Tartuffe and The Bourgeois Gentleman

Molière’s Tartuffe and The Bourgeois Gentleman brings together two of the great comedies of seventeenth-century French theatre, first published in 1669 and 1671 respectively. In Tartuffe, a calculating religious impostor insinuates himself into the household of Orgon, exploiting his host’s misplaced devotion to secure influence, wealth and the affections of his wife. In The Bourgeois Gentleman, the prosperous Monsieur Jourdain dreams of escaping his social station, surrounding himself with tutors, fashionable manners and aristocratic acquaintances in his pursuit of refinement. Through deception, vanity and the absurdities of social ambition, Molière exposes the distance between appearance and reality.

Written in the brilliant theatrical world of Louis XIV’s France, these plays combine sparkling dialogue, physical comedy and incisive social observation with a lasting interest in human folly. Tartuffe provoked fierce controversy for its portrayal of religious hypocrisy, while The Bourgeois Gentleman, conceived as a lavish comedy-ballet with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, remains a wonderfully perceptive satire of class and pretension. Together, they demonstrate Molière’s extraordinary ability to make the manners of his own age speak to successive generations, revealing how easily self-interest disguises itself as virtue and aspiration becomes ridiculous when divorced from self-knowledge.

From the book

“I have been speaking prose for more than forty years without knowing it.”

— Molière, The Bourgeois Gentleman

On The Bourgeois Gentleman

“It is one of the happiest subjects for comedy that human folly has ever furnished.”

— Voltaire, on The Bourgeois Gentleman