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Excerpt from Tartuffe: Or the HypocriteLouis V entertained his court, in May of 1664, at his recently finished palace and pleasure-grounds of Ver sailles, with a week of uninterrupted festival. Moliere, now the chief furnisher of the king's pleasures, gave dur ing the week four plays: The Bares; le Forced Mar riage; 77x Princes: ofelz's, begun in verse, but hastily fin ished in prose to be ready for the king's entertainment; and the first three acts of Tartufe. These three acts taken] alone must have seemed much less serious than the play as a whole seems to us now. They are in fact made up for the most part of excellent light comedy - the harangues of Madame Pernelle, the retorts of Dorine, the quarrel and reconciliation of the lovers, the famous scene of The poor man! And that of the confounding of Damis. Tartufie himself does not enter until the second scene of the third act, and in that act he is odious and comical not, as in the later acts, odious and almost terrifying. The character of Cleante was less seriously conceived than in later versions of the play, since part of his origi nal r61e was later transferred to Dorine. And some of the more serious passages of these three acts as we have them now, especially in the speeches of Cle'ante, were probably not yet written.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
