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...
A different sort of catering is seen at the end when the Officer speaks to Orgon but is really speaking to the upper class as he praises the "Prince to whom all sham is hateful" (Moliere 161). Such praise for the royal box would serve the playwright and the company in the future if they needed some dispensation for their theater.
Careful reading of the play would show where the actor might direct a speech one way or another, and often this would be a choice rather than a key element in the play itself as it was in Macbeth. The play as a whole satirizes bourgeois society while also affirming its importance, and so the play would have an appeal for all classes, those that looked down on the middle class, those that envied the middle class, and even the middle class itself.
Works Cited
Hope, Quentin M. "Place and Setting in Tartuffe." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 89(1)(January 1974), 42-49.
Moliere. Tartuffe. Translated by Richard Wilbur. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1963.
Zwillenberg, Myrna Kogan. "Dramatic Justice in 'Tartuffe.'" Modern Language Notes 90(4)(April 1975), 583-590.
