Member-only story
What You’ll Love about… Tartuffe by Molière
Tartuffe offers many delightful surprises. Its humor translates really well, and the play makes interesting statements about family, friendship, loyalty, and tolerance.
Anyone who believes that a post-truth mentality originated with Trumpism will be surprised at how relevant Tartuffe (1664) seems to be to contemporary American politics. The title character manipulates a family into giving away everything they own, and some family members seem to be defenseless against his predatory deceptions.
If you already understand the relationship between religion and hypocrisy, you will be amused but not enlightened by the way that Tartuffe skewers religious hypocrites, and even though some critics focus on the religious hypocrisy in the play, it strikes me as a relatively minor feature of the text. The play is more interesting and enlightening as a caricature of middle-class values. If you appreciate this aspect of Tartuffe, I recommend Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair, which is slightly more effective at exposing religious hypocrisy and examining middle-class culture and values.
Tartuffe is named after the antagonist in a play that has no obvious protagonist. He is a guest in the house of Orgon, a middle-class patriarch, and he disrupts the family in various ways, by attempting to seduce Orgon’s wife Elmire, by attempting to…
