Hello and welcome back. How are you doing today? I hope you're keeping well and I hope your reading

is going well. Today we are talking about Tartouf. Fantastic play. But Jean-Baptiste Pocalan or

Molière got a lot more than he had bargained for when it came to the first performance of this play.

What we have in our hands when we pour over the script of Tartouf is a physicalisation of pure

scandal because Tartouf caused a huge scandal. We have a piece of theatrical history here in our hands

and the same way that we carry the history of our life and the ills we have suffered around in our

physiology. A book or a play or a poem, a work of art contains its history encoded into it.

And indeed, the history of theatre and literature is ultimately a history of censorship,

coming up against it, defeating it, succumbing to it, rolling with it. And if you want to

make a study of suppression, oppression, censorship and banning, then you can chart a pretty powerful

and insightful course through the great works of literature and how these works came to be and the conflict that these great

artists came up against often contains a story even more exhilarating and profound than the story

they've put on stage or on the page. Now we have to guess at what the original tartuth looked like,

the tartuth of the first performance, because what we see today, what we have today, is not

what was performed before King Louis XIV in the Palace of Versailles on the 12th of May 1664 as part of a series of celebratory royal

spectacles. That play, that first version of Tartouf, was banned within just three days of the

first performance. It was banned swiftly. And great scholars of French dramatic literature have made

great efforts to reconstruct the Ur-Tartouf. And that means the original. Yeah, the same way we talk of

the Orr Hamlet, the lost first version of that tragedy, we can talk of the Ur-Tartouf. The original does not survive,

nor do we have significant commentary from the troupe about it. Now, the play would sweep through

Europe in bootleg manuscript form. Aristocrats would read it aloud in salons across the continent,

and the French authorities had their work cut out for them when it came to putting a stop to that.

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