Tartuffe and Other Plays

The Ridiculous Precieuses * The School for Husbands * The School for Wives * The Critique of the School for Wives * The Versailles Impromptu * Tartuffe * Don Juan

This memorable collection gathers the plays of the great social satirist and playwright Molière, representing the many facets of his genius and offering a superb introduction to the comic inventiveness, richness of prose, and insight that make up Molière’s enduring legacy to theater, literature, and the world.

Translated and with an Introduction by Donald M. Frame, a Foreword by Virginia Scott, and a New Afterword“Molière is probably the greatest and best-loved French author, and comic author, who ever lived. To the reader as well as the spectator, today as well as three centuries ago, the appeal of his plays is immediate and durable; they are both distinctly accessible and inexhaustible.”—Professor Donald M. FrameMolière, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in1622, began his career as an actor before becoming a playwright who specialized in satirizing the institutions and morals of his day. In 1658, his theater company settled in Paris in the Théâter du Petit-Bourbon. The object of fierce attack because of such masterpieces as Tartuffe and Don Juan, Molière nonetheless won the favor of the public. In 1665, his company became the King’s Troupe, and the following year saw the staging of The Misanthrope, as well as The Doctor in Spite of Himself. In 1668, he produced his bitterly comic The Miser and, in the remaining years before his death, created such plays as The Would-Be Gentleman, The Mischievous Machinations of Scapin, and The Learned Women. In 1673, Molière collapsed onstage while performing his last play, The Imaginary Invalid, and died shortly thereafter.

Donald M. Frame was Moore Professor of French at Columbia University and an acclaimed scholar and translator of French literature. Among his notable works of translation are The Complete Essays of Montaigne, The Complete Works of Rabelais, and the Signet Classics Tartuffe & Other Plays and Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories.

Virginia Scott is Professor Emerita in the Department of Theater of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of Moliére: A Theatrical Life, The Commedia Dell’Arte in Paris, and Performance, Poetry and Politics on the Queen’s Day: Catherine de Medici and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainebleau (with Sara Sturm-Maddox).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction

 

Molière is probably the greatest and best-loved French author, and comic author, who ever lived. To the reader as well as the spectator, today as well as three centuries ago, the appeal of his plays is immediate and durable; they are both instantly accessible and inexhaustible. His rich resources make it hard to decide, much less to agree, on the secret of his greatness. After generations had seen him mainly as a moralist, many critics today have shifted the stress to the director and actor whose life was the comic stage; but all ages have rejoiced in three somewhat overlapping qualities of his: comic inventiveness, richness of fabric, and insight.

His inventiveness is extraordinary. An actor-manager-director-playwright all in one, he knew and loved the stage as few have done, and wrote with it and his playgoing public always in mind. In a medium in which sustained power is one of the rarest virtues, he drew on the widest imaginable range, from the broadest slapstick to the subtlest irony, to carry out the arduous and underrated task of keeping an audience amused for five whole acts. Working usually under great pressure of time, he took his materials where he found them, yet always made them his own.

The fabric of his plays is rich in many ways: in the intense life he infuses into his characters; in his constant preoccupation with the comic mask, which makes most of his protagonists themselves—consciously or unconsciously—play a part, and leads to rich comedy when their nature forces them to drop the mask; and in the weight of seriousness and even poignancy that he dares to include in his comic vision. Again and again he leads us from the enjoyable but shallow reaction of laughing at a fool to recognizing in that fool others whom we know, and ultimately ourselves; which is surely the truest and deepest comic catharsis.

Molière’s insight makes his characters understandable and gives a memorable inevitability to his comic effects. He is seldom completely realistic, of course; his characters, for example, tend to give themselves away more generously and laughably than is customary in life; but it is their true selves they give away. It is an obvious trick, and not very realistic, to have Orgon in Tartuffe (Act I, scene 4) reply four times to the account of his wife’s illness with the question “And Tartuffe?” and reply, again four times, to each report of Tartuffe’s gross health and appetite, “Poor fellow!” But it shows us, rapidly and comically, that Orgon’s obsession has closed his mind and his ears to anything but what he wants to see and hear. In the following scene, it may be unrealistic to have him in one speech (ll. 276–79) boast of learning from Tartuffe such detachment from worldly things that he could see his whole family die without concern, and in the very next speech (ll. 306–10) praise Tartuffe for the scrupulousness that led him to reproach himself for killing a flea in too much anger. But—again apart from the sheer comedy—it is a telling commentary on the distortion of values that can come from extreme points of view. One of Molière’s favorite authors, Montaigne, had written about victims of moral hubris: “They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts.” Molière is presenting the same idea dramatically, as he does with even more power later (Act IV, scene 3, l. 1293), when Orgon’s daughter has implored him not to force her to marry the repulsive Tartuffe, and he summons his will to resist her with these words:

Be firm, my heart! No human weakness now!

These moments of truth, these flashes of unconscious self-revelation that plunge us into the very center of an obsession, abound in Molière, adding to our insight even as they reveal his. And even as he caricatures aspects of himself in the reforming Alceste or in the jealous older lover in Arnolphe, so he imparts to his moments of truth not only the individuality of the particular obsession but also the universality of our common share in it.

*   *   *

Molière is one of those widely known public figures whose private life remains veiled. In his own time gossip was rife, but much of it comes from his enemies and is suspect. Our chief other source is his plays; but while these hint at his major concerns and lines of meditation, we must beware of reading them like avowals or his roles like disguised autobiography.*

He was born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in Paris early in 1622 and baptized on January 15, the first son of a well-to-do bourgeois dealer in tapestry and upholstery. In 1631 his father bought the position of valet de chambre tapissier ordinaire du roi, and six years later obtained the right to pass it on at his own death to his oldest son, who took the appropriate “oath of office” at the age of fifteen. Together with many sons of the best families, Jean-Baptiste received an excellent education from the Jesuit Fathers of the Collège de Clermont. He probably continued beyond the basic course in rhetoric to two years of philosophy and then law school, presumably at Orléans.

Suddenly, as it appears to us, just as he was reaching twenty-one, he resigned his survival rights to his father’s court position, and with them the whole future that lay ahead of him; drew his share in the estate of his dead mother and a part of his own prospective inheritance; and six months later joined in forming, with and around Madeleine Béjart, a dramatic company, the Illustre-Théâtre. In September 1643 they rented a court-tennis court to perform in; in October they played in Rouen; in January 1644 they opened in Paris; in June young Poquelin was named head of the troupe, and signed himself, for the first time we know of, “de Molière.”

Molière’s was an extraordinary decision. Apart from the financial hazards, his new profession stood little above pimping or stealing in the public eye and automatically involved minor excommunication from the Church. To write for the theater, especially tragedy, carried no great onus; to be an actor, especially in comedy and farce, was a proof of immorality. Though Richelieu’s passion for the stage had improved its prestige somewhat, this meant only that a few voices were raised to maintain its possible innocence against the condemnation of the vast majority.

Obviously young Molière was in love with the theater, and had to act. He may also have been already in love with Madeleine Béjart; their contemporaries were probably right in thinking them lovers, though all we actually know is that they were stanch colleagues and business partners. Their loyalty was tested from the first. Although the Béjarts raised all the money they could, after a year and a half in Paris the company failed and had to break up; Molière was twice imprisoned in the Châtelet for debt; he and the Béjarts left Paris to try their luck in the provinces. For twelve years they were on the road, mainly in the south.

For the first five of these they joined the company, headed by Du Fresne, of the Duc d’Épernon in Guyenne. When d’Épernon dropped them, Molière became head of the troupe. From 1653 to 1657 they were in the service of a great prince of the blood, the Prince de Conti, until his conversion. Even with a noble patron, the life was nomadic and precarious, and engagements hard to get. However, the company gradually made a name for itself and prospered. Molière gained a rich firsthand knowledge of life on many levels. In the last few years of their wanderings he tried his hand as a playwright with such plays as L’Étourdi and Le Dépit amoureux.

At last in 1658 they obtained another chance to play in the capital. On October 24 they appeared before young Louis XIV, his brother, and the court, in the guard room of the old Louvre, in a performance of Corneille’s tragedy Nicomède, which Molière followed with his own comedy The Doctor in Love. Soon they became the Troupe de Monsieur (the King’s brother) and were installed by royal order in the Théâtre du Petit-Bourbon. Though they still performed tragedies, they succeeded more and more in comedy, in which Molière was on his way to recognition as the greatest actor of his time.

Within a year he made his mark also as a playwright with The Ridiculous Précieuses (November 18, 1659), which, though little more than a sketch, bore the stamp of his originality, keen observation, and rich comic inventiveness.* Nearly thirty-eight, Molière was to have thirteen more years to live, and was to live them as though he knew this was all. To his responsibilities as director and actor he added a hectic but glorious career as a very productive playwright, author of thirty-two comedies that we know, of which a good third are among the comic masterpieces of world literature. The stress of his many roles, of deadlines, and of controversy is well depicted in The Versailles Impromptu. Success led to success—and often to more controversy—but never to respite. He was to be carried off the stage to his deathbed. No doubt he wanted it that way, or almost that way; for probably no man has ever been more possessed by the theater.

On February 20, 1662, at the age of forty, he married the twenty-year-old Armande Béjart, a daughter (according to the mostly spiteful contemporaries) or sister (according to the official documents) of Madeleine. Though what we know of their domestic life is almost nothing, contemporary gossip, a friend’s letter, and Molière’s own preoccupation in several plays with a jealous older man in love with a flighty young charmer, combine to suggest an uneasy relationship. They had two sons who died in infancy and a daughter who survived. The King himself and his sister-in-law (Madame) were godfather and godmother to the first boy—no doubt to defend Molière against a charge, or rumor, that he had married his own daughter.

When the Petit-Bourbon theater was torn down in October 1660 to make way for the new façade of the Louvre, things looked bad; but the King granted the company the use of Richelieu’s great theater, the Palais-Royal, which remained Molière’s until his death. An early success there was his regular, elaborate verse comedy, The School for Husbands. Within a year of his marriage he wrote his first great play and one of his most popular, The School for Wives. It aroused much controversy; when Molière published it, he dedicated it to Madame; the King gave him the support he sought in the form of a pension of one thousand francs for this “excellent comic poet.” The Critique of the School for Wives and The Versailles Impromptu (June and October 1663) completed Molière’s victory in the eyes of the public.

However, his attack on extreme piety and hypocrisy in Tartuffe showed him the strength of his enemies. The first three-act version, performed in May 1664, was promptly banned. For the next five years much of his time and energy went into the fight to get it played: petitions, private readings, revisions, private performances. In August 1667 a five-act version entitled The Impostor was allowed a second public performance—then also banned. Only in February 1669 was the version that we know put on, with enormous success; and this time it was on the program to stay.

Meanwhile Molière had hit back at his enemies in 1665 in Don Juan, which he soon withdrew. In August of that year his company became The King’s Troupe, and his pension was raised to six thousand francs. A year later he completed his greatest and most complex play, The Misanthrope, which met only a modest success, and the light but brilliant farce that often served as a companion piece, The Doctor in Spite of Himself. In 1668 he displayed the bitter comic profundities of The Miser; and in the last four years of his life—still to mention only his finest plays—The Would-Be Gentleman, The Mischievous Machinations of Scapin, The Learned Women, and The Imaginary Invalid.

Molière’s last seven years were dogged by pulmonary illness. A bad bout in early 1666 and another in 1667 led him to accept a milk diet and spend much of the next four years apart from his wife in his house in Auteuil. The year before his own death saw those of his old friend Madeleine Béjart and later of his second son. As his health grew worse, he composed—characteristically—his final gay comedy about a healthy hypochondriac. Before its fourth performance, on February 17, 1673, he felt very ill; his wife and one of his actors urged him not to play that evening; he replied that the whole company depended a lot on him and that it was a point of honor to go on. He got through his part, in spite of one violent fit of coughing. A few hours later he was dead. Since he had not been able, while dying, to get a priest to come and receive his formal renunciation of his profession, a regular religious burial was denied at first, and later grudgingly granted—at night, with no notice, ceremony, or service—only after his widow’s plea to the King. He died and was buried as he had lived—as an actor.

*   *   *

Translations of Molière abound. Two of the most available, both complete, are by H. Baker and J. Miller (1739) and Henri Van Laun (1875–76). The former is satisfactory, but its eighteenth-century flavor is not always Molière’s; the latter is dull. Better for the modern reader are the versions of selected plays by John Wood (1953 and 1959), George Graveley (1956), and especially three others.

Curtis Hidden Page has translated eight well-chosen plays (Putnam, 1908, 2 vols.) which include three verse comedies done into unrhymed verse. Though it sometimes lacks sparkle, his version is always intelligent and responsible.

Morris Bishop’s recent translation of nine plays (one for Crofts Classics, 1950, eight for Modern Library, 1957) is much the best we have for all but two. His excellent selection includes six in prose (Précieuses, Critique, Impromptu, Physician in Spite of Himself, Would-Be Gentleman, Would-Be Invalid) and three done into unrhymed verse (School for Wives, Tartuffe, Misanthrope). His knowledge of Molière and talent for comic verse make his translation lively and racy, and his occasional liberties are usually well taken.

Richard Wilbur has translated Molière’s two greatest verse plays, The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, into rhymed verse (Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1955 and 1963). They are the best Molière we have in English. My sense of their excellence is perhaps best stated personally. I have long wanted to try my hand at translating Molière. When the Wilbur Misanthrope appeared, I decided not to attempt it unless I thought I would do that play either better or at least quite differently. When I finally tried it, I was surprised to find how different I wanted to make it. Wilbur’s end product is superb; but in his Misanthrope I sometimes miss the accents of Molière.* His Tartuffe seems to me clearly better, since it follows the original closely even in detail. Both are beautiful translations. Again and again my quest for sense and for rhymes has led me to the same solution that Wilbur found earlier.

The question whether foreign rhyme should be translated into English rhyme has been often debated and seems to me infinitely debatable. I think a different answer may be appropriate for each poet, and perhaps for each translator. Page explains his rejection of rhyme as something unnatural to good English dramatic verse; but he also recognizes that he often found it harder to avoid rhyme than to use it, and that unrhymed verse is more difficult than rhymed to write well. I think this last point explains my disappointment at some of his and Bishop’s lines. Against the point that rhymed dramatic verse is not natural in English, I would argue that it seems to me almost necessary for Molière. Wilbur has made the case brilliantly in his introduction to The Misanthrope, pointing to certain specific effects—mock tragedy, “musical” poetic relationships of words, even the redundancy and logic of the argument—which demand rhyme. In my opinion, rhyme affects what Molière says as well as the way he says it enough to make it worthwhile to use it in English, and the loss in precision need not be great.

Fidelity in meter, however, seems clearly to mean putting Molière’s alexandrines into English iambic pentameter, and, although allowing some liberties with syllable-count as natural to English, holding rather closely to the precise count that the practice of Molière’s day demanded. However, this reduction in length, while translating (which normally lengthens) even from French into English (which normally shortens), often forces the translator to choose between Molière’s ever-recurring initial “and’s” (and occasional “but’s”) and some key word in the same line. I have usually chosen to retain the key word; but at times I deliberately have not, for fear of losing too much of Molière’s generally easy flow and making him too constipated and sententious.

Molière’s characteristic language is plain, correct, functional, often argumentative, not slangy but conversational. Since in French—despite many savory archaisms—he does not generally strike the modern reader as at all archaic, he should not in English. For most of his writing, verse and prose, I have sought an English that is familiar and acceptable today but not obviously anachronistic.

However, there is much truth in Mornet’s statement that Molière is one of the few great writers who has no style, but rather all the styles of all his characters. The departures from the norm noted above are as common as the norm itself. The earthy talk of peasants and servants is in constant (and sometimes direct) contrast with the lofty affectation of bluestockings and précieuses and the pomposity of pedants; manner as well as matter distinguish a Don Juan from a Sganarelle, Lucile and Cléonte from Nicole and Covielle; Alceste’s explosiveness colors his language and enhances his opposition to Philinte; Charlotte even speaks better French to Don Juan than to her peasant swain Pierrot. To render this infinite variety the translator must call to his aid all the resources of his language—anachronistic or not—that he can command.

A special problem is that of dialect, as in Don Juan and The Doctor in Spite of Himself. To the dialect of the Île de France that Molière uses, familiar to his audience, I see no satisfactory equivalent in English. Since part of the dialect humor rests on bad grammar (“j’avons” and the like) and rustic oaths, I have tried to suggest this by similar, mainly countrified, lapses and exclamations.

My aim, in short, has been to put Molière as faithfully as I could into modern English, hewing close to his exact meaning and keeping all I could of his form and his verve.

*   *   *

The edition I have mainly relied on for this translation is that of Molière’s Œuvres by Eugène Despois and Paul Mesnard (Paris: Hachette, 1873–1900, 14 vols.). I have followed the standard stage directions and division of the play into scenes. The stage directions do not normally indicate entrances and exits as such, since in the French tradition these are shown in print by a change of scenes and signalized only in that way.

*   *   *

I should like to acknowledge three debts: to earlier translators, especially Page, Bishop, and Wilbur; to Sanford R. Kadet for his thorough reading of the Tartuffe and valuable suggestions; and, as always, to my wife, Katharine M. Frame, for her ready and critical ear and her unfailing encouragement.

—Donald M. Frame

Foreword

 

Molière is the most popular French playwright in the United States, the most frequently translated and produced. In fact, Molière’s may be the only French plays many Americans will ever read or see performed onstage. Although written more than 325 years ago, his thirty-three farces, comedies, satires, and court entertainments include plays that are not only fresh and funny but marked by trenchant and still relevant observations about human nature and human foibles. His great subjects are the gender and marital wars, middle-class alienation, the gullibility of man faced with disease and death, and—often seen by theater producers as most applicable to us today—the malignancy of religious hypocrisy.

The playwright and actor who was to rename himself Sieur de Molière was baptized Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in Paris on January 15, 1622. Although his father, Jean Poquelin, was a middle-class merchant and member of the guild of upholsterers, Jean-Baptiste was given the education of a young gentleman. He attended the most prestigious school in Paris, the Collège de Clermont, a Jesuit institution on the Left Bank where noble and even royal children were sent to learn classical languages and the arts of speaking and writing. From there he may have gone to Orléans to study law—or his father may have bought him a degree. It would seem that the ambitious father wanted something more for his son than an apartment over a shop. Law was the way in which middle-class men prepared themselves for offices in the state bureaucracies, eventually becoming “nobles of the robe.” So, Clermont, the law, and tomorrow the world.

Fate in the guise of a red-haired actress named Madeleine intervened. Madeleine Béjart was four years older than Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. She, too, came from a bourgeois background, but at the age of seventeen, Madeleine had herself “emancipated,” that is, declared free of the control of her parents, and became the mistress of a nobleman, the count of Modène. The novelist Georges de Scudéry described her as an actress as “one of the best of the century who had the power to inspire in reality all the feigned passions that are seen on the stage.” She certainly inspired passion in young Poquelin.

In June 1643, Jean-Baptiste along with Madeleine, her brother, and seven others signed a contract establishing themselves as the Illustrious Theater. According to their agreement, the heroes were to be played by Poquelin, Joseph Béjart, and one other, while Madeleine was to choose whatever roles she wanted. The theater opened on New Year’s Day 1644 in a converted tennis court on the Left Bank. It was not a success. Joseph Béjart stuttered, while Poquelin, who wanted desperately to be a tragic actor, lacked, according to Angelique du Croisy, whose parents were members of the troupe, “those external gifts” required to play princes and heroes. He had a short neck and slightly bowed legs and was, as a later critic noted, categorically comic. Only Madeleine was truly suited to play the tragic repertory that was all that mattered in the 1640s.

After the end of the Wars of Religion in 1594, professional traveling troupes gave public performances in Paris, but the first permanent troupe was established there only in 1629, and theater was still in its early days when the Illustrious Theater tried to make a place for itself. In 1644, there were two “official” troupes approved by Louis XIII: the King’s Actors at the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Royal Troupe at the Théâtre du Marais. The Illustrious Théâtre had the protection of Gaston d’Orléans, Louis XIII’s brother, although his patronage did not extend to the financial assistance that was so desperately needed.

The young actors hung on somehow, falling further and further behind, until July 1645, when Jean-Baptiste Poquelin—now calling himself Molière—found himself in debtors’ prison. Once released, he left Paris with Madeleine and joined a provincial troupe led by Charles Dufresne. The long exile had begun.

Many biographers and critics have suggested that Molière changed his name in order to spare his family the embarrassment of being related to an actor. In fact, most actors adopted stage names, usually taken from nature or from a geographical location—du Parc, de la Grange, de Montfleury, de Brie—all of which allowed the actor or actress to use the particule, the “de” that indicates upper-class origin. No one was fooled by this obvious fiction, but actors, who were mostly from the artisan class or from theatrical families, liked to match their noble names to their noble roles. And perhaps this convention made it easier for them to accept their status as people whose profession meant exclusion from society and excommunication from the Church.

For thirteen years, Molière performed in the provinces of France. By 1653 the company was known as the troupe of Molière and Mlle. Béjart. In that same year, the prince de Conti, fifth in line for the French throne, became Molière’s patron and friend. The stagestruck prince enjoyed strolling in his park at Pézenas with the actor, discussing plays and reading choice passages aloud.

Like most French theatergoers of his time, Molière was entranced by the antics of the Italian actors of the Commedia dell’Arte, whose improvised comic entertainments were seen both in Paris and throughout the country, and his first efforts as a playwright were French versions of several farces from the Italian repertory. In 1655 he wrote his first full-length play, L’Étourdi (The Simpleton). A year later he added Le Dépit amoureux (The Vexation of Love) to his repertory. Both are workmanlike farces based on Italian models with excellent roles for comic actors, especially for Molière himself, who had begun to specialize in playing a clever servant named Mascarille.

In this same year, the prince de Conti, suffering from the symptoms of syphilis, noisily reformed his life. He became zealously pious and dismissed the actors that “used to bear his name.” From that time on, he was an implacable enemy of the theater, part of the devout party at court that would cause his former “friend” such extreme distress. However, the critic Chappeauzeau had written of the troupe that, although itinerant, it was “ordinarily just as good as that of the Hôtel [de Bourgogne].” If this were true, then perhaps it was time for Molière and his companions to test the waters in Paris. On October 24, 1658, a tryout was arranged by Louis XIV’s younger brother, Philippe d’Orleans, known as Monsieur, and although the tragedy was not a success, a little farce by Molière called Le Docteur amoureux (The Amorous Doctor) saved the day.

The king awarded the Troupe of Monsieur the right to share with an Italian Commedia dell’Arte company a royal theater known as the Petit-Bourbon. The troupe of ten that began to play there on November 2, 1658, was celebrated for Molière, its farceur, and for its three beautiful actresses, Madeleine Béjart, Catherine de Brie, and Marquise du Parc, but it lacked a young leading man to play lovers and heroes. Its initial repertory of tragedies by Corneille failed to please, but matters improved when Molière’s two comic plays were introduced.

Paris was ready to laugh. In the late 1630s, farce had been largely driven from the stage by reformers led by Cardinal Richelieu. The most successful comic playwright of the 1640s and 1650s was Paul Scarron, who wrote primarily for an actor named Julian Bedeau, known as Jodelet. Molière announced a new direction for his troupe when he lured Jodelet away from the Marais. To welcome the old farceur, Molière wrote a new afterpiece, a short comic play to follow the main tragedy or comedy. Starring Molière as Mascarille and Bedeau as Jodelet, The Ridiculous Précieuses was accused of being nothing but a trifle, a miserable farce that was all Molière and his troupe were capable of staging. In one sense the attackers were right. The Ridiculous Précieuses is, according to seventeenth-century definitions, a farce in most ways. It is short and written in prose, it has middle-class provincials and servants for its characters, and it ends with indecency and violence. Like the farces performed on the same stage by the Italians, it features stock characters: one played in white face, the other in a black mask. On the other hand, it savagely mocks the language and manners of certain pretentious upper-class Parisian women