Tartuffe Character Analysis

Tartuffe was written by a well-known French playwright named Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière. According to the Eight Plays by Molière, “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 “Molière 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, Molière shows how lust causes the clever hypocrite to lower his mask and reveal his hypocrisy.”
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