Molière: life, works, and theatrical legacy

Tartuffe

In plays from the time of Moliere, including his own Tartuffe, the playwright would often play to different parts of the audience based on social differences. The actors might play to different parts of the theater, for instance, which would not necessarily be indicate by the text. What is more evident in the text is the way different subject matter is included for different groups in the theater. The poorer classes would stand in the open area before the stage. These people were known as groundlings and paid the least to enter. Those who paid more would sit in the lower seats; even more pay was needed to sit in the balcony; and more still to still in the boxes to either side of the stage. Those in the cheap seats and standing on the ground were thought to prefer low humor, and the way Shakespeare played to them was often evident as in the tragedy Macbeth when the gatekeeper brings in low humor different from the tone of the rest of the play. Tartuffe is a satiric comedy throughout, but certain types of humor might have been tailored more to the lower class, while some references would be of greater meaning to higher classes.

Tartuffe is a religious hypocrite, a man who professes to be what he is not and who fools Orgon to the degree that the latter wants to make him part of his family.

For Orgon, this would be both a religious act and a boost to his social position. Moliere criticizes Christian thinking in a number of ways. Orgon and his mother are the avowed Christians in the piece, and they are presented as foolish. In this regard, Moliere differs greatly from his contemporaries, who sought guidance in divine inspiration rather than in human philosophy and rational thought.

The foolishness of Orgon contrasts with the deviousness of Tartuffe, and the latter character dominates the play even when not on stage because the other characters all act in response to him and his machinations. Indeed, Tartuffe does not appear physically until the third act, but his presence is felt from the beginning as other characters talk about him, behave as he would have them behave, and show themselves ready to submit their will to his. By the time Tartuffe actually appears, the audience has a strong image of him. This image is not entirely favorable.

The setting is important in the play and connects with most of the audience. Quentin M. Hope indicates the importance of time and place in Tartuffe when he writes,

Tartuffe belongs to the category of plays that take place inside, and in particular to those that take place in a bourgeois house in Paris. Place plays a particularly distinctive role in it. The world in which Moliere's characters live can be seen as a series of concentric circles: props, set, house, city, province, universe. The places they live in and the things that surround them are in varying degrees atmospheric and expressive. In Tartuffe material objects, the props and the house itself, and the places alluded to?

Paris and province, heaven and earth, palace and prison?

have a particular importance (Hope 44).

This does not tie the play to a particular time and place, however, but only shows the importance of locale to the action of the play. Members of the audience also belong to different circles in this scheme and recognize their place in the text.

Holding back the physical appearance of Tartuffe in the play allows other players to exaggerate when describing him and to play to the prejudices of the gallery as far as what such a religious man would be like. The play follows a careful structure to achieve its effect, a structure that would be appreciate by the more educated in the audience, while the broad humor of Orgon appeals to the lower classes. Myrna Kogan Zwillenberg sees the structure of the play as one more key element shaping the play as a powerful satiric statement:

Tartuffe may disappoint those looking for "real life" drama, but the play itself has no such pretensions. Its internal comedy, nourished by examples of injustice, constitutes a closely controlled dramatic mechanism whose evolving plan leads us to expect a just ending. Tartuffe clearly fulfills this expectation, and provides masterful comedy in the process (Zwillenberg 590).