Now it's your turn enjoy it. First, a disclaimer: Tartuffe was scandalous back in the day, and there's a reason why. It deals the idea of religious hypocrisy. This issue was hard to tackle back then and, well, it remains hard to tackle now. We here at Shmoop think everybody has a right to believe what they want; we're just here to present the facts.
Sure we have lots of opinions on literature, but even then, we want you to challenge them and come up with your own thoughts. OK, time to get on to the issues Tartuffe. In , an American Christian group called LifeWay Research conducted a survey in which they asked participants about their beliefs and churchgoing habits, among other things.
According to the survey, a majority of Americans who said they believed in God didn't go to church. Those are pretty strong words, right? Now, although surveys are by no means perfect, there's some indication that Americans don't like religious hypocrisy.
These same Americans live in a society that protects free speech and guarantees the separation of church and state. Whenever evoked in a modern or a postmodern cultural context, even outside France, Tartuffe still carries with it a considerable amount of polemical baggage. He died a few hours after the performance at his home of a lung embolism. 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.
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. The crude slapstick of French farce with its stock characters and exaggerated situations was enjoyed by the populace, while the sophisticated preferred the dignity, verisimilitude, and profundity of tragedy. Literary or high comedy needed to be similarly serious and refined. He showed that comedy, as well as tragedy, could reach psychological depths and essential human themes and that the caricatural distortions of farce aided rather than prevented the exploration of human nature and social experience.
Over the course of the play, Orgon completely destroys his family only to be saved at the last minute by the king. Even before its premiere in , the first version of Tartuffe was already a subject of great concern in the court. The church and the state were intertwined and France was still in a state of recovery from violent religious conflicts.
Powerful religious factions were disrupting society under the pretext of moral reform. Though the king approved the play for performance at court, he heeded protests of devout members of the court and clergy and forbade any further public performance. Next, he wrote The Misanthrope which, mercifully, was a hit. At the same time, 2 the monarch must never delegate his judgment to another: he remains responsible for the wisdom of whatever advice he takes, and therefore must always retain the independent exercise of his own powers of mind.
Most importantly, 3 this judgment itself must always be ruled in turn by reason and common sense. The basic insight you want to get at is that despite the fact that divine right of kings is a theologically grounded theory of political legitimacy, the play implicitly insists that the monarch must never make his conscience the prisoner of his confessor or even of the pope.
Even the religious policy of the nation he must determine on the basis of sober and humane reason which is a faculty of the natural constitution of man rather than on the basis of intensity of faith which is to be suspected as an expression of irrational passion. Finally, if the king refuses to recognize these facts, he will not only risk the displeasure of God in the afterlife, but will make a fool of himself before mankind, and will suffer ignominy in history, as ridiculous and pitiful.
This sanction, though informal, is powerful, and it is exercised in this world. Our delight is capped by seeing the villain dashed, in a surprise come-uppance. But it is the logic of the categories at work in the play that makes it impossible for the king to accept this compliment without at the same time paying court to the general principle that if an absolute king hence he himself were to behave in his kingdom France in a way analogous to that in which Orgon behaves, there might be no way for himself and his kingdom to be rescued from disaster except by a miracle.
For this, it is sober reason that is required. Moreover, even if political disaster were averted by a divine advent, an Orgon-like monarch would be a laughingstock of history. And Louis XIV was a person whose priority in life, after of course his eternal salvation, was glory: recognition in history, by qualified judges hence, by reasonable men for his achievements in history.
See Matthew and Platt, p. This understanding, on the part of King and audience, works as a sanction a carrot and a stick upon the King, recognized as legitimate by both King and subject, for encouraging the King, in and despite his absolute authority, to behave with caution. It is enabled to do so by the fact that this aspect of its working remains completely implicit, and by the fact that the implication is logically inseparable from the elegant flattery with which it concludes.
Divine-right absolutism as a "modern" political theory. His brother Charles I had been restored to the throne to replace a virtual absolute monarchy in the form of the Protectorate instituted by the Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell, who himself had participated in the execution of James II's and Charles II's father, Charles I, who had tried to act upon the theory of divine right of kings that his father, in turn, James I, had vigorously argued for in a number of political tracts but prudently stopped short of asserting in practice.
The American Revolution of , for its part, rebelled against the exactions of the limited monarchy that had been established in
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