle leaves, Cléante, who is Orgon s brother-in-law, and Dorine, Orgon s daughter s maid, discuss the situation and their boarder and agree that Tartuffe has beguiled not only Madame Pernelle, but Orgon as well. Orgon s son, Damis, adds to the situation by wondering out loud if his father, after being influenced by Tartuffe, will still allow his daughter, Mariane, to marry her love, Valère. Damis is also concerned because he wants to marry Valère s sister; thus he asks Cléante to question Orgon about his earlier promise to allow the marriage to take place. Orgon arrives and seems much more concerned about the welfare of Tartuffe than anything else around him, including his wife s illness. Cléante tries to discuss Tartuffe with Orgon, but fails and discovers that Orgon is only interested in singing Tartuffe s praises. When he questions Orgon about the intended wedding, he dodges the issues and refuses to give a direct answer; however, when his daughter arrives, Orgon tells her that he wants to ally Tartuffe with his house and that this can best be done by Mariane s marrying Tartuffe. Mariane is so shocked that she cannot believe her ears. After Orgon departs, Dorine, the maid, reprimands Mariane for not having refused to marry Tartuffe. Mariane s beloved, Valère, arrives and accuses her of consenting to the marriage. Dorine listens to them argue and then, after they are reconciled, promises to help them expose Tartuffe s hypocrisy. Damis, incensed about Tartuffe, is also determined to reveal Tartuffe s hypocrisy, and, as he hears Tartuffe s approach, he hides in the closest. Elmire, Orgon s wife, arrives, and Tartuffe, thinking they are alone, makes some professions of love to her and suggests that they become lovers. Having heard Tartuffe s plans, Damis reveals himself and threatens to expose Tartuffe. When Orgon arrives, Damis tries to inform his father about Tartuffe s proposition, but Orgon is so blind that he thinks his own son is evil in trying to defame Tartuffe s good name and he immediately disinherits his son. As Orgon and Tartuffe leave, Orgon reveals his plans to make Tartuffe his sole heir and also his son-in-law. Cléante later confronts Tartuffe and tries to reason with him, but Tartuffe will only respond in religious clichés, and, as soon as the opportunity presents itself, he hastily excuses himself from the room. Orgon and Elmire arrive, and when she hears Orgon s plans, she extracts a promise from him to hide in some concealed place and observe Tartuffe s actions. Orgon consents, and Elmire sends for Tartuffe. When he arrives, he is accosted by Elmire, and soon he begins to make not only declarations of love to her but also derogatory comments about Orgon. Finally convinced of Tartuffe s hypocrisy, Orgon emerges and orders him from the household. Tartuffe then reveals that legally he is now the owner of the house, since Orgon has signed over all his property. Alone with his wife, Orgon reveals that he is frightened because, earlier, he had entrusted some secret documents to Tartuffe s care--documents which could ruin Orgon s trusted position in the court. When Orgon s mother arrives, he cannot convince her that Tartuffe is a hypocrite; it is only when news arrives that Tartuffe is having the entire family evicted that Madame Pernelle is convinced. Tartuffe brings with him officers of the court, but, as the family is about to be evicted, an officer reveals that the king has seen through the hypocrisy of Tartuffe and has ordered him to be imprisoned for this and for other crimes. The king has also restored to Orgon all his rightful property. 4
Characters: Tartuffe MADAME PERNELLE, Orgon s mother, is totally deluded by Tartuffe until near the end of the play. ORGON, husband of Elmire, son of Madame Pernelle, and father of Mariane and Damis, is the central character of the play and comes entirely under the influence of the hypocrite Tartuffe. Yet, whereas Tartuffe is the obvious hypocrite and scoundrel, Orgon is a much more complex character. Thus, Orgon s religious fanaticism seems more directly correlated to his basic nature, which is characterized by Cléante as being extravagant and uncontrolled in all respects. Thus, having once adopted a life of piety, Orgon tries to become the epitome of the pious person and goes to absurd extremes both in his words and deeds. In contrast, when he discovers the hypocrisy of Tartuffe, he reverses himself and determines to hate and persecute all pious men. ELMIRE, Orgon s second wife, is reasonable and represents the opposite of her husband throughout most of the play. DAMIS, Orgon s son and Elmire s stepson, uses his common sense to see through Tartuffe, but when he tries to prove him a hypocrite to his father, he is disinherited. MARIANE, Orgon s daughter, is in love with Valère and is being forced by her father to marry Tartuffe. VALÈRE, Mariane s suitor, is rejected by Orgon in favor of Tartuffe. CLÉANTE, Orgon s brother-in-law, tries, usually unsuccessfully, to get everyone to view things with calm and reason. TARTUFFE, a hypocrite, is a superb scoundrel who can don any pose and become a master of it. As a religious ascetic, he convinces Orgon and Madame Pernelle that he is a devoutly pious and humble man; his obvious hypocrisy, however, is apparent to the audience. Tartuffe s superiority lies in the fact that he can accurately analyze the weaknesses of his victims and then exploit these flaws for his own advantage. He is no simple or ignorant charlatan; instead, he is an alert and adept hypocrite who uses every means to bring about his success. DORINE, Mariane s maid, is a stock character found in many of Molière s comedies and, in fact, has become a type found in comedies of all periods. She is the wise servant who sees through all pretense, and, while being the inferior in terms of social position, she is the superior in any contest of wits. 5
About the Playwright: Moliere From Insights, 1993 Molière is generally considered to have been the greatest comic dramatist of France and the author of some of the most brilliant comedies in all of theatrical history. His real name was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, and he was born in Paris in l622, the son of an upholsterer who prospered by rendering his services to the French court. Educated at a Jesuit school where he was graded as an excellent scholar, the young Jean-Baptiste declined to take up his father s vocation, flirted with a study of law, and fell in with a troupe of players with whom he acted for thirteen years through the provincial towns of France, often in skits of his own authorship derived from old Italian comedies and stock farces which later, in Paris, he quickly polished and expanded into the plays that have come down to us. It was during this early career as an actor that he adopted the name Molière. In l658 his troupe came to Paris and had a chance to appear before King Louis XIV and his court. They began their performance with a short poetic tragedy of Corneille. The troupe was so much more suited to comedy than to the bombastic tragic style of the time that the reception was disastrous--until Molière modestly introduced a farce of his own, The Doctor in Love, and theatrical history was made. Molière and his company (of which he was the leading actor, director, manager, and playwright) immediately were taken up by the court and subsequently quickly became a popular success throughout the country. During the next fifteen years, until his death form overwork, Molière poured out his great stream of twenty-seven plays, acted in them, directed them, and choreographed them--for he combined many of the plays with music and ballet to achieve a unification of all theatrical arts in a form that did not continue after his death but flowered again in opera l25 years later, and in American musical comedies 300 years later. Molière enjoyed such royal support from King Louis XIV that on several occasions when his plays were premiering at court the king participated in them, acting small roles and in some cases dancing in the ballets. The king was a great ally (he even stood as godfather to Molière s second child), and protected Molière and his troupe from the wrath evoked by their scathing portraits of French society. In the nineteenth century, the English historian Lord Morley commented that the best claim to lasting fame of Louis XIV was the protection he extended to Molière. Molière saw to it that comedy came to rival tragedy in importance in French theatre. The best known of his plays today are The Affected Young Ladies (l658), which was the first modern social satire, holding up to ridicule the affectations of the overly-elegant women of courtly society of the time; The School for Wives (l662), a sequel to The School for Husbands that was even even more successful than the predecessor; Tartuffe (l664), the masterpiece that so vividly painted a hypocrite that the character s name has become a synonym for hypocrisy in all languages; The Misanthrope (l666), a truly original play, an illustrious portrait of a man of integrity; The Doctor in Spite of Himself (l666); The Miser (l668); The Would-Be Gentleman (l67l); The Learned Ladies (l672); and The Imaginary Invalid (l673), which was presented by the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 1989, the inaugural season of the Randall L. Jones Theatre. These plays are still presented with great frequency in the United States and other Englishspeaking countries, and they are standard fare in France today, especially at the Comédie Francaise, the greatest national theatre of modern France, which was founded soon after Molière s death by the joining of his own company with two others. In honor of the towering dramatist, the Comédie Francaise is often called the House of Molière. The Imaginary Invalid was not only Molière s last play, but a turning of his slapstick upon 6
himself as a man who felt himself to be really ill, and probably dying, but who could not be sure that he was not hypochondriacally deluding himself about his health. In 1673, during his fourth performance in the comedy s title role, Molière proved he wasn t imagining himself to be sick by falling into a convulsion and dying later that night. Other Molière plays include The Deaf One (1658), Lover s Spite (1658), The Tiresome Ones (1661), Don Garcia of Navarre (1661), On Criticism of the School for Wives (1662), The Impromptu of Versailles (1663), The Forced Marriage (1664), The Princess of Elide (1664), Don Juan (1665), Love Is the Doctor (1665), The Sicilian (1667), George Dandin (1668), Amphitryon (1668), Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669), Psyche (1671), and The Rascalities of Scapin (1671). 7
Slithering Between Illusion and Reality Some translations subtitle Tartuffe the Hypocrite ; others, the Impostor. Either way, the title character of Molière s 1664 comedy of humors slithers between what is and what appears to be. While illusion and reality constitute a universal theme of literature, the particularly appropriate metaphor by which Molière labels his sanctimonious fraud adds a tantalizing dimension to Tartuffe s black, subtle, subterranean soul. His very name bespeaks a linguistic history that associates hidden meanings, trifling, cheating, falsehood, and hypocrisy with a mysterious underground fungus. The name Tartuffe means truffle --unfortunately, not the chocolate kind. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites the first use of truffle for a chocolate confection in the 1926-27 U.S. Army and Navy Stores Catalog. The truffle Molière knew is a subterranean fungus of knobby, shriveled appearance, which cannot be located by sight or logic, but only, as John Evelyn wrote in 1644, by an hogg train d to it. Even now, wrote gastronome Craig Claiborne in the 1970 Time-Life volume of Classic French Cooking, no one knows exactly how they grow, and no one has been able to cultivate them successfully (53). Truffles were introduced, along with mushrooms, into French cuisine by Catherine de Medici in the sixteenth century and elevated to their current elegant status by La Varenne, a chef whose culinary creations delighted Molière s king, Louis XIV. In fact, more than once Louis adorned festivities for which La Varenne oversaw the cuisine and Molière the entertainment. Tartuffe derives from provincial Italian forms similar to tartoufli, little truffle, which in German became Kartoffel, potato, another product of the mysterious underground. As a common noun, tartuffe entered the English language shortly after the production of Molière s play as an epithet meaning a hypocritical pretender, especially to religion. The OED cites a character, Tartuffo, from an Italian play, as perhaps Molière s source and states that both Old French and Italian used their respective cognates to mean truffle, the subterranean fungus, or by extension any hidden production like a potato or a hypocrite. Molière s aptly named Tartuffe, like the lowly fungus, is the center of attention even when not in sight. Prior to his humble, penitent appearance, he has been the exclusive topic of conversation--sometimes cautionary, sometimes caustic--between the grandmother and the rest of the family, the brother-in-law and the maid, the daughter and her stepmother, the stepmother and her brother, the son and the maid, the daughter and her beloved, and everybody and the myopic, monomaniacal father, Orgon. Only Orgon and his mother fail to sniff out the black fungus, Tartuffe, who consequently trifles with their purses and affections. ince before Molière s time, the French have honored the aphrodisiac properties of truffles. Brillat- Savarin, author of The Physiology of Taste, wrote in 1725, Whosoever pronounces the word truffle gives voice to... erotic and gastronomical dreams equally in the sex that wears skirts and the one that sprouts a beard (96). He set out to investigate the amorous effect of truffles and found them a believable excuse for risqué behavior. Appropriately, Molière gave Tartuffe a raging propensity for the flesh. The first English use of truffle was a verb meaning to cozen, to cheat, to deceive, to fool. Trifle, as in trifle with one s affections, showed variant spellings with u in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, when it was adapted from an Old French word meaning mockery, trumpery, and the fungus. Tartuffe s attempted seduction of Elmire could be called trifling or truffling with her, just as he truffled with Orgon s generosity and trust or as he nearly tartuffed them all. What better name for an impostor? It suited the nineteenth-century English enough to inspire tartufferie, tartuffism, tartuffian, and tartuffish to describe hypocrisy of various sorts. Ironically, the character Tartuffe remains hidden from the audience until Act 3, and the play proved so odious to both ecclesiastical and political authorities that it remained unproduced until 1669, five years after its completion. Thus, both the play and its title character smack of tartuffism or tartuffery --one as tartuffer, the other as tartuffee. 8
A Memorable Imposter By James Mills From Midsummer Magazine, 1993 Molière first presented Le Tartuffe at the Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle, a royal extravaganza held at Versailles under the auspices of Louis XIV, as the second featured play after his Princess of Elide. Performed on May 12, 1664, on the sixth day of the fête, under the title, Tartuffe or the Impostor, the unfinished three-act play initially received the king s approval, but not that of the church, which condemned its treatment of the subject of abuse and religious zeal by a confidence man and his victim (Hallam Walker, Molière [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1971], 81). Its portrayal of credulity, distorted faith, and blind obedience earned the censure of the archbishop of Paris, who was irate over its possible bad effects on society, as well as the disapproval of the Queen Mother, who similarly expressed her strong dismay. Molière was obliged to battle for the next five years against great odds to have his play accepted and was reduced to giving private readings because of legal sanctions against it. In an attempt to curry favor, he offered a revised version in five acts in 1665, which was rejected. In 1667 he presented another version under the title, Panulfe or the Impostor, in which he attempted to mollify his enemies by modifying Tartuffe s near clerical garb and changing his name to Panulfe. However, his efforts were in vain, for the play was suppressed by the archbishop of Paris who forbade involvement with it on pain of excommunication. It was not until 1669 that the present format was offered on stage in a published version with official approval at the Palais-Royal Theatre. Although scholars disagree as to what was contained in the earlier versions, most feel that they differed substantially from the 1669 play ( James F. Gaines, Social Structures in Molière s Theatre [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984], 199). It was during the Quarrel of Tartuffe that Molière came to realize that he was no longer able to count fully on the political backing of the king nor the moral support of the public (Ronald W. Tobin, Tarte à la crème Comedy and Gastronomy in Molière s Theatre [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990], 46). However, this period also witnessed the appearance of the masterpieces of his maturity: Dom Juan (1665),The Misanthrope (1666), Amphitryon (1668), George Dandin (1668), and The Miser (1668). Tartuffe is a contemporary play that mirrors the religious struggles of the seventeenth century. Only recently (1647-1650), there had been violent conflicts called Frondes during which religious groups sided with the various factions of nobles vying for power. And France still felt the repercussions of the bloody civil strife between Catholics and Huguenots that witnessed the massacres on Saint Bartholomew s Day in 1572 and continued in Molière s time with the ongoing harassment of the Protestants. The Jesuits continued to oppose the heretical Jansenists, a conflict whose fires had been recently stoked by Blaise Pascal s Provincial Letters (1656-1657) which served as an apologia for the Jansenists and as an indictment of the Jesuits. Gallicans, who sought greater French autonomy from Rome, opposed the Ultramontanists, who gave primary allegiance to the Pope. Quietists fought to worship in private without church control, while various cults practiced their secret rites, including black magic, at all levels of French society. Religion and politics were inextricably bound together, with the way to temporal power being ecclesiastical. Cardinal Richelieu had cemented that symbiotic relationship during the reign of Louis XIII, while Cardinal Mazarin, who had just died in 1661, had continued the centralization of power during the early ascendancy of the maturing Louis XIV. The sources for Tartuffe are unclear. Although Philip Wadsworth indicates that Flaminio Scala s Il Pedante, published in 1611, is the only serious source still considered, he nevertheless dismisses it and suggests instead that a novel by D Audiguier and a Spanish novella adapted in French by Scarron are more contemporary to Molière and offer many of the same features as those found in Tartuffe (Molière and the Italian Theatrical Tradition [French Literature Publications Company, 1977], 20-23). Molière spent fifteen years on the road working his early plays and sketches for commedia dell arte skits. The Italians and Spaniards taught him elegance and cynicism, as well as the use of disguises, trap 9
10 doors, stock characters, and mysterious happenings. Reflections of his formative training appear in Tartuffe in his use of such theatrical devises as Orgon hiding under the table, the clowning of Dorine, and the quarrel between Mariane and Valère. He made fun of royalty, criticized society, admired the common sense of the lower classes, saw the similarities in life, presented a nobility that was not always admirable, and offered his own views of life. Finely wrought comedy was for Molière a disrespectful attitude to a potentially tragic situation (Albert Bermal, trans, One-Act Comedies of Molière, [New York: The World Publishing Company, 1964], 5). The themes of knowledge and blind ignorance, reality and appearances, and love and its distortions served as social criticism designed to educate society (Walker, 83). Tartuffe is an essentialist view of men and women. It has to do with a city morality, where life is more a matter of perpetual contact with others than with nature or things (Percy A. Chapman, The Spirit of Molière [Russell and Russell, Inc., 1965], 232). Ultimately, the whole play tends to be greater than the sum of its parts as its appeal is largely attributable to its coherence and wholeness as a comic structure (Wadsworth, 112 113). Tartuffe is probably Molière s most sinister character. While the name is apparently from the Italian tartufulo, meaning truffle, there is a subtle hint of deception in the French verb truffer, which could mean tromper, or to deceive (Gaston Hall, Molière: Tartuffe [London: Arnold, 1960], 24). The play s ominous quality has been emphasized by Harold Knutson, who has discussed its sense of imminent defeat and ritual death. He sees a symbolic death for Mariane when she ponders extinction at the prospect of a forced marriage to Tartuffe and metaphoric suicide in her pleas to enter a convent. Orgon murders Damis when he replaces him with Tartuffe as his legal heir. Ironically, he, in turn, experiences ritual death when he tries to expel Tartuffe only to have the latter demand that he leave his own home. The overall mood is one of perfidy, betrayal, and despair (Molière, an Archetypal Approach, [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976], 77 78). It is significant that Du Croisy, the actor who usually played comic roles, played Tartuffe, while Molière played Orgon. Where Tartuffe is a country boor aping Town manners, especially in his effort to play l honnête homme amoureux (Knutson, The Triumph of Wit [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988], 91), Orgon has high social standing, is wealthy, owns his own home, has an abundance of money, is a man of power, and perhaps a royal officer or officier de longue robe, either of the sovereign courts or the financial administration (Gaines, 200 206). In fact, Lionel Gossman treats Orgon as the pivot of the play and suggests that a true understanding of it is based on the relationship of the blind obedience of Orgon and the hypocritical wickedness of Tartuffe. He observes that dupe and deceiver and which is which? are seen to be partners in the same enterprise (Men and Masks, A Study of Molière [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963], 101). It is his opinion that Orgon, a Christian who is unable to give love or receive it, views Tartuffe as a kind of Christ-figure and is not interested in the real qualities of his guest but only in the authority that he commands (104). This is a play about authority and power, and the reality is that Orgon himself is largely responsible for Tartuffe s imposture (Gossman, 112). Even Madam Pernelle, who is possessive and tyrannical, seeks to usurp her own son s place in his home and covets power over others through Tartuffe. It also has to do with the family and its potential destruction by an intruder. The play takes place indoors with the word, céans, which means on these premises, being used an unprecedented fourteen times. It is Molière s first realistic picture of a bourgeois interior. It revolves around a traditional bourgeois family consisting of three generations, as well as extended family. The unity of the family, a symbol for continuity and social renewal, is temporarily threatened and destabilized by the presence of the intruder. Molière s intent was not to destroy society but to teach the lesson that false power and false piety were not for the public good. When the officer of the king arrives during the dénouement, he enters a home filled with confusion, usurpation, treachery, and despair. It is his duty to restore order in the name of Louis XIV. He functions as deus ex machina, or rex ex machina, in order to reinforce the ultimate power of the monarch over his people to restore authority to where it properly belongs in an orderly society (Tobin, 113).
Ironically, while Tartuffe seeks honor and glory in Orgon s home, it is the king who symbolically takes it away from him to return it to Orgon, and, indirectly, to himself. Yet, as Knutson points out: Whatever the comic force of many scenes, the ominous mood that hangs over the play remains with us long after the dénouement. A cancer of bondage and corruption has set into the play s society, and, even after it is extirpated at the comic reversal, the concluding verses speak more of relief and gratitude than of exultation and victory (Archetypal, 76). Molière s was a vision of reconciliation, with the family unit serving as an emblem for societal harmony. His was a ritual view of comedy that celebrated regeneration. It is nevertheless ironic that in Tartuffe the dénouement is the fantasy, while the body of the play represents the reality of life. In other words, the komos reveals the fantasy, while it is the tragic that is the real world. Ultimately, Molière sought to paint a France in which some sort of compromise is hit upon between vigor of personality, stability of custom, and enlightened acceptance of authority (Chapman, 248). In Tartuffe he succeeds in creating one of his most successful and best-loved masterpieces and one of his most memorable characters, even if he is an impostor. 11
12 Attacking Hypocrisy, Not Religion By Jerry L. Crawford From Insights, 1993 What Shakespeare is to the English, Molière is to the French. While there are differences between them, there are also similarities: both were practical men of the theatre; both were actors as well as playwrights; both had incredible insight into human life; both had a breath-taking mastery over language. As a writer of comedy, however, Molière is more closely akin to Aristophanes, Ben Jonson, and George Bernard Shaw than he is to Shakespeare, for his comedies not only entertain, but they also sparkle with satire and devastating criticism of society. Civilization has never reached a higher degree of sophistication than it did in the Court of King Louis XIV during the time of Molière. One of the more admirable features of this court was its stress on the intellect. In theory (although there were glaring exceptions in practice) man was expected to be reasonable. Bad temper and violence were properties of the lower classes; whereas, logic and laughter were the critical tools of the aristocrats; and although Molière was not an aristocrat, he possessed the qualities aristocrats most admired: wit, brilliance, taste, and balance. Yet, in spite of Molière s favorable reputation and in spite of support from the king himself, Tartuffe created a storm of protest that has seldom been equaled, and the battle to gain public presentation raged for almost five years. From our present point of view, the violent opposition that Tartuffe engendered seems surprising. Critics insisted that the play was an attack upon religion, but Molière quite rightly maintained that he was attacking hypocrisy, not religion. As a matter of fact, Clèante, the character who speaks most clearly for the author, is as distressed when Orgon reacts violently against the whole religious brotherhood as he was when Orgon was doting with blind faith upon the religious hypocrite, Tartuffe. Clèante exclaims accusingly: Ah, there you go extravagant as ever! / Why can you not be rational? You never / Manage to take the middle course, it seems, / But jump instead between absurd extremes. Indeed, Clèante, the shrewd little maid, Dorine, the sensible young wife, Elmire, and the whole action of the play itself make it abundantly clear that Molière is against extremes, that he is satirizing not faith but blind faith --the same irrational, unseeing faith that still generates problems today. Although in Tartuffe the playwright s immediate focus is upon faith as it related to the church, the extensions of that focus are dramatic and manifold. Today it is the political rather than religious world that the eyeless, almost fanatic faith of the true believer is so vexatious and disturbing--a world in which isms provide painful evidence of the common man s passion to believe blindly, to fight blindly for his belief, and to turn a deaf ear to anything that threatens--and perhaps ought to threaten--that belief. As Tartuffe so dramatically exemplifies, once blind faith has entered the scene, it becomes a weakness of character to waver, strength of character to persist--even in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary. In fact, strong evidence to the contrary is usually translated by the mind as temptation, and the true believer would rather die than yield. What is much worse, he does not hesitate to cause others to die--all in the firm and righteous conviction that he is showing courage and strength of character. War and most of the other really hideous crimes are seldom the machinations of rascals and renegades, but usually the handiwork of dedicated, self sacrificing true believers like Orgon and his dear old mother, Madame Pernelle. Professional hypocrites like Tartuffe seem instinctively to sense this and prey upon willing victims. It matters little whether their belief relates to religion, philosophy, politics, poetry, or art. It was, therefore, a case of foolish, mistaken identity for Molière s critics to see Tartuffe himself as a symbol of religion. He is an obvious opportunist, a renegade, and a con man, who will play any kind of a trick to gain his desires. Religious piety simply happens to be the cloak that best conceals his motives from the gullible Orgon. He is smart enough, and actor enough, to make the most of his opportunities. So deep has been the concern about the meaning of Tartuffe that its brilliance as exciting and thoroughly entertaining theatre is often forgotten. The characters are especially alive; the plot is skillfully
constructed; the action is charged with suspense; and the characters use delightfully comedic language. Regardless, it is difficult in this day and age to comprehend the opposition from both the ecclesiastical and secular authorities that Tartuffe encountered when originally written. A powerful religious fraternity of laymen, known at the time as the Compagnie du Saint Sacrement (and later as the Cabale des Devots) seemed to identify itself with the pious hypocrisy ridiculed in the play, and it was natural for this sensitive group to take strong exception. The eventual success of Tartuffe made it the drama celebre of the author s career, and it is interesting to note that the offended organization was dissolved shortly after the public premiere of the play. In comedy of humors (made popular earlier in England in the work of Ben Jonson), a ridicule is aimed not so much at the follies of society (as it is directed in satire to a large extent and in comedy of manners to some extent), but rather at the foibles of individuals within a society. The concentration is on human behavior that strays from an acceptable mean and veers toward an extreme in either direction. The dramatic technique in this type of comedy in part involves the selection of a dominate human trait, preferably a foolish or dangerous one, and developing that trait in an exaggerated fashion in one of the leading characters, who is, it would follow, more often than not, an eccentric. Nearly all of Molière s plays can be properly labeled comedies of humors. Tartuffe is not an exception. In this play, there are really two leading characters, Tartuffe and Orgon. In the former we find the embodiment of religious hypocrisy, in the latter we find stupidity incarnate. Even some of the minor characters, such as Dorine, whose insolence probably is unsurpassed by that of any servant in the world of comedy (save Mosca in Volpone), are supplied with distinct human peculiarities. Molière is not particularly concerned with why his characters behave the way they do. The influences of heredity and environment (later to become such importance considerations in the naturalistic movement) are virtually ignored. Molière has simply observed his fellow man and has probed deeply into his idiosyncrasies. But his probing is always in the comic spirit, and exaggeration of character, one of the main controls in comedy of humors, is fully employed for the evocation of laughter. The play has been faulted by some for its rather unbelievable denouement, in which Tartuffe is discovered to be a notorious criminal. But unprepared-for endings and the use of a deus ex machina never disturbed Molière and apparently delighted rather than bothered the sensibilities of his audiences. In the case of Tartuffe, the additional poetic justice and the restoration of normalcy in a complicated situation make the contrived solution not only palatable but even pleasing. When skillfully performed by professionals or by gifted amateurs, Tartuffe can provide a rare entertainment in the theatre. 13