Tartuffe was written by a well-known French playwright named Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere. According to the Eight Plays by Moliere, “he is the unquestioned champion” in the genre of dramatic comedy (Bishop vii). Tartuffe was first presented in the festival of Versailles as a three-act play. It is about a hypocrite, named Tartuffe, who poses as a religious and pious man in order to gain trust, so he can manipulate people around him. Orgon wants to be closer to God, so he accepted Tartuffe into his own house.
He trusted him so much that he wants Mariane, his daughter, to marry Tartuffe and let him be his heir instead of his own son Damis. Fortunately, not everyone adored the impostor. Other family members of Orgon tried to expose Tartuffe’s true nature. Calandra and Roberts of CliffNotes. com stated that “Moliere humanizes Tartuffe by endowing him with one other flaw. His eventual downfall is caused by his lust. Instead of making Tartuffe into an inhuman monster, Moliere shows how lust causes the clever hypocrite to lower his mask and reveal his hypocrisy. ” The main themes of this play are religion and ambition.
Moliere also aimed to expose and mock religious hypocrisy. Vice versus virtue was also an issue in this play. Moliere implied that ambition is a vice rather than a virtue. On the other hand, Christopher Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus. Marlowe was an English playwright of the Elizabethan era. He was considered as the foremost dramatist of his time. In Harold Bloom’s Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, he stated that the original texts of the play was presented “without the punctuation of act division or scene enumeration (13). ” This was the most common form of plays written in this period.
Doctor Faustus is about a dissatisfied scholar that seeks intelligence and ultimate power through black magic. He learned black magic through the help of his magician friends, Valdes and Cornelius. Faustus summoned Mephistopheles, and then he sold his soul in exchange of the devil’s service and power. Themes of this play are pride and sin. We all know that pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins and that is the greatest sin committed by Faustus. Pride is the root of all evil which made him proud. Tartuffe is a French comedy while Doctor Faustus is a tragedy in the Elizabethan era.
Both plays are the most famous works written by their respective playwrights. These plays are written by different playwrights, but they possess similarities as well as differences. Both plays focused on the story of the central character, Tartuffe and Faustus. Their life and flaws were presented and modeled as examples of misconduct and misbehavior which obviously implied that viewers and readers should not imitate or follow them. Another similarity is that these two characters came in contact with concerned individuals who were willing to help them.
In Doctor Faustus, God and the angel tried to stop him from selling his soul to the devil. The angel did not stop convincing him to repent but Faustus did not bulge, and he rejected the help. Eva Fitzwater of CliffNotes. com wrote, when Faustus “is waiting for his damnation, he rationalizes his refusal to turn to God. Throughout the drama, internal and external forces suggest that Faustus could have turned to God and could have been forgiven. ” Tartuffe also received help from Orgon, but he just betrayed the man. He took advantage of Orgon’s help because he knew that he adores and praises him a lot.
He even described Orgon as a gullible man. The play showed how Tartuffe manipulated Orgon and his family. Tartuffe and Doctor Faustus’s ending did not favor the central characters. Tartuffe was imprisoned while Dr. Faustus was sent to hell. In between intense plots, comedic acts were also used by the playwrights to ease the tension and intensity of the unfolding scenes. In terms of the settings of the plays, Tartuffe has only one which was Orgon’s house while Doctor Faustus happened in many exotic places such as the Papal palace in Rome. He literally toured around the globe.
Doctor Faustus has a dark, tragicomic tone. This is evident because the play deals with serious topics. It is considered dark because Faustus and Mephistopheles talked and discussed about hell and Faustus sold his soul to the devil. Tragicomic because despite the horrific scenes, there were also funny and comedic acts. However, Dr. Faustus’s plot was actually written in blank verse or unrhymed iambic pentameter. This means that the play was consisted of unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. On the other hand, Tartuffe has a witty and eccentric tone.
Moliere wrote the play in French with rhyming verse. “Each line is twelve syllables long. It’s what academic, poetical types call an alexandrine” (Shmoop Editorial Team). Tartuffe is actually Moliere’s most controversial play. It is interesting to know that the play was revised so many times because critics questioned its intention and “every spokesman for the Church in the seventeenth century condemned the play as dangerous to true religion” (Bishop 152). Doctor Faustus did not have many critics as Tartuffe but what’s interesting about this play is that originally it has a three-act plot.
This simply means that on Act One, the conflict was revealed and in Act Two, goals seemed impossible and unreachable. Lastly, during the Act Three, the conflict was resolved. But in 1669, the first five-act version of the play was staged. Another difference of the two plays is that Doctor Faustus used magic and supernatural characters, such as God and the angel while Tartuffe used reallife characters and situations. Faustus is considered as a tragic hero and protagonist of the play.
In study. com, Patricia Vineski said that Faustus “is a contradictory character, capable of both profound intellectual thought and a grandiose ambition, yet prone to a blindness and a willingness to waste the powers he has gained. ” Tartuffe, on the other hand, is the antagonist of the play. Even though he is the central character, he is considered the villain of Orgon’s family. He “takes Orgon’s money, agrees to marry his daughter (in order to get said money), attempts to seduce his wife, denounces him to King, and annoys everyone else with his selfrighteous blather” (Shmoop Editorial Team).