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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
The invention of Tartuffe is decisive in the evolution of Molière’s art. As parasite, he shifts the action of the comedy indoors, accenting both inwardness and concealment. As agent of the father’s “holy experiment,” he inaugurates the Andromeda scheme whereby Molière’s fathers regularly will hand over a beloved daughter to the misfit who mirrors the dark state of their own souls. As charlatan of piety, he poses a challenge to the age which his creator was to pay for dearly in a five-year struggle to gain for his play the freedom of the stage. Though the denouement of Tartuffe is essentially political—reflecting the challenge by a political cabal to its right to exist—the comedy proper ends with its villain stripped of the protective cloak of the religion of an unseen Presence, by an appeal to the palpable truth of the religion of ancient Greece where comedy originated.
∗ The text of this article was read before the Society for the Humanities at Cornell Univ., on 12 Feb. 1976.
1 See Edward D. Montgomery, “‘Tartuffe’: The History and Sense of a Name,” Modern Language Notes, 88 (1973), 838–40.
2 See John Cairncross, New Light on Molière (Paris: Minard, 1956), and my review of it in Modern Language Notes. 72 (1957), 389–92. George Couton, in his 1971 Pléiade edition of Molière's ιEuvres complètes (i, 834–35), sticks to Gustave Michaut's view that the first three acts of our present version “se suffisent et se terminent par un dénouement.”
3 “On voit qu'entre 1664 et 1667, plusieurs états du texte ont dû se succéder,” writes Couton (p. 843).
4 All references to Tartuffe are to Gustave Michaut's edition of ιEuvres complètes, 11 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale. 1947), whose faithfulness to 17th-century capitalization and especially punctuation renders distinctive service to the sense.
5 See Cairncross, pp. 2–3.
6 While it occurs 8 times in Les Femmes savantes, there are no more than 34 occurrences noted for the whole of Molière's oeuvre (I am indebted for these statistics to the kindness of Bryant C. Freeman, who Xeroxed and passed on to me the relevant pages of his concordance while still in progress).
7 “Tartuffe is unique in the particular importance it gives to the house itself” (Quentin Hope, “Place and Setting in Tartuffe” PMLA, 89, 1974, 48).
8 Robert Jouanny writes in the Notice of his Théâtre complet de Molière (Paris: Editions Garnier. n.d.):
Tous les personnages sensés de la pièce nous affirment sur tous les tons que Tartuffe est un parfait hypocrite, et voici qu'une crainte nous vient; si Tartuffe glissait à la sincérité! Si à force d'aveugler les autres il s'aveuglait lui-même, se prenait à son jeu, et croyait en ce Dieu en qui il feignait de croire! (i, 626)
9 There is restraint and uneasiness even in the boisterousness of a medieval Feast of Fools, when set by the side either of the calm derision with which Homer envisages the towering shamelessness of the gods, or of the slapstick familiarity exhibited by Aristophanes in The Frogs as he doubles over Dionysos with a cramp on the god's own feast day.
10 Judd Hubert thinks otherwise. In Molière and the Comedy of Intellect (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962), he develops the view that the play features the defeat of an inferior performance, Tartuffe's, by Molière's superior theatrical skill. I hold with Auerbach (in Mimesis) that Tartuffe's performance is quite good enough to effect his ends—namely, to take in the Pernelles, mother and son—and that is the standard it should be judged by. His downfall, by the way, comes not of an inferior performance (loin de là!), but from having been maneuvered into playing before a concealed audience (Damis first, then Orgon) and rendered thus incapable of playing up to his audience.
11 Molière: A New Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949). pp. 44–50.
12 “Mystery,” A Catholic Dictionary of Theology (London : Nelson, 1971). iii, 317.
13 George E. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries (Princeton : Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), p. 273.
14 A word of caution. The Eleusinian mysteries are not taken here as an improbable “source” of Molière's strategy of unveiling. No suggestion is made that they centered on a phallic ceremony. A metaphorical showing forth takes place in Tartuffe, analogous to, and somehow faithful to the spirit of, pagan ceremonial—hewing to the palpable, rendering the unseen visible (Kerényi's sense of the word Hierophantes).
15 Couton speculates that the 1664 Tartuffe most likely wore the petit collet of a candidate for a church benefice, and perhaps, though less surely, a cassock (pp. 835–38).
16 See Couton, esp. pp. 861–71, fora thorough airing of the political background of the play.