Le Tartuffe ou l’Imposteur

Why it matters

Tartuffe, or The Impostor, first performed in 1664, is a verse comedy by Molière, written in rhyming twelve-syllable lines: Wikipedia counts 1,962 of them. It is still alive in two ways. In the Comédie-Française it is the most performed play in the repertoire, and the title character gave both French and English a word: a tartuffe is a hypocrite who exaggeratedly feigns virtue, especially religious virtue. The story is a household farce with a sharp edge. Orgon and his mother take in Tartuffe as a holy man, and he turns that trust into power over the family’s daughter, wife and property.

The play is also remembered for what happened to it. Wikipedia reports that after a Versailles performance in 1664 the King suppressed the play, and the Archbishop of Paris threatened excommunication for anyone who watched, performed in or read it. A softened version, L’Imposteur, with the title character renamed Panulphe, was played once in August 1667 and banned the next day. The final text reached the Palais-Royal on 5 February 1669 and was highly successful. In between, a defender argued in 1667 that a hypocrite shown on stage is comic and so cannot be an endorsement. Few comedies have had their right to exist argued so openly.

Notice who works to expose Tartuffe: Dorine, the maid, and Elmire, who stages the trap. Notice how long Orgon refuses to see, and how comic that blindness is. Content note: a religious hypocrite attempts to seduce his host’s wife, there is a threat of disinheritance and eviction, and a father plans to force his daughter into marriage; it is all treated as comedy and nothing is graphic. This page uses an eighteenth-century engraving of the play. The French text on this site is from French Wikisource.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.