However, the play retains its ability to shock and touch audiences on sore spots, and the need to be able to distinguish true piety amidst sham is no less urgent today than it was in 17th-century France.Ĭontroversy, such as that surrounding Tartuffe and Molière’s passing, was a constant in the playwright’s career, beginning with his return to Paris in 1658 after a 12-year provincial tour as actor, manager, and playwright with a struggling theatrical troupe. It is easy to condemn the bias and blindness of Molière’s clerical contemporaries at the time of his death, still smarting from the stings of Tartuffe. That his critics misperceived the play’s exposure of false piety and religious hypocrisy as an attack on religion itself suggests that Tartuffe hit a sensitive nerve. That Molière would comically treat such a subject in a religiously sensitive age that still dealt with heresy at the stake was daring in the extreme, if not foolhardy. Molière’s shockingly delightful drama about religious belief radically redefined the targets and ends of comedy. Tartuffe is one of the most contentious plays ever produced and the subject of the 17th-century’s greatest censorship battle. The clergy refused to forgive Molière for his presumed impious and blasphemous attack on religion in Tartuffe, which had been first performed almost a decade before in 1664, and only reluctantly bowed to royal persuasion. The king managed to persuade the archbishop of Paris to grant Molière a Christian burial, but only in the dead of night, without a public ceremony of mourning.

France’s greatest dramatist was finally buried, in the words of critic Nicholas Boileau, in a “piece of land obtained by supplication,” through the intervention of Louis XIV on behalf of his friend. The priests at the parish of Saint-Eustache, where he had been baptized as Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, refused him last rites and the opportunity for the conventional deathbed renunciation of his profession that would have allowed the excommunicated actor to be buried in holy ground. He died a few hours after the performance at his home of a lung embolism. That the already desperately ill Molière should end his theatrical career pretending to be a hypochondriac is one of the theater’s great dramatic ironies. On February 17, 1773, Molière coughed up blood while performing the title role in his final comedy, Le Malade imaginaire ( The Imaginary Invalid). Ralph Albanese, Jr., “ Tartuffe Goes to School” It may be argued that it delves far closer to the level of persistent cultural preoccupation than any of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, and that one must look to Don Quixote or War and Peace to find a literary text so thoroughly joined to a particular concept of nationhood. Whenever evoked in a modern or a postmodern cultural context, even outside France, Tartuffe still carries with it a considerable amount of polemical baggage.

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