Tartuffe

Roger W. Herzel is Professor Emeritus, Department of Theater and Drama, Indiana University, Bloomington.Prudence L. Steiner took her Ph.D. at Harvard University, where she served as Lecturer and Director of the Harvard Extension School Writing Program.

The new Steiner Tartuffe offers welcome relief from all the rhymed translations that make Moliere sound like a third-rate Restoration poet while creating the (false) impression that verbal dexterity and wit trump all other values in the great comic playwright's dramaturgy. Steiner's crisp, lucid prose—her adroitly balanced sentences are especially effective at conveying the slippery rhetoric of Tartuffe's seductions—unfolds the plot and characters of Moliere's play with an unaccustomed clarity, presenting the ideological clashes of the play with a bluntness many other translations attenuate. Roger Herzel's Introduction is well-focused for those encountering Molière for the first time and informed throughout by his own excellent scholarship. --Jim Carmody, University of California, San Diego