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Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed

Tartuffe

by Molière

1669

Drama

Comedy

Among the most polished of Moliere's sophisticated comedies, this play is notable also for its serious overtones and for the skillful portrayal of the complex title character, whose name has become a synonym for hypocrisy.

Despite his central role, Tartuffe is not the play's principal character. That dubious distinction belongs to Orgon, the wealthy bourgeois who has befriended Tartuffe and is almost willingly gulled by the latter's machinations.

The character of Tartuffe himself does not appear onstage until the third of the play's five acts, by which time his entrance has been amply prepared by grumblings among the various members of Orgon's household. A most selfish and demanding houseguest, Tartuffe has turned the household upside down, disrupting any semblance of order and routine. Orgon, meanwhile, staunchly defends his guest as a man of rare piety and probity, a truly religious individual from whom the others could learn much if only they would follow his example.

Like Moliere's other comedies both high and low, this one builds upon a base of stock characters drawn from early Italian comedy. Here, as in his other high comedies, Moliere develops the featured characters (such as Orgon) well beyond stereotype, observing also the classic rules of construction and development established for French tragedy by Pierre Corneille. Tartuffe himself is a highly individualized and extremely complex character, not without some true sincerity even as he tries to relieve Orgon of both his money and his wife, Elmire. The play's ending, quite frankly artificial and contrived, functions at least in part as a parody of artificial endings on the stage, underscoring the play's self-conscious theatricality.

Orgon, onstage throughout the action, emerges from stereotype (the gullible bourgeois) as he grows and develops toward the end, truly learning and profiting from his mistakes. Tartuffe, in contrast, remains locked in character, however fascinating that character may be.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
, Molière. "Tartuffe." Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed, edited by Editors of Salem Press, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=6CR_0535.
APA 7th
, M. (2015). Tartuffe. In E. Salem Press (Ed.), Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
, Molière. "Tartuffe." Edited by Editors of Salem Press. Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.