Tartuffe or, The Impostor—Molière

The father, the son, and the holy guest

Portrait of Molière

First performed in 1664, Tartuffe brought both popular success and controversy to Molière, who foolishly but sincerely fancied himself a dramatic actor. Apparently, Molière’s tragic performances brought him plenty of boos and more than one rotten vegetable, but the minute he and his troupe launched into a farce, he had the audience in the palm of his hand. Fortunately for us, he eventually acquiesced to popular demand and gave us several of the most delightful comedies ever written.

At the beginning of Tartuffe or, The Impostor, we learn that Orgon has taken into his household a stranger, one Tartuffe, who has impressed Orgon and his mother with his pious manner. We quickly learn all about Tartuffe as various family members complain bitterly about how things have changed since his arrival. No more dancing, no more games, no visits from friends, everyone chafes under a gloomy religiosity. Most family members see right through Tartuffe’s hypocrisy, but cannot get Orgon to believe them. One comic scene in Act One, worthy of a Monty Python skit, shows the depth of Orgon’s infatuation with his holy guest. Orgon has just asked the lady’s maid, Dorine, about everyone’s health.

Dorine: Madame had a bad fever, two days ago,

And a headache that really brought her low.

Orgon: Yes. And Tartuffe?

Dorine: Tartuffe? Fit as a fiddle:

Red mouth, pink cheeks, and bulging in the middle.

Orgon: Poor fellow!

Dorine: Then she had no appetite,

And therefore couldn’t eat a thing that night.

Her headache was just too much to bear.

Orgon: Yes. And Tartuffe?

Dorine: Piously, with her there,

He ate a brace of partridge like a flash,

Then half a leg of mutton in a hash.

Orgon: Poor fellow!

And so on through several more “poor fellows!”

Tartuffe doesn’t actually appear on stage until Act Three. After all the buildup, his first words, directed to his servant offstage, “Put back my scourge and hair shirt in their place,” probably brought roars of laughter from the audience. Later in the same act, Damis, Orgon’s son, scheming to catch Tartuffe out, sees him professing his love to Orgon’s wife, Elmire. Damis leaps out of the closet where he had hidden, partly spoiling the plan, and then blurts out to Orgon all about it. But Orgon disbelieves Damis. In a brilliant display of reverse psychology, Tartuffe repents, confesses his own unworthiness, and, submits to any punishment Damis would demand. Orgon, of course, takes all this as proof of Tartuffe’s true humility and holiness. He not only sends Damis away, but he also insists that Tartuffe spend even more time with Elmire, and, purely to spite all the doubters in the household, he changes his will to leave everything to Tartuffe.

In the final act, Orgon, hiding underneath a table, stops Tartuffe just as he starts to force himself on Elmire and attempts to toss him out, but Tartuffe has two aces up his sleeve. First, Orgon had already signed over his house and all his possessions to the hypocrite, but, most damagingly, he has revealed to Tartuffe that he has certain compromising letters from a friend in a strong box. Suspecting that Orgon might turn against him, Tartuffe had stolen them and handed them over to the King. These documents will almost certainly lead to Orgon’s arrest for treason. However, in a true deus ex machina, the King’s guard arrives at the house and arrests, not Orgon, but Tartuffe! It seems that the all-wise King has long followed Tartuffe’s criminal history and has chosen this moment to spring the trap. Thus, the bad guy gets his comeuppance, the good family gets their house back, and all turns out well. As the gentleman from the king’s guard explains:

We live under a king who hates deceit,

A king whose eyes see into every heart

And can’t be fooled by an imposter’s art.

The keen discernment that his greatness brings

Gives him a piercing insight into things

Not surprisingly, Molière’s patron, King Louis XIV, rather liked that ending, but the church officials took a dim view of the play and had it squelched.

I enjoyed Tartuffe greatly. It struck me as a timeless satire about how hypocrisy and gullibility work together to bring about disaster. Since the play takes aim at religious hypocrisy, I would think that religious leaders would approve a play that made fun of those who would hide behind a mask of sanctity. But the play almost immediately provoked such a controversy that Molière had to cease giving public performances of it. He tried rewriting it and changing the name to The Impostor, but that version only got one performance before it, too, got withdrawn. Church officials suppressed it because Tartuffe’s words and actions sounded exactly like those of a sincerely religious person. The guardians of public morality worried that audiences might not see the difference between true piety and imposture, leading them to laugh at the wrong people. That worry seemed absurd to me when I read about it and seemed rather to expose the insecurity of the censors.

However, the more I thought about the Church’s objection, the more plausible it seemed. In fact, Tartuffe’s own words don’t betray him. For the first two acts, we only hear what others say about him. Orgon’s children deeply resent Tartuffe’s intrusion into their household, with his condemnation of their games and parties. Orgon praises Tartuffe’s solicitude for the souls of everyone in the family, particularly for Elmire. “I see him censure everything, and take / Great interest in my wife, all for my sake.” These sly lines and others like them give us plenty of room for seeing past them, but even so, a literal reading might leave Tartuffe above reproach. When Tartuffe himself appears on stage and mentions his hair shirt, he also tells his servant that anyone looking for him would find him “among the prisoners, giving alms all round.” It makes us laugh, but only because we don’t believe it. When Damis catches him professing his love for Elmire and reports it to Orgon, Tartuffe affirms everything, confessing his own depravity. Tartuffe does not lie or make excuses. Orgon, not Tartuffe, accuses Damis of treachery. Orgon’s eventual enlightenment only happens when Elmire pretends to fall for Tartuffe and seduces him into making a pass at her. And finally, during that final confrontation where we expect the bad guy to gloat over the success of his devilish scheme, Tartuffe never drops any mask. “Your insults have no power to rouse my gall,” Tartuffe avows, “And for the sake of Heaven I’ll suffer all.” He remains consistently pious to the end.

So why do we call Tartuffe a hypocrite? Because of all the things he does not say? The script only offers us two types of evidence. (1) The resentful accusations made by those who have had a wet blanket thrown over their boisterous lifestyle, and (2) The fact that Orgon has undergone a religious conversion and rejected his own worldly ties, heaping unsolicited gifts and favors on the new spiritual guide. If we doubt the motives of the resentful family members, the only other evidence comes from the fact that Tartuffe has risen from poverty to wealth—sort of like the Church.

Molière did not do himself any favors by avoiding the main theatrical device that would have settled matters for good. A simple aside by Tartuffe to the audience could have laid bare any hypocrisy. But the script only gives us Tartuffe’s behavior, not his thoughts. Moliere of course easily could have included an aside. After all, at one point Dorine says to the audience after a brief exchange with Tartuffe, “Ah, how polite! / My word! I still believe that I am right.” But Molière resists using this device for Tartuffe himself, leaving the audience to judge his sincerity.

One could, perversely, offer a revisionist interpretation of the play, in which Tartuffe comes across as a legitimately holy man, the victim of slander by Orgon’s resentful relatives, entrapped by the irresistible feminine wiles of Elmire. So I see Tartuffe as an ambiguous character on paper, if not on stage. Molière relies on the the actor’s delivery to clarify the satire and properly direct our ridicule. Despite the title, Orgon, not Tartuffe, has the central comedic role. Tartuffe merely spouts piety. Orgon refuses to see his own gullibility, despite the efforts of everyone around him to open his eyes.

The play has seen many productions in the 350 or so years since its first performance. Gullibility and false piety have not become obsolete during that time. According to Wikipedia, in 2016, the American Stage Theatre Company adapted Tartuffe into a modern-day political satire, in which a wealthy American businessman gets duped by a politician on the rise. I can’t think of a better time than now to get people thinking about when to trust those who make a grand show of their religiosity.

§ § §

Since the Decade Project contains four plays by Moliere, and since this one has so piqued my interest, I think I’ll continue with Molière and read his most famous play next: The Misanthrope.

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Despite a few purchases from subscribers, Amazon has canceled my “associates account” because of insufficient activity, so I won’t be providing links for purchasing any of the books, movies, or music I refer to—at least not for a while. I will continue to list them here at the bottom of each post.

• I mentioned Tartuffe or, The Impostor, by Molière, translated by Donald M. Frame.

• For some biographical background, I also read The Life of Monsieur de Molière: A Portrait, by Mikhail Bulgakov.

• I’ll next read The Misanthrope, by Molière, translated by Donald M. Frame.