Introduction

Few plays in the history of theater have ignited such fierce controversy, endured such determined suppression, and emerged so gloriously triumphant as the work you are about to read. When Molière first presented this comedy to the court of Louis XIV in 1664, he could scarcely have anticipated the storm it would unleash. Within days, powerful factions had mobilized against it. Religious authorities denounced it from their pulpits. The Archbishop of Paris threatened excommunication to anyone who dared to perform, watch, or even read it. For five long years, the playwright fought to bring his creation before the public, revising, defending, petitioning, and refusing to abandon what he believed to be a work of genuine moral purpose. That a single comedy could provoke such an extraordinary reaction tells us something essential about its power. It struck a nerve. It exposed something that many people would have much preferred to keep hidden.

The reason for this furor was not, as the play’s enemies claimed, an attack on religion or piety. Molière was no enemy of faith. What he targeted with surgical precision was something far more dangerous and far more universal: the abuse of sacred things for selfish ends, the cynical performance of virtue as a means of acquiring power, wealth, and control over others. The figure at the center of this drama is one of literature’s most unforgettable creations, a man who has draped himself in the language and gestures of holiness while pursuing the basest of human appetites. He is a fraud of monumental proportions, yet he is also disturbingly persuasive, and the household he infiltrates falls under his spell with a completeness that is both comic and terrifying to behold.

What makes this satire so enduring is precisely that it does not concern itself merely with one corrupt era or one particular brand of religious cant. The phenomenon Molière exposes is timeless. In every age and in every society, there have been those who recognize that the appearance of goodness can be more profitable than goodness itself, who understand that a reputation for piety opens doors that honest dealing keeps closed. Such people learn to mimic the outward signs of virtue while their hearts remain entirely devoted to their own advancement. They speak the right words, adopt the right postures, and cultivate the right associations, all while pursuing ends that would horrify their admirers if those ends were ever exposed. The play asks a question that has lost none of its urgency: how do we tell the genuine from the counterfeit? How do we distinguish authentic devotion from its skillful imitation, when the imitation has been so carefully crafted to resemble the real thing?

This is a comedy of deception, but it is also a comedy of self-deception. The figures who are most thoroughly taken in by the central impostor are not stupid people, nor are they wicked. They are, in many cases, well-meaning individuals who have allowed their better instincts to be exploited. They want to believe in goodness, and that very desire becomes the instrument of their undoing. There is a profound psychological truth at work here that elevates the play far above simple farce. Molière understood that we are most vulnerable to manipulation not through our vices but through our virtues, that the wish to do right can blind us to the manipulations of those who exploit that wish. The household that admits this dangerous guest does so out of a misguided form of generosity, and watching the consequences unfold is to witness a kind of slow-motion catastrophe in which the audience can see the disaster approaching long before the characters can.

The structure of the comedy is itself a masterclass in dramatic craftsmanship. Molière withholds the appearance of his title character with extraordinary patience. For two entire acts, we hear about this man, we observe the violent disagreements he provokes among the members of a single family, we form an increasingly vivid picture of his influence, but we do not actually meet him. By the time he finally steps onto the stage, our anticipation has been wound to an almost unbearable pitch. This delay is not an accident or a flaw; it is a deliberate and brilliant technique. By the time the impostor appears, we already understand exactly how he operates, because we have seen his effect upon the household so clearly that his actual presence becomes a kind of confirmation. The man we have imagined is given flesh, and the reality proves every bit as repellent and fascinating as the reports had suggested.

To appreciate fully the achievement of this play, it helps to understand something of the man who wrote it and the world in which he worked. Molière, whose real name was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, was the son of a prosperous upholsterer who held an official position in the royal household. By all conventional expectations, the young man should have inherited his father’s comfortable trade and lived a respectable, unremarkable life. Instead, he turned his back on security and chose the precarious, often disreputable existence of an actor and theatrical manager. In the seventeenth century, this was no minor rebellion. Actors occupied a marginal position in society, frequently condemned by the Church and denied the ordinary sacraments. To choose this life was to choose the company of vagabonds and outcasts, to accept a measure of social stigma that would follow a person to the grave and even beyond it.

For years, Molière and his troupe struggled in the provinces, traveling from town to town, performing in tennis courts and makeshift theaters, learning their craft through endless practice and the unforgiving education of audiences who would not pay for mediocrity. These years of hardship and apprenticeship gave Molière an intimate knowledge of human nature and a profound understanding of what made people laugh, what moved them, what held their attention. He absorbed the traditions of the Italian commedia dell’arte, with its stock characters and improvised comedy, and he combined these popular elements with the classical learning he had acquired in his education. When at last he won the favor of the king and established himself in Paris, he brought with him this rich and varied inheritance, fusing high and low, refined wit and broad physical comedy, into something entirely his own.

It is important to remember that Molière wrote his plays not as a detached literary author working in isolation but as a working man of the theater, an actor who performed in his own productions and a manager responsible for the livelihood of his company. He knew his actors intimately, wrote roles to suit their particular gifts, and tested his comedies against the immediate response of living audiences. This practical, hands-on relationship with the stage permeates everything he wrote. His plays are not closet dramas meant only to be read; they are scripts for performance, alive with the rhythms of speech, the possibilities of gesture, and the dynamics of human interaction. Even on the page, one can sense the theatrical energy crackling through every scene, the careful orchestration of entrances and exits, the building of tension and the explosive release of laughter.

The age in which Molière wrote was one of remarkable cultural brilliance, the golden age of French classicism under the reign of Louis XIV. The Sun King had gathered around him the most gifted artists, writers, and thinkers of his realm, and the court at Versailles became a stage upon which the drama of power was performed with elaborate ceremony. It was an era obsessed with appearances, with manners, with the careful calibration of social conduct. In such a world, the gap between what people seemed to be and what they actually were became a subject of endless fascination, and no writer explored that gap more incisively than Molière. His great comedies hold up a mirror to the society around him, reflecting its pretensions, its hypocrisies, and its follies with a clarity that proved deeply uncomfortable to many of his contemporaries.

The king himself, however, recognized and protected Molière’s genius. The relationship between the playwright and his royal patron was one of the most consequential artistic alliances of the period. When the enemies of this particular play mounted their campaign of suppression, it was ultimately the support of Louis XIV that allowed the work to survive. The king understood, perhaps better than the offended clergy, that satire directed against hypocrisy was not the same as satire directed against faith. He grasped that Molière’s target was the false believer, not the true one, the manipulator who exploited religion rather than religion itself. This royal protection was no small thing, for without it the play might well have been lost to history, suppressed and forgotten, its author hounded into silence.

Molière’s comic method deserves particular attention, because it is the engine that drives this play and all his greatest works. His characters are frequently defined by a single dominant trait, an obsession or a folly that has come to govern their entire being. There is something almost monstrous about the way these obsessions take over a personality, crowding out reason, distorting judgment, and leading the afflicted person into ever more absurd and self-destructive behavior. Yet Molière never reduces his characters to mere abstractions or simple targets of ridicule. They remain recognizably human, and their follies are exaggerated versions of weaknesses that we recognize in ourselves and in those around us. The comedy arises precisely from this recognition, from the uncomfortable awareness that we are laughing at exaggerated portraits of failings to which we ourselves are not immune.

This particular play features one of the most remarkable examples of such a comic obsession, not in the impostor himself, who is fully aware of his own fraudulence, but in the man who falls so completely under his spell. Here is a figure whose infatuation with his counterfeit holy man reaches such heights of absurdity that he is willing to sacrifice everything and everyone he ought to hold dear. His blindness is comic, but it is also frightening, because it shows how thoroughly a person can be led astray when they surrender their own judgment to another. The dynamic between the deceiver and the deceived forms the central engine of the drama, and Molière extracts from it both uproarious comedy and a chilling meditation on the dangers of credulity.

This edition presents the work in a modern translation, adapted for the contemporary reader, and a word about what this means may help you to approach the text with appropriate expectations and an open mind. Molière wrote in French, and much of his original was composed in rhymed verse, a form that lent the dialogue a particular music and elegance. Any translation must make difficult choices about how to convey the spirit and meaning of the original in another language, and a modern adaptation goes further still, seeking to render the comedy accessible and immediate to readers who live in a very different world from that of seventeenth-century France. The aim is not to dilute or simplify Molière’s genius but to remove the barriers of archaic language and obscure reference that might otherwise stand between the modern reader and the full enjoyment of this remarkable work.

What you will discover, I think, is that the essential power of the play translates across the centuries with astonishing ease. The reason for this is simple: the human types that Molière portrayed have not disappeared. We still know the smooth-talking manipulator who exploits the trust of others. We still encounter the gullible enthusiast who falls for an obvious fraud. We still recognize the clear-sighted observer whose warnings go unheeded, the family torn apart by a dangerous outside influence, the servant whose plain common sense cuts through the pretensions of her supposed betters. These figures populate our own lives, our own news headlines, our own experience of the world. The con artist who poses as a guru, the charlatan who builds an empire on false promises, the charismatic figure who persuades intelligent people to abandon their own judgment, these are not relics of a vanished age but permanent features of human society.