Tartuffe

• 1. Introduction

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  Tartuffe is a comedy by Moliere, first performed in 1664, and within that same year King Louis XIV suppressed it. The play had appeared at Versailles during the grand fetes, the celebration known as The Party of the Delights of the Enchanted Island. It was found extremely diverting. Yet the king deprived himself of this pleasure and forbade it in public. What could a stage comedy do to provoke a king, an archbishop, and a Catholic underground organization all at once? The answer sits inside a single character, a houseguest who fakes holiness to seize a man's daughter, his fortune, and his home. The word he gave to the French and English languages still names a particular kind of liar. This documentary follows the impostor through the rooms he invades, the seduction that exposes him, the long battle to keep the play alive, and the centuries of stages that have refused to let it rest.

• 2. The Impostor In The House

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  Orgon, the head of the house and husband of Elmire, is blinded by admiration for a fraud who was a vagrant before Orgon's charity. Tartuffe manipulates Orgon by aping devotion and pretending to speak with divine authority. Madame Pernelle, Orgon's mother, shares his conviction and denounces both Elmire and Cleante. The family is up in arms while the two believers defend the man draining them.

  Orgon returns from his estate with news that detonates the household. His daughter Mariane is engaged to Valere, the young romantic lead, but now Tartuffe will marry her instead. The announcement opens a rift between Mariane and Valere, each convinced of the other's apathy. Dorine, the family housemaid, reconciles the couple and plots to reveal the hypocrisy. She suspects Tartuffe can be swayed by Elmire and arranges for the two to meet.

  Damis, Orgon's son and heir, hides during that meeting without Dorine's knowledge. When Tartuffe declares his love for Elmire, Damis interrupts and reports everything to his father in triumph. Tartuffe answers with reverse psychology, accusing himself in lines that survive in the text: Oui, mon frere, je suis un mechant, un coupable. Un malheureux pecheur tout plein d'iniquite. Yes, my brother, I am wicked, guilty. A miserable sinner just full of iniquity. Orgon, swayed by the false confession, decides his own son is the liar.

• 3. The Table And The Trap

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  Banished from the house, Damis is disinherited as Orgon signs over all his worldly possessions to Tartuffe. Cleante reasons with Orgon and Mariane pleads with him, and neither moves him. So Elmire decides to act. She challenges Orgon to eavesdrop on a private meeting between herself and Tartuffe, and Orgon, still certain of the man's piety, agrees and hides under a table.

  Elmire's attempts to seduce Tartuffe at first make him suspicious. His lust soon overrides his caution and gives Orgon unobjectionable proof from beneath the table. Orgon demands that Tartuffe leave, but Tartuffe reminds him that the house now belongs to him and threatens to return. The blindness has become a legal trap with the family inside it.

  Orgon confesses to his family a secret from before the play began. He had told Tartuffe that he kept letters written by his friend Argas, a veteran of the Fronde who opposed Louis XIV, and those letters denounced the king. The box that held them cannot be found. The hypocrite now holds both the deed to the house and a weapon of treason.

• 4. The King From The Wings

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  Monsieur Loyal, a bailiff, arrives with a message that Orgon and his family must vacate the house. Dorine mocks his name and his false loyalty as he goes. Then Valere rushes in with worse news: Tartuffe has shown the treasonous letters to the King, and an officer is coming with a warrant for Orgon's arrest.

  Tartuffe arrives with the officer expecting to watch Orgon taken away. To his surprise, the officer arrests Tartuffe instead. The officer explains that the King, who is never mentioned by name, has heard of the injustices in the house and was appalled by Tartuffe's treachery. The King has learned that Tartuffe carries a long criminal history and has often changed his name to escape capture.

  As a reward for Orgon's earlier good services, the King forgives him for keeping the letters and invalidates the deed that handed Tartuffe the house. The family escapes both disgrace and dispossession, and Orgon consents to Valere marrying Mariane in thanks for his loyalty. This sudden rescue by an unseen royal hand is considered a notable modern example of the classical plot device deus ex machina.

• 5. Banned And Defended

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  Louis XIV suppressed the play almost immediately, probably under the influence of the archbishop of Paris, Paul Philippe Hardouin de Beaumont de Perefixe, who was the King's confessor and former tutor. The official account of the fete recorded the reasoning: the king's extreme delicacy in religious matters could not suffer this resemblance of vice to virtue, which could be mistaken for each other. The portrait of a man outwardly pious but fundamentally mercenary, lecherous, and deceitful gave offense at once.

  The factions against Moliere included part of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, members of upper-class French society, and the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, a Catholic underground organization. Archbishop Perefixe issued an edict threatening excommunication for anyone who watched, performed in, or read the play. Moliere rewrote the work to seem more secular, renaming the character Panulphe and the play L'Imposteur, but church officials would not budge. That single performance occurred at the Palais-Royal theatre on the 5th of August 1667, and the next day Guillaume de Lamoignon, first president of the Paris Parlement, censored public performances while the king was away.

• 6. Verse And Vocabulary

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  The play is written entirely in twelve-syllable lines, alexandrines, of rhyming couplets, running to 1,962 lines in total. That formal craft carries a farce about a swindler dressed as a saint. The characters of Tartuffe, Elmire, and Orgon are counted among the greatest classical theatre roles.

  Moliere's creation reached beyond the theatre into everyday speech. Contemporary French and English both use the word tartuffe to name a hypocrite who exaggeratedly feigns virtue, especially religious virtue. A character became a common noun.

  The play's afterlife shows in how its name became a banner for argument. When the satirical anticlerical magazine La Calotte began publication in 1906, its first editorial declared that laughter is the only weapon feared by the soldiers of Tartuffe. The magazine promised to wield that weapon with articles and cartoons lampooning the Catholic Church and its clergy.

• 7. Three Versions, Many Stages

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  The original version was in three acts and was first staged on the 12th of May 1664 at the Palace of Versailles' Cour de Marbre during Les Plaisirs de l'ile enchantee. Because of the attacks and the ban, this version was never published and no text survives, leaving scholars to debate whether it was finished. Many believe it held the first three acts of the final version, while John Cairncross has proposed that acts one, three, and four were performed. Private stagings kept it alive, seen on the 25th of September 1664 at Villers-Cotterets for Louis' brother Philippe I, Duke of Orleans, and on the 29th of November 1664 at the Chateau du Raincy for Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti.

  The second version, L'Imposteur, was in five acts and performed only once before the archbishop banned it on the 11th of August. The largely final third version, titled Tartuffe, ou L'Imposteur, in five acts, appeared on the 5th of February 1669 at the Palais-Royal theatre and was highly successful. This is the published version generally performed today. It has stayed on the repertoire of the Comedie-Francaise, where it is the most performed play.

  The stage history reaches across countries and decades. Constantin Stanislavski was working on a production when he died in 1938, and Mikhail Kedrov completed it for an opening on the 4th of December 1939. A 1967 National Theatre Company production used the Richard Wilbur translation, with John Gielgud as Orgon and Robert Stephens as Tartuffe. Later reinventions moved the action far from 1664, including a 1999 staging by Charles Randolph-Wright set among affluent African Americans of Durham, North Carolina, in the 1950s, and a Royal Shakespeare Company version by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto relocated to the modern-day Pakistani-Muslim community of Sparkhill, Birmingham.

• 8. Screen And Sound

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  F. W. Murnau directed a 1926 German film, Herr Tartuff, produced by Ufa, with Emil Jannings as Tartuffe, Lil Dagover as Elmire, and Werner Krauss as Orgon. Gerard Depardieu later directed and starred in the title role of Le tartuffe, the 1984 French film version. The 2007 French film Moliere folds the play into its plot, with the character of Moliere masquerading as a priest who calls himself Tartuffe, implying he went on to write the play from that experience.

  Broadcasters returned to the impostor again and again. On the 28th of November 1971, the BBC broadcast a Play of the Month production with Michael Hordern as Tartuffe and Patricia Routledge as Dorine. The BBC also adapted Bill Alexander's Royal Shakespeare Company staging, first screened in the UK during November 1985 with much of the original cast, including Antony Sher and Nigel Hawthorne reprising their roles.

  The play keeps drawing new voices into its rooms. Kirke Mechem based an opera on it, and in 2009 BBC Radio 3 aired an adaptation translated by Roger McGough. In 2025, a new adaptation by Lucas Hnath opened off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop with Matthew Broderick as Tartuffe and David Cross as Orgon, directed by Sarah Benson. Another version starring Andre De Shields as Tartuffe was announced on the 4th of September 2025, set at the House of the Redeemer with performances beginning on the 3rd of October.