Tartuffe Essay

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Out of the plays that we could have chosen to produce, I have decided to go with Molière’s, “Tartuffe.” This play is a comedy that comes from 17th century France and is heavily influenced by two large sources of experience for Molière. Those sources are the rules and structure for a play put in place by the French academy and the lessons of improvisation taught by the Commedia dell’Arte. This piece is written in fives acts that are in a unique alexandrine style of verse which have 12 syllables in a line and usually ends with rhyming words. The reason I chose this play is because, in my opinion, things like television, movies, plays, and other forms of media and entertainment are meant to transport you away from all the bad things happening in real life and focus you on something fun and/or interesting. I find this play to have a lot of fun moments that can be mined for even more comedy and I think it has the good chance to keep a large audience entertained for a long period of time. To accomplish my goal I will use elements of situational comedies, France in the 1660’s, and one of Molière’s plays, “A school for girls.” …show more content…

From this, I realized that the easiest lens for me to read, analyze, and recreate “Tartuffe,” is through my favorite genre of television program, situational comedies. When looking through this lens, I could see a lot parallels between “Tartuffe” and you average 30 minute situation comedy. At the beginning, the family is at a pretty neutral state where everything seems to be okay. Then, things go awry and the family is plunged into complete chaos and they do not see a way out. At the end, after various hijinks have ensued throughout the story, everything is wrapped up nicely with pretty bow and everything has return to the way things were at the

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