Moliere
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- Les pre'cieuses ridicules
- a parodic representation of the forced representation of the forced and artifical language of bourgeois young women aping the practices of what they understood, or thought they understood, as the precieuse tradition at the great learned salons (p.103)
- Bourgeois
- Perhaps only the range of material in his plays reveals Moliere's keen understanding of bourgeois aspirations and idiosyncrasies (p.101)
- Voltaire's remark
- "Moliere was a great philosopher disguised as a farceur." (p.101)
- Comic action
- In the comic action the disruption of social harmony results from too severe a split between principles of order and principles of release. (P.105)
- End of the action
- The final komos, or revel, is a reauthorization of the social order, which in the meantime has been streched, been rendered more flexible. (106)
- Authority
- the excess of authoritarian will without modification tends to produce an imbalance that expresses itself in natural resistance. (P.106)
- Unchecked nature
- The comic dilemma is set by unrestrained authority and unchecked nature. Young lovers may know few bounds in the expression of their love, ... In Tartuffe the natural urges of Mariane seem temporarily subdued by parental law ... until Dorine points out that an excess of parental law is a travesty of nature: "A daughter must do as her father tells her even if the wants her to marry a monkey" (2.3). But it also occurs to Dorine that lovers in comic action are often irresponsible because they are overly impulsive, almost madly so. (P.106)
- Youth
- the society must go on - its younger, more natural foces cannot be stifled forever. This is one reason the senex iratus, or irritable old man, in comedy is so often a figure of disgust. His will murders nature or at least defiles it. (P.107)
- Alazon and eiron
- The humor types of Renaissance comedy are refinements, based on a primitive and metaphoric psychology, of broader Greek classifications of the comic alazon, or strong-willed imposter, and the comic eiron, or self-deprecating victim. The alazon invariably serves the cause of law; the eiron, of nature. It is testimony to Moliere's comic genius and economy that in a play such as Tartuffe, he can make its leading figure both an alazon (in that he is an imposter) and an eiron (in that he is a self-flagellating hypocrite). (P.108)
- Marriage
- Marriage, or course, is the legalization of nature, the licensing of impulse... Moliere would follow this pattern regularly, often ratifying it by ending his plays with the way cleared for marriage through the drawing of a marriage contract. (P.108)
- Tartuffe's hypocrisy
- does not derive from what he says, but from what he has carefully led several key figures in the household to believe he feels. Orgon and Orgon's mother ... seem undisturbed by Tartuffe's admitted frailties because he conveys the false impression that he remains as genuinely worried about his sins as they ought to be. (111)
- Custom
- It was customary at the time, in the provinces more than in Paris, for wealthy bourgeois families to equip themselves with a lay religious figure known as a director of conscience. (P.111)
- Guest or host
- {}provides the audience with testimony on the corrupt nature of his character... acknowledge the open violation of one of the oldest social bounds in human nature, the guest-host relation. (111)
- Dorine and wife
- Tartuffe has designs not only on Orgon's state, but also on his wife. His hypocrisy cuts across the comic bonds of law and nature. Dorine, the servant who is the eiron counter to Tartuffe's alazon, sees from the beginning that the violation is both economic and sexual. (P.111)
- Tartuffe's libido
- His libido is always active.
- Tartuffe griefing
- To orgon, the grief is more relevant than the grief. (P.112)
- violation of thrust
- the hypocrate violates everybody's bonds of trust. Tartuffe can afford to extend himself in his sexual usurpation because he has already effected his economic one. (113)
- Societal control
- hypocrisy is so difficult to control that it requires recourse to the highest law of the realm to stop it. (P.113)