by Ranjit Bolt
TARTUFFE
Molière
TARTUFFE
A translation by Ranjit Bolt
Introduction by Nicholas Dromgoole
OBERON BOOKS
LONDON
First published in this translation in 2002 by Oberon Books Ltd
Electronic edition published in 2012
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Contents
Introduction
Characters
ACT ONE
ACT TWO
ACT THREE
ACT FOUR
ACT FIVE
Appendix
Introduction
The first version of Molière’s Tartuffe was performed in three acts at the royal court at Versailles on 12 May 1664, before the young Louis XIV. News of its contents provoked scandal, outrage and demands that the play be banned and Molière punished. As a result of intervention by the authorities it did not transfer to the expected public performance before a paying public in Paris. The literary world of the time seemed to flourish on vitriolic pamphlets denouncing every possible abuse, and Tartuffe certainly got its share. Molière was ‘the devil come alive in a human frame’; the play ‘committed lèse majesté against God and His Church.’ What was going on? Was Molière an innocent playwright penning an amusing little comedy and quite unaware that he was blundering into a hornet’s nest? Or was he a seasoned dramatist, well able to judge exactly the kind of publicity his subject matter would arouse, and how long queues at the box office could be summoned out of a public furore and outcry?
The days when the play was dynamite exploding into hates, fears and bitter prejudices have happily receded, and can really only be understood in the context of wider social issues of its own time. In the second half of the sixteenth century France nearly tore itself apart in a series of vicious religious wars between a Catholic majority and a Protestant minority. Beliefs were passionate and both sides totally committed, but there was another agenda. The growing power of the monarchy had eroded the status and privileges of the nobles, many of whom used the religious wars in a determined attempt to win back what they had lost. Fortunately for the monarchy, between 1630 and 1660 France had two remarkably able first ministers, Richelieu and then Mazarin, who both re-established and extended the King’s power. The civil uprising of the Fronde in 1648 was the last despairing attempt to reverse this process, but it failed. From 1661 the young Louis XIV determined to rule France himself, without a first minister, and proved during his long reign to 1715 that he was one of the finest administrators France had ever had.
Catholicism in France gained renewed confidence and inspiration under thinkers like Cardinal de Bérulle, St Francis de Sales and St Vincent de Paul. A widespread movement called Gallicanism felt there was something special about French Catholicism, and opposed outside interference from the Pope in Rome. The rise of Jansenism, an extreme form of Catholicism, in many ways reflected this fresh energy and piety. On the other hand, Catholics undoubtedly felt threatened and insecure by growing Protestant zeal, and in Calvinism the Protestants had an extreme answer to Catholicism. Equally threatening was a growing revival of ancient Greek and Roman Stoicism among an educated minority, with its tendency to adopt a world-weary attitude to the theological disputes of the period: ‘A plague on both your houses.’ These attitudes are best exemplified in the writings of Guillaume du Vair and Pierre Charron whose De La Sagesse (1601) had a considerable influence, even extending to the Catholic brilliance of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées.
Into this almost feverish atmosphere of renewed faith, energetic zeal and yet strange insecurity, with each side almost hysterically aware of enemies both without and within their respective camps, Tartuffe seemed to spearhead yet another attack. The play, like a red rag to a bull, infuriated the deeply religious. It tells of a rich man, Orgon, who takes a fake religious guru, Tartuffe, into his home, is seduced by his piety into offering him his daughter’s hand in marriage and turning over his property to him, until the con-man is finally unmasked as a villain. Tartuffe repeatedly mouths high-sounding religious platitudes, and in creating a villain from this display of religious zeal, the play was bound to spark public uproar. It is safe to assume that Molière knew exactly what he was doing. But who was this seasoned playwright and where did he spring from?
Born in 1622, Molière’s career in the theatre until his early death at fifty-one in 1673 divides neatly into two phases: humiliation and struggle for the first fifteen years, then increasing success and fame for the next fourteen years. His rich merchant family gave him the best education available, but he deserted the solid comforts of bourgeois family life to spend his entire career in the competitive rat race of the theatre. With a young group of fellow enthusiasts he set up a drama company, L’Illustre Théãtre, and bravely opened in Paris. There is no doubt he nursed delusions of grandeur. He saw himself, not only as a great tragic actor, but as someone who was going to revolutionise the conventional sing-song delivery of the tragic actors of his day. At this distance we have no idea of the rights and wrongs of his performance, but in the theatre, the audience is always judge and jury, and they would have none of these new-fangled attempts at tragic acting. The undoubted fact that Molière had an unfortunate stutter, particularly at moments of high drama and extreme emotion, cannot have helped.
Within two years his company was bankrupt and he was in prison for debt. When his father rallied and paid the debts, Molière, unrepentant, formed a fresh company, including the three members of the Béjart family who had joined him in setting up the original L’Illustre Théãtre, and disappeared into the provinces, to learn his trade the hard way, on tour for the next thirteen years. We would all like to know much more than we do about what he acted, what he wrote, but clearly during these years he learned how to be an actor, a playwright, a director, a theatre manager, a publicist and an ingenious manipulator of his fellow human beings. He was bright, massively well educated (he knew all the plays of Terence in Latin by heart), good-looking, charming, witty and fun to be with. He developed an outstanding talen
t as a comic actor, and became better and better at writing plays. It was only a matter of time before Paris discovered it needed him almost as much as he needed Paris.
In 1658 Molière and his company performed before the King at court. He must still have been nursing dreams of imposing himself as a great tragic actor. They opened with a Corneille tragedy, even though, in the audience, interested to see this provincial company about which they had doubtless already heard much, were members of the Bourgogne Company, famous in Paris for their tragic acting, presumably in the very style Molière was hoping to improve and supersede. Alas for innovation and change! The company and their tragedy were not well received. Fortunately Molière then saved the day by begging permission from the footlights to present a farce, written by himself, with himself in the leading role. It was an immediate success. The king was immensely amused. By royal command, Molière and his company were thenceforth installed in the Salle du Bourbon in Paris, sharing the premises with an Italian commedia dell’arte company, and each performing on alternate nights. The Italian company was directed by the famous Tiberio Fiorillo (Scaramouche), from whom in his younger days Molière had taken acting lessons. Hostile critics long taunted that most of Molière’s best ideas were cribbed from the Italians.
Increasingly after that performance before the king in 1658, Molière became an influence in French cultural life. In a sense, he has never left Paris since 1658, and he is still very much a part of French thinking, indeed in any attempt to understand what being French involves, it would still be impossible to ignore Molière’s contribution. This may seem a grand claim, but an even grander one can be made for him. France in the seventeenth century was at the heart of Europe’s cultural life. French thinking dominated the ideology of the period, and French styles in clothing, manners and all the arts from architecture, painting and sculpture to literature, were imitated and copied all over Europe, potent symbols of France’s domination of Europe at the time. Anyone lucky enough to see Roger Planchon’s famous productions of Tartuffe, either in 1962, or the even more effective 1973 staging which, appropriately for what I am suggesting, opened in Buenos Aires, before coming to France (and was presented by the Planchon company at London’s National Theatre in 1976), could hardly fail to realise that Molière is still not only French, but a treasured element of western culture as a whole. That is why he is so frequently translated into other languages and given so many productions outside France. Ranjit Bolt has happily caught much of the original’s many-layered ambiguities and sheer sense of fun in the version for the Royal National Theatre published here.
It was no accident that when Molière first played before the King, he opened with a tragedy. When he arrived in Paris, tragedy reigned supreme. Humour was seen as a matter for broad farce or for the commedia. He chose a tragedy by Corneille, who had also written comedies, but even the Oxford Companion to the Theatre refers to Corneille as ‘France’s first great tragic dramatist’. Comedy was considered a lesser art. Molière greatly admired Corneille’s comedy Le Menteur and is reported to have claimed that without it, ‘I might have written L’Etourdi but never Le Misanthrope.’ But it was really Molière who gave comedy the same status in art as tragedy had previously enjoyed alone. Essentially it was his achievement as a writer, aided and abetted by his impressive gifts as an actor and a director. By creating recognisable characters in believable situations, he used humour to persuade his audience to confront many of the most important issues of his day. Because he was a creative artist, Molière was not happy just to repeat himself. Every play tackled something new, not just in its subject matter but often in its form as well. He repeatedly surprised his audience so that they never knew what to expect. Alongside ten one-act plays, a couple of Molière’s plays have two acts, nine have three, and twelve have five. Each play fitted its subject like a glove. W B Yeats spoke of ‘a theatre ...joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, beautiful, resonant and altogether reckless.’ Molière had already been there and done that.
Tartuffe, at its solitary first performance, was originally three acts, and Tartuffe may himself have been dressed in some form of holy orders. What was Molière trying to do?
Perhaps we should first remember that this was an amazingly conformist and conventional world. It was the last comfortable time in which nobody questioned the system itself. Here were the great majority of people working in relative poverty, crippled with taxes, in order to keep a small minority of aristocrats leading a life of idle luxury, hopping in and out of bed with each other at Versailles. Nobody asked if society could be organised on a fairer basis. Why on earth not? The answer is distressingly simple. This was a deeply religious age, and every body believed and accepted that God had ordained that there should be kings, nobles and peasants, and the good life consisted of making the best of whatever life God had allotted. Church and State mutually supported each other and upheld the status quo both ideologically and practically. To question the system was to question God, and as that unfortunate affair at Loudon was to show, there were still medieval punishments in store for anyone who dared to do that. Admittedly, across the Channel things were ordered differently. The English had been busily questioning the system for most of the century. They had beheaded their king and set up a Commonwealth, but the rest of Europe merely held up their hands in horror at what this rogue nation was up to. Just as Elizabethan drama had almost no effect on contemporary drama in France, so the ferment of revolutionary ideas in England was largely ignored by the French. It was not until the eighteenth century that the French started analysing what on earth had been happening in England. (And not until well into the nineteenth century that British drama made much of an impact on its chauvinist neighbour. Whereas the British had been slavishly copying French drama since Molière!)
Conformism had taken over the arts as well. Louis XIV established separate academies for architecture, for painting and sculpture, for music and even for dance, which laid down what was acceptable and what was not, and exactly how things should be done. The same rules were laid down for the decorative arts. We may feel today that our Serotas and our Arts Councils can occasionally seem to have too dictatorial a say in what is fashionable and acceptable and what is not, but conformism was much more greatly enforced in France under the Sun King. Literature, and particularly theatre, could not be so strictly controlled because patronage and commissions were less in the State’s hands but rested far more in the Paris box office. Drama was more free to tackle what concerned its audience, not the authorities (but not if a furious Archbishop of Paris had anything to do with it).
Moreover, across the Channel in 1660, because England had grown fed up with Puritan austerity and, dare one say, hypocrisy, the Puritan Commonwealth had petered out, and Charles II had been invited back to reign over his people once again, and incidentally to allow theatre once more to flourish after it had been forbidden for a generation. Perhaps, like England, Molière and his Paris audience were fed up, not with piety, not with virtue, but with listening to hypocrites voice pious sentiments as a cover for much less admirable self-seeking.
It is possible too, for such are the vagaries of the creative impulse, that some of the force of the final Tartuffe may have arisen from Molière’s bitterness towards Racine. In the same year as the first performance of Tartuffe, Molière’s company was putting on a first play by a young man, all charm and intelligence, whom Molière had befriended, encouraged and brought into his literary circle. Through Molière, the young Jean Racine (1639-99) met writers like Boileau and La Fontaine. He also met the pretty women of Molière’s company and started an affair with one of them: Mlle du Parc, even though she was apparently no stranger to the bed of Molière himself. Generously recognising the talents of someone younger than himself (both in the bedroom and on the stage), Molière not only advised Racine on his first play, The Thebaid, and produced it in his own theatre, but put on his second play, Alexander the Great, in 1665.
Racine had been brought up in a st
rictly Jansenist circle. This extreme form of Catholicism gave Racine an even bleaker view of life than most of his contemporaries. For Jansenists, man was not only born in sin, but was basically corrupt. Without God’s grace to bolster the rather pathetic human longing for virtue and to stiffen the weak and wavering human will, the corruption of the flesh and the temptation of the world would triumph. Song and dance and theatre were all part of the world’s insidious corruption. They trampled virtue and overcame the weak will. The young Racine, in joining Molière’s circle and in writing plays himself, was consciously repudiating the beliefs he had been brought up in. No doubt he spoke about them with scorn. He too must have been sickened by the hypocrisy which a remarkably clever adolescent could discern in those ostensibly pious around him. Someone had already called Molière ‘Dangerous! He carries his eyes and ears about with him everywhere!’ Was it the young Racine’s fulminations against his Jansenist upbringing that gave Molière the idea for Tartuffe? Worse was to come. As soon as Alexander the Great proved a success, Racine decamped with it to the Bourgogne Company. Shortly afterwards Mlle du Parc followed.
Molière could not believe such base ingratitude. He never spoke to Racine again and perhaps some of his fury and bitterness went into the final version of Tartuffe? Poor Mlle du Parc did not last long. When her charms faded for Racine, according to secret police reports, he murdered her to clear his bed for a more favoured competitor. And got away with it. In his case charm was only skin deep and the flesh corrupt indeed.
In spite of the wild protests from the clergy, Tartuffe the play is in no sense an attack on the Church. Nobody condemns Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales for including some pretty unsavoury characters among his clergymen, including a Pardoner who is clearly not going to be pardoned at all when he finally faces a stem St. Peter at the heavenly gates. Chaucer was exposing clergymen who did not live up to their vows, but he was not in any sense attacking the institution of the Church in his day, nor did his audience even remotely imagine he was attempting any such thing. It says a great deal about the subsequent sense of insecurity in the French Church that they were so quick to take offence when Molière did much the same as Chaucer. After that one performance at court in 1664, Molière presented a revised version in Paris in 1667. It was immediately banned after one public performance, and the Archbishop of Paris ordered that the play should be denounced from every parish pulpit in Paris. With hindsight, and gratefully with some of Roger Planchon’s insight, we are better able to come to terms with the play today.
