Tartuffe

Overview

Tartuffe is five acts of rhymed couplets, about a hundred and ten pages, and it caused the biggest theatrical scandal of the seventeenth century. A three-act version was performed at Versailles in May 1664 as part of a royal entertainment. Within days the archbishop of Paris had threatened excommunication for anyone who watched it, and Louis XIV, who plainly enjoyed it, banned public performance. Moliere rewrote it, tried again in 1667 under a different title with the hypocrite dressed as a layman, and had it shut down the same night. The version we read was finally licensed in 1669 and became the most successful play of his career.

The company that objected was probably the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, a secretive devout society with influence at court, and one of the play’s sharper jokes is that Tartuffe’s methods, insinuating himself into households and directing consciences, resembled theirs.

Technically the play is a model of construction, and the famous feature is the delayed entrance. Tartuffe is discussed for two full acts before he appears, by people who despise him and by a man who adores him, so that by the time he walks on in the third act the audience already knows him in two incompatible versions.

The verse in French is alexandrines in couplets. Richard Wilbur’s English version reproduces the form and is generally reckoned one of the great verse translations.

What happens

Madame Pernelle, Orgon’s mother, sweeps out of the house in the first scene, telling everyone in it that they are frivolous and that the holy man staying with them is their only hope. Her exit establishes the household: Elmire the young second wife, Damis the hot-headed son, Mariane the daughter, Cleante the level-headed brother-in-law, and Dorine the maid, who has the best lines in the play and no patience.

Orgon returns from a trip and asks after the household. Dorine reports that his wife has been ill with a fever, and Orgon, after each item, asks instead about Tartuffe, who has been eating and sleeping enormously, and responds to the news of the man’s appetite with concern for his health. It is the most efficient character sketch in French comedy.

Cleante tries to reason with him and delivers the play’s explicit position: that there is all the difference in the world between true devotion and its imitation, that the genuinely pious do not advertise, and that Orgon has confused the two. Orgon is unmoved.

Then he announces that Mariane, who is engaged to Valere and loves him, will marry Tartuffe instead. Dorine argues, mocks, interrupts and refuses to be quiet, and Orgon eventually swings at her and misses.

Tartuffe appears at last in Act III, and his first act on stage is to tell a servant to cover her breasts, which is all the introduction he needs. Left alone with Elmire, he makes an elaborate pass at her, in the vocabulary of devotion throughout. Damis, hidden, hears it, bursts out, and tells his father.

The trap here is beautifully set. Tartuffe does not deny it. He throws himself down and accuses himself of being the worst of sinners, a wretch, guilty of everything and more. Orgon, overwhelmed by such humility, disinherits his son, throws him out, and signs over his entire estate to Tartuffe on the spot.

Elmire sees that argument is useless and arranges a demonstration. She puts her husband under the table and receives Tartuffe alone. He presses her, and when she raises the matter of heaven he explains that he knows how to remove such obstacles and that a private sin is no sin at all. Orgon, coughing desperately under the table, has to be almost physically driven out by what he hears, and when he emerges he is finished with the man.

Then the reversal. Tartuffe informs him that the house is no longer his, and that he also holds a box of compromising papers Orgon had asked him to keep safe. In the fifth act the bailiff arrives to evict the family, and Tartuffe turns up with an officer to have Orgon arrested for treason.

The officer arrests Tartuffe instead. The king, it is explained, saw through him at once, remembered his record of crimes under another name, and has cancelled the deed and pardoned Orgon’s earlier fault. The family is saved by an intervention from outside the play.

How to read it

Read the first two acts attentively. The play’s construction depends on Tartuffe’s absence, and the pleasure of Act III is entirely prepared there.

Read Wilbur if you want the verse. English rhymed couplets can sound like light verse, and his do not; the effect is much closer to the French than prose translations manage.

Watch Dorine. A servant who contradicts her master, argues him down and physically interposes herself is a deliberate provocation, and she is also the play’s clearest-sighted character.

Read Cleante’s speeches as Moliere’s defence exhibit. They are the reason he could argue the play was not an attack on religion, and they are also slightly too neat, which is why they did not work.

Read the three petitions to the king if your edition prints them. They are Moliere’s own account of the fight, and the argument that comedy’s business is to correct vice by making it laughable is the best short statement of what he thought he was doing.

The ending is the standing objection, and it is worth taking seriously rather than excusing. The deus ex machina is an obvious flattery of the king who was protecting him. It is also the only force in the play capable of undoing what Orgon legally did, and the play has shown that reason, mockery and evidence all failed. Whether that is a weakness or a bleak point about how such things actually end is a fair argument.

Questions it raises

• Is the target hypocrisy, or the credulity that rewards it? Orgon is the one who signs everything away.
• Cleante can distinguish true devotion from false. Can anyone else in the play, and could the audience, if Tartuffe were more careful?
• Tartuffe’s method of confessing to everything disarms his accuser completely. Is there any defence against it?
• The family is rescued by royal intervention. Is that a flaw, flattery, or the play’s real verdict on what reason can accomplish?
• Moliere insisted he was attacking only the counterfeit. Why did the devout not believe him?
• Elmire’s solution is to stage a demonstration rather than to argue. What does the play think about the limits of persuasion?