Collect Tartuffe And Other Plays Compiled By Molière Depicted In Physical Book

Tartuffe or, The Imposter oh my gosh, so applicable to today! The characters, the humor, the tension, the examination and awareness of human nature really amazing, And it all rhymes even in translation!!! A broad selection of Moliere's works, Though he's regarded as high literature, and rightly so, his works are far more accessible than I had anticipated, He seeks to entertain but also adds his philosophies and personal style to what remains very human dramas, These are very funny plays, A good read. Translation was so focused on rhyming that I think the author might have lost the forest for the trees,./.

This set of Molière's plays was more of a fascinating literary document rather than a rollicking festival of laughs, This edition featured the early plays The Ridiculous Précieuses and The School for Husbands, the classics Tartuffe and The School for Wives and some less remarkable but fitting plays, to wit, The Critique for the School for Wives, The Versailles Impromptu and the prose play Don Juan.


The first plays were delightful albeit short romps, the classics were great to a certain extent and the "lessremarkables" were clever enough to keep one interested, The language was rather downtoearth with nothing showy going on galaxies away from Shakespeare, in other words, and the translation was very clean and easytofollowyet sometimes it succumbed to less graceful turns of phrase, especially when it came to the conversational cues.
It's very difficult to find any faults with the whole collectionthe main problem was simply that I did not find it as funny as I thought it should/could have been.


I found that the most risible plays were the first three that were presented: TRP and the Schools, TRP seemed to be just a draft, but it was full of such ridiculous airs that I couldn't help belting out a couple of guffaws, TSfH continued much in the same vein, with some delightful added malice in the character of Sganarelle, The whole approach came nearest to perfection with the excellent TSfW, where our cuckoldphobe protagonist is repeatedly being forcefed the failures of his own machinations,

After TSfW we get the curiosity plays: the Critique and TVI, The Critique is actually a very clever piece of writing which is a subtle rebuff at the less admiring reception of TSfW, This one has its own share of précieuses, which still do not fail to amuse me, and some of the arguments flung at the play either devised by M.
himself or by his actual detractors were, if not really clever, at the very least entertaining in their sophistry, My main gripe with this play is that it leans way too much towards the common sense approach any popular artist can have recourse to: "Doesn't matter, people come to see my stuff.
" For my idealistic self, this is the approach of a dull businessman, not an artist, and even though Molière is no hack, he certainly did not have many interesting ideas considering his craft, if this play is anything to go by.
However dull his ideas, though, he certainly had the wit to make his enemies splendidly laughable,

TVI was a play commissioned by the King under a very short notice, which also happens to be the subject of the work, Perhaps a bit forced in some ways, but the idea of someone pulling a meta in theth century is certainly worth a grin,

The classic Tartuffe is certainly a fine portrait of a ridiculously hypocritical man, who only believes in egotistic advantage, and is not afraid to sacrifice honour, epistemology and morals for his goals.
Strangely enough, though, it wasnt particularly funny to read: the title character was hilarious in his own right, but the effect he had on the people around him was far from it.
Most of them simply hated him and their middleclass lives were almost ruined by his humbug, and Molière was not deft enough to mitigate the effect in comic fashion.
It can be that the stage performances were more hilarious, The same disadvantages can also be glimpsed in Don Juan: we have a similarly unscrupulous title character, who causes pain in a way that humour quite does not manage to alleviate.


What kind of drags most of Molières plays down is that he relied way too much on dei ex machina, And this is probably the only thing I would state as a proper weakness in his playwriting for even if I wasnt particularly impressed by his language, Im also willing to distance mine inner critic by virtue of language barriers.
Whether its the King in Tartuffe or the sudden wraith/statue combo in Don Juan, it just screams of lazy planning, Its even doubly annoying, when both of those plays seemed to be building up for something far more complex and rewarding,

I think the approach worked well only in TSfW: you have a protagonist who has spent all his life cataloguing cuckoldries and meticulously learning to avoid them, and then, after all the stratagems and counterstratagems, something utterly unexpected happens and ruins his plans.
It works as a silly but artistically justified act of vengeance against the foolish Arnolphe,

Overall, as I said, it was a fascinating literary document, It made me chuckle and showed me some delightfully absurd manners of thethcentury France, It was also not without psychological complexity, a hallmark of all good writers! It just left me with more to be desired, Moliere is genius and a master craftsman, I read himyears ago, Rereading them now made me realize how avantgarde and modern he his, The selection includes Don Juan , Tartuffe, school of husband/wife and others, Brilliant, perceptive, and one of my favorite french author, Tres bien!!! I only read Tartuffe here, It was not compelling enough to overcome my distaste for plays in rhyming verse,

I loved Moliere waywayway back in the day, Perhaps I read an unrhymed translation Whatever, School for Wives pwns Tartuffe, School for Husbands/Wives, critique, and a few others, He's quite a wit, and I like the trick of working dialogue into rhymed couplets, Seven plays by the genius of French theater,

Including The Ridiculous Precieuses, The School for Husbands, The School for Wives, Don Juan, The Versailles Impromptu, and The Critique of the School for Wives, this collection showcases the talent of perhaps the greatest and bestloved French playwright.


Translated and with an Introduction by Donald M, Frame
With a Foreword by Virginia Scott
And a New Afterword by Charles Newell It is very hard for me to even fourstar Tartuffe and Other Plays Signet Classics Kindle Edition.
Likely this is my fault, but please allow me to make my case, Some plays read well some do not, For me the selection here, including the great Tartuffe, and the famous School for Scandal seem limp on the page, The dialogue was too much of a type and neither sparkled nor engendered much in the way of laughter, Have seen enough of these plays to know that they live well on the stage, I plead an imagination too weak to read while seeing, in the minds eye, the staging, costumes and acting carry their share of the experience.


Most all of the plots, excepting Tartuffe and Don Juan are variations on one another, Keeping women uneducated and locked away, Can women be corrupted by too much exposure to the world outside of enforced seclusion or by the susceptibilities that go with unnatural innocence To his credit, Molière, shows that women are capable of finding love in either case and further suggesting the “lock them up school” is cover for weak men.


Tartuffe, and Don Juan stand above the other variations on “School for” Husbands, Wives Scandal, These two introduce deliberately villainous characters, This Don Juan is the great tragic villain of the Opera, Don Giovanni, If only because it Is not intended as a comedy and has its own themes it may be my favorite read, Still not great literature, but a fair nights entertainment as live theater,

Some would argue that with Tartuffe, Molière guaranteed his immortality, The character is the classic con man and Orgon his wealthy mark could serve for any number of more money than brains slaves of fashion, From strange Maharishis, money grubbing televangelists, to the latest fad super food, we see that “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose",

Taken together my recommendations is see the plays, Maybe follow the dialogue on your kindle, but as standalone reads, not so much, I struggle to enjoy Moliere, as all his work feels so samey to me, and I don't think this translation helped the matter with some very forced rhymed translations.
There are moments of brilliance, like The School for Wives, but so often these translations come off as awkwardly rhymed lectures, Read the actual paperback, which has been sitting on my shelf for years, An exceptional translation, and I loved learning about each play and its historical/social setting from the forewords, Moliere is a true artist I was blown away by how amazing his writing is! Moliere has long been on my toread list because his comedies were on a list of "Significant Books" I was determined to read through.
The introduction in one of the books of his plays says that of his "thirtytwo 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 itthe 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 offputting at first, The format of rhyming couplets seemed singsong 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.


The Pretentious Young Ladies Les Précieuses ridicules is a oneact satire about two girls who are taken in by their own social pretensions and made ridiculous.
This is an early work, and especially having read before this such works by Moliere as The Misanthrope and Tartuffe this comes across as rather slight.


The School for Husbands has a similar plot to The School for Wives but isn't nearly as good, although still amusing, It has many of the stock elements of Moliere's comedies, In this case, Sganarelle, a foolish and tyrannical man of middle age, is determined to keep his ward Isabelle isolated and restricted and force her to marry him, I thought a particularly nice touch was the device the young lovers used to fool Sganarelle and make him their inadvertent gobetween,

The School for Wives The introduction calls it a "burlesque tragedy" for how the hopes and

pretensions of the prospective husband Arnolphe are smashed, He's groomed his foster daughter Agnes to be his wife from age four, sending her to a convent to be kept docile and ignorant, He says that "to say her prayers, love me, spin and sew" is all she needs to learn, and he's disappointed that she learned to read and write, The way Agnes grows out of her simplicity and outwits Arnolphe made me think of this as a kind of antiTaming of the Shrew, In this one the woman becomes very much untamed,

The Critique of the School for Wives and The Versailles Impromptu Apparently The School for Wives attracted quite a few detractors.
Another man faced with such a response might publish essays defending himselfMoliere instead wrote and produced two OneAct plays on the subject, In The Critique Moliere has characters representing his critics argue with a character that defends his play and in the course of which defends the ordinary theatergoer and the genre of comedyit's an "accomplishment to make people laugh" and his purpose is "to please.
" The Versailles Impromptu features Moliere and his company playing themselves and showing them rehearsing, and features a "playwithinaplay, "

Tartuffe of the five Moliere plays I now have read, this one, about overreligiosity and hypocrisy is my favorite, The title character Tartuffe is a conman who prays on the religious sensibility and mancrush 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,

Don Juan or The Stone Guest, although it has comic elements doesn't strike me as a comedy, The whole plot reminded me very strongly of Mozart's Don Giovanni on the subject with very similar characters, There's a Donna Elvire, a Commandant Don Juan kills whose statue he invites to supper, and Charlotte reminds me quite a bit of Zerlina, It did think funny this bit of business where Don Juan plays off two lovers against the other, What I didn't particularly care for in Donald Frame's translation was his attempt to suggest different dialects by making Spanish peasants sound like characters out of Mark Twain with Pierrot using phrases such as "Doggone it!".