How is tartuffe a comedy

It likewise was immediately banned. Louis let the ban stand but agreed to reexamine the case upon his return to Paris. The basic elements of the comedy are inherited. The parasite, the tyrannical father, young put-upon lovers, and scheming servants recall the cast in Roman comedies. The most striking structural innovation in the play is keeping Tartuffe offstage until the second scene of the third act, the climax of most five-act dramas. Is not a face quite different from a mask?

Cannot sincerity and cunning art, Reality and semblance, be told apart? Are scarecrows just like men, and do you hold That a false coin is just as good as gold? He thereby becomes a petty tyrant in his home, willing to sacrifice all he is responsible for—wife, son, daughter, and property—to his desires, while casting out all who dissent as damned heretics. The flesh is weak. As late as Voltaire's Candide the irrational acceptance of a popular philosophy is ridiculed. In England, earlier, Jonathan Swift was concerned with rationality in a similar fashion.

They repeatedly express the exasperated wish that the rest of the world would act equally as rationally. It is often used by opposing characters to add strength to their own contradictory points of view.

Neoclassical comedy also calls for a degree of intellectual detachment from the audience which other types of plays do not. Tragedy demands sympathy for the protagonist; other kinds of comedy — like "Romantic comedy" — individualize characters and allow for a certain identification with them. This detachment forces us to see a fop as a fop the type and thus comic, rather than as an individual evoking pity. Following is the eighth line of Tartuffe in the original French, demonstrating the Alexandrine scheme with the caesura after the comma.

The accented syllables are in boldfaced blue. A couplet is a pair of lines in which the final syllable of each line rhymes. Following are lines in the original French, demonstrating this rhyming pattern. Madame Pernelle is the speaker. The rhyming syllables are in boldfaced blue:.

Among these works is Tartuffe. Study Questions and Essay Topics. Plot Summary By Michael J. The text is in the public domain. Cummings Guides Home.. Plot Summary.