In the years after its premiere, Molière's “Tartuffe” provoked polemics like no theater text before or since.
As is well known, the play shows the citizen Orgon, who (in the series of five acts) has taken in the bigot Tartuffe in his house and, to the annoyance of the rest of the family (except for the mother), blindly worships him;
wants to marry his daughter, who has already been promised elsewhere, which meets with courageous resistance from her maid;
even accused his own son of lying and chased him out of the house when he publicized Tartuffe's love proposal to his stepmother;
only then sheds the scales on his eyes when said Elmire lets him overhear a fake tryst with the lecher;
Finally, taken from his house by Tartuffe and threatened with imprisonment,
"Tartuffe" was launched on May 12, 1664 in Versailles. The next day or the day after that, Louis XIV announced his satisfaction with the author and troupe leader about his new comedy - and banned further performances! From 1653 the young king had stylized himself as Roi Soleil, particularly through ballet performances in sun costumes; In 1661 he took over the management of government affairs. But in 1664 his power was not yet absolute. An underground battle raged between the “old court” around the Queen Mother and the nouvelle cour around the twenty-six-year-old throne holder. In one camp there were strict old gentlemen: prelates, preachers and presidents, in the other sensuous young ladies - and, as a means to an end, Molière and his actors. Because the sun kingExasperated by the morally acidic taunting of his adulterous relationship with Louise de La Vallière, he appreciated the broadside that “Tartuffe” fired at overzealous moral guardians.
Tug of war between the extremes
Nevertheless, he had to give in at first. Eight days after the promulgation of an edict that committed all the country's clergy to the fight against the "Jansenist sect", the royal approval for a play perceived as anti-religious would have sent a counterproductive signal, the Archbishop of Paris asserted. Molière wrote petitions, had protectors intervene, but above all revised his text several times. The tug-of-war between conservatives and liberals dragged on for almost five years, accompanied by experts and pamphleteers and eagerly followed by the educated public of the time. Even the Pope's legate and the Queen of Sweden took an interest in the case. Finally, on February 5, 1669, the king permitted the performance of a final new version of the play.It is this "Tartuffe", expanded from three to five acts, that is still performed on all stages of the world today.
We do not know what the 1664 version looked like. Some specialists suspect that only the first three acts of the five-act work, which was still in the making, were played at the time. Georges Couton, the editor of the penultimate Molière complete edition in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, even thought they formed a self-contained piece. Couton's successor, Georges Forestier, put forward a different thesis in a recently published volume: Molière expanded the original "Tartuffe" to include today's acts two and five, which pursue parallel storylines (the daughter's attempted marriage and Orgon's dispossession and final rescue by the Deus ex machine). Scratch those two lifts and do some minor retouching,remains a three-act play with the following plot – known from a number of literary sources: “A man of God who is taken into the house falls in love with his host’s wife, tries in vain to seduce her, is unmasked by a ruse on her part and is finally killed.”