The Misanthrope And Tartuffe

By Molière and Richard Wilbur (Editor)

The Pulitzer Prize winner's classic translations of Moliere's comic masterpieces satirizing shallowness, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy.
The Misanthrope is a searching comic study of falsity, shallowness, and self-righteousness through the character of Alceste, a man whose conscience and sincerity are too rigorous for his time. In Tartuffe, a wily, opportunistic swindler manipulates a wealthy prude and bigot through his claims of piety. This latter translation earned Wilbur a share of the Bollingen Translation Prize for his critically acclaimed work of this satiric take on religious hypocrisy.


In brilliant rhymed couplets, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Wilbur renders two of seventeenth-century French playwright Moliere's comic masterpieces into English, capturing not only the form and spirit of the language but also its substance.


"Mr. Wilbur has given us a sound, modern, conversational poetry and has made Moliere's The Misanthrope brilliantly our own." —The New York Times Book Review

"Richard Wilbur's translation of Tartuffe is a continuous delight from beginning to end." —Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning poet Richard Eberhart

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 20, 1965
• ISBN: 9780547542188

Molière

Molière was a French playwright, actor, and poet. Widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the French language and universal literature, his extant works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

A Note to the Harvest Edition

THE MISANTHROPE

ACT 1

ACT 2

ACT 3

ACT 4

ACT 5

TARTUFFE

ACT 1

ACT 2

ACT 3

ACT 4

ACT 5

Copyright © 1965, 1963, 1962, 1961, 1955 by Richard Wilbur

Copyright 1954 by Richard Wilbur

Copyright renewed 1993, 1991, 1990, 1989, 1983, 1982 by Richard Wilbur

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

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CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that these translations, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, the British Empire, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries which are signatories to the Universal Copyright Convention and the International Copyright Union, are subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broad-casting, and television, are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is laid on the question of readings, permission for which must be secured from the author's agent in writing. Inquiries on professional rights (except for amateur rights) should be addressed to Mr. Gilbert Parker, William Morris Agency, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019; inquiries on translation rights should be addressed to Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

The amateur acting rights of Tartuffe are controlled exclusively by the Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016. No amateur performance of the play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of the Dramatists Play Service, Inc., and paying the requisite fee.

Act One, Scene Two, of this translation of The Misanthrope was first published in New World Writing 5. Certain scenes of this translation of Tartuffe appeared in Poetry, Drama Critique, and the Massachusetts Review.

ISBN-13: 978-0-15-660517-5 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-15-660517-1 (pbk.)

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvest edition 1965

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A Note to the Harvest Edition

There are one or two things I should like to say to those who will be using this edition of The Misanthrope and Tartuffe as a script. These translations have had the good luck to be performed, a number of times, in New York, regional, and university theaters, and also on radio and on television. The best of the stage productions have repeatedly proved what the fact of radio production would suggest: the verbal sufficiency of Moliere's serious comedies. What the plays are about, what the characters think, feel, and do, is clearly and amply presented in the dialogue, so that a mere reading-aloud of the lines, without any effort at performance, can provide a complete, if austere, experience of the work.

I do not mean to say that there are no open questions in either play. To what extent do Philinte and Cléante, in their reasonable yet ineffectual speeches, express the playwright's view of things? Is Célimène incorrigibly trivial, or is she in process of developing a moral sensitivity, a capacity for love? Is it possible that Tartuffe possesses, in his real and underlying nature, a kind of balked religious yearning? And what on earth does Elmire see in Orgon? These are questions that director and actor may, and indeed must, decide; but it will be found that Moliere's comedy, because it is so thoroughly written, resists the overextension of any thesis. The actor or director who insists on a stimulatingly freakish interpretation will find himself engaged in deliberate misreading and willful distortion, and the audience will not be deceived.

In short, trust the words. Trust the words to convey the point and persons of the comedy, and trust them also to be sufficiently entertaining. A fussy anxiety on the part of the director, whereby the dialogue is hurried, cut, or swamped in farcical action, is the commonest cause of failure in productions of Molière. To such want of confidence in the text we owe the occasional presentation of the fops, Acaste and Clitandre, as flouncingly epicene, or the transformation of Tartuffe's two interviews with Elmire into a couple of wrestling bouts. In the first case the characters are falsified for the sake of an easy laugh, and cease to be legitimate rivals to Alceste for the hand of Célimène; in the second case, a real quality of Tartuffe's—his lustfulness—is manifested, but at the cost of making his great speeches seem redundant and pointlessly nuanced. The cost is too great, and once again the audience, though it may consent to laugh, will not be satisfied.

The introductions to the original editions still say what I think, and I shall let them stand. Were I to revise them, the second would explicitly and gratefully refer to the criticism of Jacques Guicharnaud, and each would contain a qualification of my claim to accuracy. The translation of The Misanthrope does not fully reproduce the formulaic preciosity with which some of the characters speak of love. In translating Tartuffe, I have not always captured Madame Pernelle's way of slipping into old-fashioned and inelegant speech, or Mariane's of parroting the rhetoric of artificial romances. My excuse for these deficiencies is that, while echoes of an unchanging scripture or liturgy are readily duplicated, as in the speeches of Tartuffe, a translation that seeks to avoid a period diction cannot easily find equivalents for such quirks and fads of language as I have mentioned.

R.W.

Portland, Connecticut, 1965

THE MISANTHROPE

COMEDY IN FIVE ACTS, 1666

To Harry Levin

INTRODUCTION

The idea that comedy is a ritual in which society's laughter corrects individual extravagance is particularly inapplicable to The Misanthrope. In this play, society itself is indicted, and though Alceste's criticisms are indiscriminate, they are not unjustified. It is true that falseness and intrigue are everywhere on view; the conventions enforce a routine dishonesty, justice is subverted by influence, love is overwhelmed by calculation, and these things are accepted, even by the best, as natural. The cold vanity of Oronte, Acaste, and Clitandre, the malignant hypocrisy of Arsinoé, the insincerity of Célimène, are to be taken as exemplary of the age, and Philinte's philosophic tolerance will not quite do in response to such a condition of things. The honest Éliante is the one we are most to trust, and this is partly because she sees that Alceste's intransigence A quelque chose en soy de noble & d'héroïque.

But The Misanthrope is not only a critique of society; it is also a study of impurity of motive in a critic of society. If Alceste has a rage for the genuine, and he truly has, it is unfortunately compromised and exploited by his vast, unconscious egotism. He is a jealous friend (Je veux qu'on me distingue), and it is Philinte's polite effusiveness toward another which prompts his attack on promiscuous civility. He is a jealous lover, and his frankness about Oronte's sonnet owes something to the fact that Oronte is his rival, and that the sonnet is addressed to Célimène. Like many humorless and indignant people, he is hard on everybody but himself, and does not perceive it when he fails his own ideal. In one aspect, Alceste seems a moral giant misplaced in a trivial society, having (in George Eliot's phrase) a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; in another aspect, he seems an unconscious fraud who magnifies the petty faults of others in order to dramatize himself in his own eyes.

He is, of course, both at once: but the two impressions predominate by turns. A victim, like all around him, of the moral enervation of the times, he cannot consistently be the Man of Honor—simple, magnanimous, passionate, decisive, true. It is his distinction that he is aware of that ideal, and that he can fitfully embody it; his comic flaw consists in a Quixotic confusion of himself with the ideal, a willingness to distort the world for his own self-deceptive and histrionic purposes. Paradoxically, then, the advocate of true feeling and honest intercourse is the one character most artificial, most out-of-touch, most in danger of that nonentity and solitude which all, in the chattery, hollow world of this play, are fleeing. He must play-act continually in order to believe in his own existence, and he welcomes the fact or show of injustice as a dramatic cue. At the close of the play, when Alceste has refused to appeal his lawsuit and has spurned the hand of Célimène, one cannot escape the suspicion that his indignation is in great part instrumental, a desperate means of counterfeiting an identity.

Martin Turnell (whose book The Classical Moment contains a fine analysis of The Misanthrope) observes that those speeches of Alceste which ring most false are, as it were, parodies of "Cornelian tirade. To duplicate this parodytragic effect in English it was clearly necessary to keep the play in verse, where it would be possible to control the tone more sharply, and to recall our own tragic tradition. There were other reasons, too, for approximating Moliére's form. The constant of rhythm and rhyme was needed, in the translation as in the original, for bridging great gaps between high comedy and farce, lofty diction and ordinary talk, deep character and shallow. Again, while prose might preserve the thematic structure of the play, other musical" elements would be lost, in particular the frequently intricate arrangements of balancing half-lines, lines, couplets, quatrains, and sestets. There is no question that words, when dancing within such patterns, are not their prosaic selves, but have a wholly different mood and meaning.

Consider, finally, two peculiarities of the dialogue of the play: redundancy and logic. When Molière has a character repeat essentially the same thing in three successive couplets, it will sometimes have a very clear dramatic point; but it will always have the intention of stabilizing the idea against the movement of the verse, and of giving a specifically rhetorical pleasure. In a prose rendering, these latter effects are lost, and the passage tends to seem merely prolix. As for logic, it is a convention of The Misanthrope that its main characters can express themselves logically, and in the most complex grammar; Molière's dramatic verse, which is almost wholly free of metaphor, derives much of its richness from argumentative virtuosity. Here is a bit of logic from Arsinoé:

Madame, l'Amitié doit sur tout éclater

Aux choses qui le plus nous peuvent importer:

Et comme il n'en est point de plus grande importance

Que celles de l'Honneur et de la Bienséance,

Je viens par un avis qui touche vostre honneur

Témoigner l'amitié que pour vous a mon Coeur.

In prose it might come out like this: Madam, friendship should most display itself when truly vital matters are in question: and since there are no things more vital than decency and honor, I have come to prove my heartfelt friendship by giving you some advice which concerns your reputation. Even if that were better rendered, it would still be plain that Molière's logic loses all its baroque exuberance in prose; it sounds lawyerish; without rhyme and verse to phrase and emphasize

Reviews for The Misanthrope And Tartuffe

[bayardus-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Clichés are a strange thing to judge an older text by, since it's often hard to say whether something that is commonplace and tired today wasn't fresh and revolutionary at the time. While I can't be sure about how new the tropes used by Molière in these two plays were when they were written, I know that they struck me as stale when I read them today.

Tartuffe features a bumbling, foolish, and quick to anger husband and a clever wife trying to undue his mistakes, a Homer and Marge Simpson for 17th century France. The antagonist is the titular Tartuffe, a hypocrite who hides in the mantle of piousness while secretly lusting after both wealth and a married woman. It's never believable that Tartuffe hoodwinked anyone, as he's only ever portrayed as an idiot only a hair's-breadth more clever than the bumbling husband. The play really beats you over the head with its message, that you should avoid being suckered by deception or self-deception, and that all that glitters isn't gold. Tartuffe's use of religion to mask his true intention may have been revolutionary at the time, but nowadays it's hard to go on an online forum without someone drawing the same connection between the church and deceit of the masses. Molière uses a royal deus ex machina to shoehorn in a happy ending.

The Misanthrope is slightly more interesting, mostly because of how it largely refuses to give the expected ending. There are some interesting characters here, but instead of exploring the worldview of a man who detests people, or one who shamelessly flatters everyone equally, or someone who can't restrain herself from flirting with everyone available, Molière treats these as amusing personalities for the play and nothing more. Large swaths of this play are characters just flat out refusing to communicate (something that is played for comedic effect in Tartuffe, but more briefly) and using this method to create dramatic tension has always rubbed me the wrong way. It's something that occasionally happens in real life, but rarely, and not usually for an extended conversation. It's a very artificial way to put two characters at odds with each other, and I take it as a sign of bad writing. Again, though, perhaps it wasn't so tired in the 17th century.

There are some good points to the plays as well, for instance women aren't passive objects but active participants in both plays, and Molière is gifted at crafting dialogue. I'm sure a production of either of these plays could be quite funny. Overall though, I expected something more from one of France's greatest playwrights. As Molière wrote:

Everything, madam, may be praised or blamed,
And each is right, in proper time and season.

Others have loved this play for hundreds of years, and I'm sure many will continue to do so for many years to come, but for me I'm afraid Molière's season has passed.

[nosajeel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This time around I only read The Misanthrope. It is, of course, an absolute pleasure from the first rhyming couplet to the last. It is even more dialogue-driven than most Moliere plays, perhaps somewhat more of a discourse and debate on manners and society and a little bit less of a madcap plot--although that is not entirely lacking either. And Alceste, the misanthrope of the title, is a particularly memorable figure.

[william345 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read The Misanthrope and was surprised by how it held me. Generally, I find plays very dead on the page. Not this one. Moliere's keen wit and sharp characterizations comes through beautifully. He has this very light touch. And here's the funny thing--the play's in verse! Rhyming couplets for the most part. Here's part of what translator Wilbur says about it: "In this play, society itself is indicted, and though Alceste's criticisms are indiscriminate, they are not unjustified...." Let me add that Alceste thinks of himself as the only moral visionary about. Everyone else is ruined by the various social fraudulences of the day (1666). There are others who see through this faux civility, too, of course, but Alceste is the one whose pride spurs him on to ever greater truth telling. If the play weren't so funny, and Wilbur's verse so sharp, Alceste would be a very great bore indeed. Tartuffe I liked too. It's about this con man who, playing the role of the pious Christian, wheedles his way into the heart of a prosperous Paris householder. That man, Orgon, is so taken in by the fraud Tartuffe that he allows it to disrupt his very large household. But then he's caught trying to seduce the lady of the house. That moment of exposure provides enormous pleasure. Though the meter tends to slow the reader down a bit, both plays read very fast, about an hour each.

[alcracka · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Okay, I like tragedy better than comedy. Sorry if that makes me all emo.

These two plays by Moliere...I like them more than most comedies. I like them more than Shakespeare's comedies, and I like them at least as much as Aristophanes. They're very focused: each presents its case and makes it. I appreciate that. I suspect Alceste and Tartuffe and Dorine will stick with me as eponymous characters. But all that said, it's not like it changed my life. I only liked them. Sorry, French people?

[jasonlf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This time around I only read The Misanthrope. It is, of course, an absolute pleasure from the first rhyming couplet to the last. It is even more dialogue-driven than most Moliere plays, perhaps somewhat more of a discourse and debate on manners and society and a little bit less of a madcap plot--although that is not entirely lacking either. And Alceste, the misanthrope of the title, is a particularly memorable figure.

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Moliere has long been on my to-read list because his comedies were on a list of "100 Significant Books" I was determined to read through. The introduction in one of the books of his plays says that of his "thirty-two comedies... a good third are among the comic masterpieces of world literature." The plays are surprisingly accessible and amusing, even if by and large they strike me as frothy and light compared to comedies by Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Wilde, Shaw and Rostand. But I may be at a disadvantage. I'm a native New Yorker, and looking back it's amazing how many classic plays I've seen on stage, plenty I've seen in filmed adaptation and many I've studied in school. Yet I've never encountered Moliere before this. Several productions of Shakespeare live and filmed are definitely responsible for me love of his plays. Reading a play is really no substitute for seeing it--the text is only scaffolding. So that might be why I don't rate these plays higher. I admit I also found Wilbur's much recommended translation off-putting at first. The format of rhyming couplets seemed sing-song and trite, as if I was reading the lyrics to a musical rather than a play. As I read more I did get used to that form, but I do suspect these are the kinds of works that play much better on stage than on the page.

Misanthrope - this was the first Moliere play I ever read, and arguably the most famous of all his plays. The introduction in what might seem an oxymoron calls it a comic King Lear, and I can see that side of it. As comic as this might read, it is basically a tragedy about the young man Alceste, the "misanthrope" of the play, who makes such a fetish of always being honest he alienates everyone around him. The character I enjoyed the most was definitely the malicious Arsinoe who plays the prude. The catty scenes between her and Alceste's love Celimene is particularly hilarious.

Tartuffe - of the five Moliere plays I now have read, this one, about over-religiosity and hypocrisy is my favorite. The title character Tartuffe is a conman who prays on the religious sensibility and man-crush of his patron Orgon. The scene in particular where Orgon responds to reports of his wife's illness by repeatedly asking, "But what about Tartuffe" nearly had me laughing out loud. The character of the pert and shrewd lady's maid Dorine is particularly delightful.