Tartuffe by Molière
Published 1669 · 240 pages · 19,921 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Drama, Comedy, Satire
How hard is Tartuffe to read?
Tartuffe scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Standard verse comedy vocabulary. Molière writes in accessible alexandrines and prose passages. Some period legal and religious terminology but nothing obscure.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Dialogue-driven play with clear rhetorical exchanges. The verse is regular and the syntax follows natural speech patterns within the alexandrine form.
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- The play deals with concrete social situations — a household takeover by a fraud. Philosophical themes about hypocrisy emerge from action, not abstraction.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Five acts of tightly constructed comedy. Each scene advances the plot or deepens character. No wasted exchanges.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- The audience knows Tartuffe is a fraud from the start. The dramatic irony is transparent by design — the comedy lies in watching Orgon fail to see what everyone else sees.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Tartuffe functions as a type — the religious hypocrite — but the play is more concerned with social mechanics than symbolic meaning.
- Ironic distance: 75 out of 100
- The entire structure is ironic: the pious man is a predator, the devout patron is a fool, and the servants see more clearly than the master.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- The deus ex machina ending — the King's intervention — resolves everything decisively. Molière ties up all threads.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Classical five-act structure with unity of time, place, and action. Straightforward dramatic construction.
How Tartuffe is regarded
Tartuffe holds a literary regard score of 92 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.