Pre-Show Preparation, Questions for Discussion, and Activities

Note to Educators: Use the following assignments, questions, and activities to introduce your students to Tartuffe and its intellectual origin, historical context, and themes, as well as to engage their imaginations and creativity before they see the production.

  1. On the Page:  Molière's Tartuffe.  Have your students read Molière's Tartuffe in translation (the McCarter production utilizes Richard Wilbur's verse translation) and ask them while they read—either alone to themselves or together aloud as a class—to imagine what a production of the play would look like on the stage.  Following their reading, explore the various avenues of thematic reflection below through discussion or essay writing.

    • Ask your students to discuss the central themes of the play, which include:  familial discord and generational conflicts; thwarted young love; hypocrisy and deception; appearance vs. reality; and the all-consuming and potentially destructive power of extremism in its many forms (e.g., obsession, zealotry or fanaticism).  Have them select moments from the play in which these themes are dramatically presented.

    • Ask your students if any of these themes seem more important to them than others.  Urge them to explain their responses.  Can they identify any other themes?

    • Discuss other plays or works of literature your students have read or studied with similar themes. 

    • Molière wrote Tartuffe in the comic mode, and although he entertained and charmed both royal and public audiences, not everyone found the play to be funny—in fact, the original version of the play was condemned by the court clergy, censored, and suppressed.  Ask your students to consider why some audience members might have considered Tartuffe unfunny, offensive, and/or worthy of condemnation.

    • Have your students put on critical reading glasses to consider Tartuffe as 1) a political parable, and/or 2) a critique of religious fanaticism.

  1. Designing Tartuffe:  Character Collage.  Theatrical visual designers, such as those who create a play production’s scenery, costumes, makeup, and lights must find ways to communicate their preliminary design ideas to the director with whom they collaborate.  One form of visual communication is collage, in which cutout images and text, material/fabric, and other small objects are glued to a piece of paper to symbolize the world of the play, its inhabitants, and/or its themes.  Ask your students make a character collage of the character from Molière’s Tartuffe that they find the most compelling or interesting.

      • They will need an 8½” x 11” sheet of paper (either colored paper or paper that can be painted), magazines with visual images/photographs, scissors, additional color paper for cutouts, colored pencils or paint for a background, and glue.

      • They should think about how they might use color, images, and text to symbolize the character and what happens to him or her in the course of the play

      • Educators might also opt for their students to create electronic collages by utilizing PowerPoint technology and images gleaned from the Internet.

      • Students should be given time to show their finished collages to the class and to explain how the objects and images in their collages express and symbolize their favorite character from Tartuffe.

  2. Qui était Molière?:  Molière and the French Renaissance.  To prepare your students for Molière's Tartuffe and to deepen their level of understanding of and appreciation for the period in which it was written, have your students research, either in groups or individually, the life, times and works of Molière.  Topics for a study of Molière and seventeenth-century France and French culture might include:

      • Molière (born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)
      • birth, family and education
      • early career
      • rise to prominence
      • Louis XIV
      • Cardinal Richelieu
      • The French Academy
      • French Neoclassical tragedy
      • French farce
      • Pierre Corneille
      • Jean Racine
      • Hôtel du Bourgogne
      • Théâtre Italien (commedia dell'arte)
      • Alexandrine verse
      • Jansenism
      • The School for Wives
      • The Misanthrope
      • The Would-be Gentlemen
      • The Imaginary Invalid

Have your students teach one another about their individual or group topics vial oral and illustrated (i.e., posters or PowerPoint) reports.  Following the presentations ask your students to reflect upon their research process and discoveries.

  1. Dueling Translations in Performance.  Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur was originally written by Molière in French rhymed verse.  Translating a foreign language play for an English-speaking audience is a challenging task, because it requires a translator to consider the literal meaning of the playwright's dialogue and then to find a balance between accuracy (the meaning of the original words) and performability (how the words will be effectively communicated to the audience by the actor).  Translators of Molière must also choose whether or not take on the even greater challenge of writing their translations in poetic verse—it is here where accuracy does battle with both performability and poetry.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Wilbur took on the challenge of writing a poetic translation of Molère's Tartuffe.  For his efforts, he won the prestigious Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize and his translation continues to be one of the most read and performed translations of the play in the English-speaking world—it is the translation chosen for McCarter's production.  Although Wilbur's is not a literal translation of Molière's French text, his work captures the rhythm, style, theatricality, intentions and humor of the original.

    • Introduce your students to the linguistic and theatrical complexity of the play translator by having them prepare and perform scenes (either readings, staged readings, or full performances) from Wilbur's verse translation and various prose translations of Tartuffe (i.e., Christopher Hampton, Maya Slater, Morris Bishop, Curtis Hidden Page, etc.).  You might choose three groups to prepare the same scene from three different translations.  If you have any students in the class who are Francophones or who are studying French at a relatively advanced level, you might ask them to prepare a scene or scenes from Molière's original text.

    • Follow up the readings or performances by discussing the differences in the translations; urge your students to focus their analysis and critique on the translations/texts and not the performances.  Ask your students if there was a translation that they thought was best.  Ask them to explain why it is that they found it to be superior to the other play texts in translation.

[For more Tartuffe translation information and activities, see Northern Virginia Community College Professor Emerita Victoria Poulakis’ interesting translation themed web site entitled “Translation:  What Difference Does It Make,” http://www.nvcc.edu/home/vpoulakis/Translation/home.htm.]

  1. BBT:  Blogging Before Tartuffe.  Either as a class or individually, have your students access McCarter's web site (http://www.mccarter.org) to investigate the new McCarter Theatre Blog (http://www.mccarter.org/blog/index.php).  The blog has been designed to connect McCarter Theatre and its staff (production, literary, artistic, education, etc.) with subscribers, students, educators and anyone interested in reading and writing about theater, and it provides an up-to-the-minute forum for news and information on McCarter plays in pre-production, rehearsal, and performance.  Post a comment or pose a question based on either previous bloggers' entries or on your own pre-show preparatory studies.