Tartuffe

Introductory Note

Louis XIV entertained his court, in May of 1664, at his recently finished palace and pleasure-grounds of Versailles, with a week of uninterrupted festival. Molière, now the chief furnisher of the king’s pleasures, gave during the week four plays: The Bores; The Forced Marriage; The Princess of Elis, begun in verse, but hastily finished in prose to be ready for the king’s entertainment; and the first three acts of Tartuffe. These three acts taken alone must have seemed much less serious than the play as a whole seems to us now. They are in fact made up for the most part of excellent light comedy:—the harangues of Madame Pernelle, the retorts of Dorine, the quarrel and reconciliation of the lovers, the famous scene of “The poor man!”, and that of the confounding of Damis. Tartuffe himself does not enter until the second scene of the third act, and in that act he is odious and comical; not, as in the later acts, odious and almost terrifying. The character of Cléante was less seriously conceived than in later versions of the play, since part of his original role was later transferred to Dorine. And some of the more serious passages of these three acts as we have them now, especially in the speeches of Cléante, were probably not yet written.

Nevertheless the character of Tartuffe was clearly enough indicated, and the seriousness of Molière’s attack upon religious hypocrisy was evident enough, to arouse immediate opposition. Anne of Austria, the queen-mother, and all the religious or pseudo-religious “cabal” of the court, in which the Jesuits were powerful, united to persuade the young king that Molière’s play was dangerous to true religion; and its public representation was forbidden. A contemporary account of the week’s festivities says: “Although the play was thought most amusing, yet the king, realising what a resemblance there is between those who in true devoutness seek the way to Heaven, and those who with a vain show of good works nonetheless do evil, could not in his delicate carefulness for the things that concern religion suffer vice to be made so like virtue, that one might be taken for the other; and therefore, though there was no doubt of the good intent of the author, he forbade the giving of the play in public, and deprived himself of the pleasure of it, that offence might not come to others who were less capable of discerning good from evil.” The king was at heart on Molière’s side, whatever he might think public policy demanded. “Your majesty,” wrote Molière in his first formal petition for leave to give the play, “was so good as to declare that you could find no fault in this comedy, though you forbade me to produce it in public.”

The prohibition in fact covered only public performances—although a worthy curate, in a book directed against Molière, calling him “a demon clothed in flesh and dressed as a man … who deserved for his crime of sacrilege and impiety to be condemned to public execution, and that by fire, foretaste of the fires of hell, to expiate this terrible crime of lèse-majesté against God, a crime which tends to destroy our Catholic religion,” had declared that the king ordered Molière “to suppress and tear in pieces, destroy and burn all that he had yet written of it, and write no more such infamous matter, on pain of his life.” Molière made his play known by repeated readings (as Beaumarchais was to do with his Marriage of Figaro over a century later), and even won the approval of the papal legate Chigi, as he boasts in his first petition; and he gave several private performances under the patronage of those nearest the king. First the king’s brother, entertaining part of the court at Villers-Cotteret on September 25, 1664, had Molière produce again the first three acts of Tartuffe. Then Condé, the first prince of the blood, had the play produced three times, November 29, 1664, November 8, 1665, and September 20, 1668.

The edition of Molière’s works, published in 1682, and edited by La Grange and Vinot, speaks of the play as having been given, at these three performances for Condé, “perfect, complete, and finished.” It has therefore been taken for granted by all scholars and editors that the play was completed, practically in the form in which we have it, by November, 1664. There exists however a letter of Condé’s son, the Duc d’Enghien, written in October of 1665, and recently published, in which he urges his agent at Paris to beg Molière, in all secrecy, for a performance of Tartuffe (the one actually given November 8, 1665), and to ask him, “in case the fourth act of Tartuffe be written, whether he could not give that also.” The Duc d’Enghien had been present at the performance of November, 1664; if the whole play had been given then, why should he ask doubtfully, just before the performance of November, 1665, whether the fourth act were yet written, and could be given? The only solution yet suggested is that by “written” the Duc d’Enghien may have meant “rewritten”—which to say the least seems doubtful. I am inclined to think, in spite of the usual accuracy of La Grange, that the adjectives “perfect, complete, and finished” may rightly have applied to the play only at the two later, or possibly even the last, of these three performances for Condé; and that, contrary to the universally accepted opinion, the play was not finished until after 1664, and possibly even not until 1667, when the first public performance was given. There is further evidence pointing in this direction in a letter written by the French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Monsieur de Lionne, to the librarian of the ex-Queen of Sweden, Christine, who eagerly wished to arrange a private performance of Tartuffe. On February 26, 1666, Monsieur de Lionne writes: “What you request, in behalf of the Queen of Sweden, regarding the comedy of Tartuffe which Molière had begun and has never finished, is entirely impossible, being a matter not in my control, or even in that of the king. …” Monsieur Mesnard, who gives this letter in the Grands Ecrivains edition of Molière, asks in a note on the line which I have italicised: “Was Monsieur de Lionne so ill informed? Or did he pretend to be?” It is hardly probable that he was ill informed, since the rest of the letter shows familiarity with the king’s personal attitude toward the play, and with Molière’s personal reasons for not wishing to let it go out of his hands. May we not infer that possibly Monsieur de Lionne was right, and that in February of 1666 Molière had not yet given final shape to the last acts of his play? It is certainly interesting and suggestive to consider the last two acts of Tartuffe as perhaps not having been written, in anything like their present form at least, until after The Misanthrope; and this would explain their marked contrast, in tone and in mood, with the first three acts, which belong (excepting possibly a few of the more serious passages) to a somewhat earlier and very different period of Molière’s life.

In any case he was constantly revising the play. In 1667 he gave it a new title, The Impostor the better to protect himself from the charge of criticising in it men of true religion; he changed the name of its principal character (for the word tartuffe had already come into general use as a common noun, suggesting at once hypocrisy and religious unction) to Panulphe, and made him a man of the world, dressed in the latest fashion, with large wig, little hat, short sword, and “lace all over his clothes,” to avoid the resemblance of the black-robed lay confessor Tartuffe with the priesthood; and, as he says, “toning down the play in many places, cut out everything which it seemed possible could furnish the shadow of a pretext to the famous originals of the portrait; but all to no purpose.” In this form the play was produced at Paris, August 5, 1667, while the king, who it seems had orally given permission for its production if properly revised, was absent with the army in Flanders; on the next day the President of the highest court in Paris issued an injunction forbidding further performances, and five days later the Archbishop of Paris promulgated an order forbidding all persons to take part in, read, or hear the play, in public or in private, under penalty of excommunication. Molière at once closed his theatre, and despatched two of his chief actors with his second petition to the king, who promised to take up the matter again on his return. It was not for a year and a half, however, that formal and authoritative permission was finally granted, and the play was given, beginning on February 5, 1669, to the largest audiences that had ever crowded Molière’s theatre. In the meanwhile Molière had still further revised his work (as we know from comparing our present text with a rather detailed contemporary account of the single performance of 1667), had restored the name Tartuffe, and had given to the role of Cléante its seriousness and importance as representing his own ideas and his answer to his enemies.

This answer he repeated, in his own person, in the preface to the first edition of the play:

“If you will take the trouble to examine my comedy in good faith, you will surely see that my intentions are throughout innocent, and that the play in no wise tends to turn to ridicule the things that we ought to reverence; that I have shown in it all that carefulness which the delicacy of the subject called for; and that I have used all the art and the pains that I could, to make clear the distinction between your hypocrite and your man of true devoutness. I have employed to that end two whole acts in preparing the entry of my scoundrel. He does not leave the auditor one moment in doubt; … he says nothing, he does nothing, but what paints him to the spectators as a rascal, and sets off the character of the truly virtuous man I put in opposition to him …

“If the office of comedy is to correct the vices of men, I know not why any should have a special privilege of exemption. This one [hypocrisy] has consequences far more dangerous to the State than all the others. … ’Tis a mighty stroke at any vice to make it the laughingstock of everybody; for men will easily suffer reproof; but they can by no means endure mockery. They will consent to be wicked, but not to be ridiculous.”

Dramatis Personae

• Madame Pernelle, mother of Orgon

• Orgon, husband of Elmire

• Elmire, wife of Orgon

• Damis, son of Orgon

• Mariane, daughter of Orgon, in love with Valère

• Valère, in love with Mariane

• Cléante, brother-in-law of Orgon

• Tartuffe, a hypocrite

• Dorine, Mariane’s maid

• Mr. Loyal, a bailiff

• A Police Officer

• Flipotte, Madame Pernelle’s servant

The Scene is at Paris

Act I