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Tartuffe Analysis

Decent Essays

Austin Minton
Comparative Literature
Professor Willingham
HW 1C
In March-April 1664, Molière wrote a first Tartuffe, in three acts, at a time when devotees gathered around the powerful Company of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, are shocked by the privacy of Louis XIV, lover Mademoiselle de La Valliere. On the Pleasures of the Enchanted Island in May of the same year, the sumptuous feast given by King in Versailles, Molière's play The Princess of Elis, The Unfortunate and Tartuffe. This last work is very successful, and the spectators try to guess which contemporary could serve as a model for the character of the hero. Immediately, the cabal led by the Holy Sacrament of the Company is unleashed with much greater violence that during the …show more content…

Moliere rewrote the Tartuffe, which made his hero a layman, Panulph, and attenuated certain passages so that the king authorized the representation verbally before his departure for Flanders. On August 5, the premiere of L'Imposteur was an unprecedented success, but two days later, when the show was about to begin, bailiffs sent by the first Speaker of Parliament, M. de Lamoignon, 'Prohibit. Two actors, La Grange and La Thorillière, left for Flanders to hand over a second plot of Moliere to the sovereign. "Monsieur protected us as usual, and his Majesty told us that on his return to Paris she would have the play of Tartuffe examined and that we should play it," reads La Grange's register. On August 11, the archbishop of Paris, Hardouin de Perefixe, censured the play, forbidding all, under penalty of excommunication, to read it, to hear its reading or to see it represented. The affair did not evolve until eighteen months later, with what was called "the peace of the Church," and, on February 5, Le Tartuffe was finally

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