Tartuffe, By Touching On Tartuffe - 1209 Words

In constructing this short essay, I will first start off by touching on Tartuffe and how the writing was purposefully catering to the aristocratic. I will then shift to the analysis of The Country Wife. Finally, I will show the middle class society from The London Merchant breakdown. I will also be using specifics from Tartuffe, The Country Wife and The London Merchant, to show the shift from an aristocratic to middleclass society effected the drama. That being noted, I will begin with Tartuffe. The audience that Molià ¨re wrote Tartuffe was a worldly sector of the social elite in Paris in Seventeenth Century. Its original audience was of course the royal court at Louis XIV s palace in Versailles. Officially, that society continued to be patriarchal. The society that had husbands and fathers exercising supreme authority over their dependents. The plot of Tartuffe concerns itself with an incompetent head-of-household, who is Orgon, relinquishes his authority by allocating it to a counselor he has picked up off the streets. Reasoning behind this is due to his extraordinary piousness. Tartuffe turns out to be a devout con-man, who, once he has attained control over the master s property, moves to remove him and his family from the premises. At that moment it should have become obvious to readers that the play creates within itself something of a contradiction. The question that has to be asked is; what happens when a sovereign power is somehow powerless of exercising