DRAMATIC

CONVENTIONS

Characters are types.

Orgon

Cleante

Tartuffe DamisMariane

Elmire

Dorine

Madame Pernelle

Valere

Plots favor ingenuity over plausibility.

Entertain and instruct.

SOCIAL

CONVENTIONS

Father = Authority.

Divine right of kings

God: mankind

King: subjects

Father: family

SATIRE &

CENSORSHIP

If the function of comedy is to

correct men’s vices, I do not see

why any should be exempt. . . .

The most forceful lines of a

serious moral statement are

usually less powerful than those

of satire; and nothing will reform

most men better than the

depiction of their faults. It is a

vigorous blow to vices to expose

them to public laughter.

- Moliere, preface to Tartuffe

Vice Common Sense

Tartuffe Dorine

Orgon Cleante

Elmire Officer (king)

Mariane

Damis

Valere

Mme. Pernelle

vs.

Who was offended?

• The Catholic hierarchy

• The French aristocracy

• The Company of the Holy

Sacrament (a religious

secret society seeking to

reform French Christianity)

Public performances of Tartuffe

were banned for five years.

"...although it was found to be extremely

diverting, the king recognized so much

conformity between those that a true

devotion leads on the path to heaven and

those that a vain ostentation of some good

works does not prevent from committing

some bad ones, that his extreme delicacy

to religious matters can not suffer this

resemblance of vice to virtue, which

could be mistaken for each other;

although one does not doubt the good

intentions of the author, even so he forbids

it in public, and deprived himself of this

pleasure, in order not to allow it to be

abused by others, less capable of making

a just discernment of it."

King Louis XIV’s

official statement

Moliere’s defense

of comedy

The comic is the outward and visible

form that nature's bounty has attached

to everything unreasonable, so that we

should see, and avoid, it. To know the

comic we must know the rational, of

which it denotes the absence and we

must see wherein the rational consists

. . . incongruity is the heart of the

comic . . . it follows that all lying,

disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all

outward show different from the reality,

all contradiction in fact between

actions that proceed from a single

source, all this is in essence comic.

Lettre sur la comédie de l'Imposteur

(1667)