Tartuffe

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Data
Title: The Tartuffe or The Deceiver
Original title: Le Tartuffe ou L'Imposteur
Genus: comedy
Original language: French
Author: Molière
Publishing year: 1682 (in oeuvres)
Premiere: May 12, 1664 / August 5, 1667 / February 5, 1669
Place of premiere: Paris
Place and time of the action: Paris, mid 17th century
people
  • Mme Pernelle , mother of orgone
  • Orgone , man of Elmire
  • Elmire , wife of Orgone
  • Damis , son of Orgon
  • Mariane , daughter of Orgon and lover Valères
  • Valère , Mariane's lover
  • Cléante , brother of Elmire
  • Tartuffe , bigots
  • Dorine , Mariane's maid
  • u. a.
Tartuffe - illustration from the 19th century

The Tartuffe or The Deceiver (original title: Tartuffe ou L'Imposteur ) is a five-act comedy by the French poet Molière . It was premiered on May 12, 1664 in a first version under the title The Tartuffe or the Hypocrite in the presence of the Sun King in the Palace of Versailles . Due to her drastic and for the time revolutionary criticism of religious hypocrisy, she triggered a theater scandal that led to the play being banned. A second version from 1667 was also banned. Only a third version, which was clearly changed in the course of the plot and which was premiered on February 5, 1669 in the Palais Royal in Paris, received the support of Louis XIV and thus escaped censorship . This third version is the one used today; the first two are considered lost.

content

action

Orgon and his mother Pernelle, who also lives in his house, admire the deceiver Tartuffe, who poses as a particularly pious man. Pernelle tries to convince Orgon's family of her views. Since Tartuffe has lived in Orgon's house, he has followed all the cheat's advice and even decides to marry off his daughter Mariane to Tartuffe, even though she is engaged to Valère. Mariane is unhappy about her father's decision, but does not fight back directly. She leaves the initiative to the servant Dorine, who with the help of Mariane's brother Damis and her stepmother Elmire wants to thwart Tartuffe's marriage plans.

Tartuffe first meets Dorine and is rudely reprimanded by her. When Elmire appears, you Tartuffe advances. He is watched by Damis, who, against Elmire's will, reports this scene to his father, who is just coming home. Orgon does not believe his son, as Tartuffe cleverly feigns repentance. Instead, Orgone disinherits Damis and decides to transfer all of his property to Tartuffe. After an unsuccessful attempt by Orgon's brother-in-law Cléante to confront Tartuffe, Elmire tries to prove to her husband that Damis is right and that Tartuffe is actually in love with her. Orgon agrees to hide under the table while Elmire asks Tartuffe to come and pretend to love him too. Tartuffe immediately accepts her offer, Elmire sends him out for a short time to talk to her husband. Orgone is losing its illusions regarding Tartuffe and now sees him as a hypocrite and a deceiver.

When Tartuffe comes back, Orgon confronts him and wants to throw him out of the house, whereupon Tartuffe replies that he is now the new owner of the house. In conversation with Elmire, Orgone comes back to the mind that he had given Tartuffe important papers from a friend who had to flee. Ms. Pernelle appears again, but even when her orgone describes Tartuffe's true character, she does not allow herself to be dissuaded from her views. Only when Mr. Loyal, a bailiff sent by Tartuffe, informs the family that they have to vacate the house by the next morning, even Pernelle recognizes him as the cheater.

While the family is discussing what to do, Valère appears, who warns Orgon: Tartuffe has handed over the papers to the king who wants to have Orgon arrested. When the family is planning their escape, Tartuffe shows up accompanied by a police officer. The family accuses Tartuffe of all of his offenses, and Tartuffe asks the police officer to carry out his assignment. To everyone's surprise, however, the policeman arrests Tartuffe, who is a wanted fraudster and who has several names. This means that the donation is no longer valid. Orgon allows Mariane to marry Valère.

characters

The characters in this comedy are all more or less strongly typed. The piece derives its dynamism, on the one hand, from its situational comedy and its high tempo, and, on the other, from Molière's language. The tension arises less from the characters' characteristics than from the conflict of conflicting parties.

  • Madame Pernelle is Orgon's mother. In the very first scene, she confronts everyone with her mistakes, while she considers herself highly respectable. Although she is inclined to Tartuffe at first, in the end she has to realize that she was wrong.
  • Orgone is Elmire's husband. Since Tartuffe's appearance he has been "delusional" (I, 2) and works against his own family without being aware of it.
  • Elmire is the wife of Orgone. As the antipode of her husband, she represents the positive and is the regulating authority that can ultimately untie the knot of confusion.
  • Damis is Orgon's son. With his heated character he is quite similar to him, but whatever he starts, it vanishes into thin air.
  • Mariane , Orgon's daughter, is of a calm disposition; as the object of desires, however, it behaves quite passively.
  • Dorine is Mariane's maid and antipodin. Even in front of superiors she does not mince her words and gives Mariane, to whom she is very fond, instructions for action (see II, 4 for a particularly drastic example).
  • Valère and Mariane want to get married.
  • Cléante is Elmire's brother, a man with a cool mind, even if he is not always successful (e.g. I, 5).
  • Tartuffe is a religious hypocrite who won the trust of Orgons. He becomes a bone of contention and a burden for the whole family after Orgone first accommodates him permanently in the house and then even wants to marry his daughter. He remains pale as a character - a further indication that Molière wanted to pillory the common hypocrisy in general.

Molière's intentions

Der Tartüff at the Kammerspiele East Berlin, December 30, 1963, director: Benno Besson , actors: Inge Keller (Elmire), Fred Düren (Tartüff)

When Molière wrote this piece, he was attacking an extremely influential party: the pious ( dévots ). Among them were on the one hand men who were filled with honest zeal for faith, on the other hand also those who knew how to use the power of religion for their benefit. This second group is criticized by Molière.

The play not only deals with religious questions, it depicts a bourgeois family who have acquired wealth and religiously legitimize their social position. Like all upper-class citizens, Molière also describes Orgone as quite naive. He treats his children like a dictator. As in various other pieces by the author, the subject of forced marriage ( mariage forcé ) comes up .

The allusion to the Fronde , which split France about 15 years earlier, makes references to contemporary history. The role of the king as deus ex machina is explained not least by the fact that Molière owes him thanks, since the play could hardly have been performed without the permission of Louis XIV , who like Molière disliked religious fanatics.

What is special about this piece is that the protagonist only appears during the third act. Except for Orgon (played by Molière) and Tartuffe, you have to deal with fairly typified characters: naive and impetuous children (Damis, Mariane and Valère), figures guided by reason (Elmire and Cléante), those with common sense blessed servant Dorine, the old-fashioned mother of the landlord, Madame Pernelle, was played by a man in Molière's time.

Although the play contains many typified elements, the questioning of a religion that can develop into a dictatorship remains revolutionary. Along with don Juan , it is one of the pieces that has generated the most resistance. In New France , the ruling Catholic clergy arranged for a performance ban in the entire colony, the so-called "Affaire Tartuffe".

The first version from 1664

The text of the first version from 1664 is unknown. One or two days after the premiere, Louis XIV decided, at the request of his former teacher and confessor Hardouin de Péréfixe , Archbishop of Paris, to prohibit Molière from performing the play in public. Only the version made five years later is known.

For a long time, experts were of the opinion that the first version consisted only of the first three acts and ended with the triumph of Tartuffe, who married the daughter of the house, took the family fortune and even received the family residence as a gift from Orgon. Since the 1960s, however, literary historians have been able to prove beyond doubt that the first Tartuffe was a complete play in which a story known since the Middle Ages was presented, the plot of which was divided into three acts: “(I) A pious family man takes him at home a man who appears as the embodiment of perfect piety. (II) He falls in love with the young wife of the landlord and tries to seduce her; However, she rejects him and refuses to reveal the affair to her husband, who is informed by a witness and does not want to believe what happened. (III) The father's blind trust in the saint now compels the woman to reveal the bigot's hypocrisy. There is a second attempt at seduction, and the culprit is expelled from the house. ”This first version would correspond to the first, third and fourth acts (with the exception of the last scene) of the last version, supplemented by a scene from the fifth act. Mariane and Valère were not present in this first version, and Tartuffe was not supposed to marry the daughter of the house, but had thwarted the marriage plans for her brother Damis, which would better explain Damis' anger towards Tartuffe at the beginning of the third act.

A reconstructed version of the first version from 1664 has been published on the “Molière21” website.

Edits

Movie

Numerous films are based on the Tartuffe - this list only includes films that see themselves as adaptations of the drama.

watch TV

movie theater

Radio plays

  • 1948: Tartuffe; Production: RIAS - Director: Unknown
    • Speaker: Not known
  • 1949: Tartuffe; Production: Hessischer Rundfunk - Director: Theodor Steiner
    • Speaker: See above entry

Musical theater

theatre

  • Tartuffe uff hessisch in "Das verdammte Volkstheater" in the Adler Palast, directed by Wolfgang Deichsel (2015)

literature

  • Nicola Denis: "Tartuffe" in Germany. Molière's comedy in translations, in science and on the stage from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Series: Literature, Culture, Media, 2. Lit, Münster 2002 (plus Diss. Phil. University of Cologne, 2001) Visible in Google books

Web links

Commons : Tartuffe  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Molière  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Le Tartuffe ou L'Hypocrite
  2. ↑ Reclam's Acting Guide . Stuttgart: Reclam. 2010. p. 120
  3. ↑ John Cairncross, Molière bourgeois et libertin , Paris, Nizet, 1963; François Rey, Molière et le Roi. L'affaire Tartuffe , Paris, Seuil, 2007; Georges Forestier and Claude Bourqui in the new edition of Molière's works in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (2010, Volume II, p. 1361 ff.)
  4. ↑ Forestier & Bourqui, Pléiade 2010, Volume II, p. 1364
  5. ↑ Le Tartuffe ou l'hypocrite , version from 1664, reconstruction by Georges Forestier and Isabelle Grellet
  6. ^ Mainspitze : The damn Volkstheater in Rüsselsheim plays Tartüff in Hessian , accessed on February 6, 2016