The Miser


The Miser is a five-act comedy in prose by the French playwright Molière. It was first performed on September 9, 1668, in the theatre of the Palais-Royal in Paris.

The play

The play was first produced when Molière's company was under the protection of Louis XIV. It was loosely based on the Latin comedy Aulularia by Plautus, from which many incidents and scraps of dialogue are borrowed, as well as from contemporary Italian farces.
The miser of the title is called Harpagon, a name adapted from the Latin harpago, meaning a hook or grappling iron. He is obsessed with the wealth he has amassed and always ready to save expenses. Now a widower, he has a son, Cléante, and a daughter, Élise. Although he is over sixty, he is attempting to arrange a marriage between himself and an attractive young woman, Mariane. She and Cléante are already devoted to each other, however, and the son attempts to procure a loan to help her and her sick mother, who are impoverished. Élise, Harpagon's daughter, is the beloved of Valère, but her father hopes to marry her to a wealthy man of his choosing, Seigneur Anselme. Meanwhile, Valère has taken a job as steward in Harpagon's household so as to be close to Élise. The complications are only resolved at the end by the rather conventional discovery that some of the principal characters are long lost relatives.
Satire and farce blend in the fast-moving plot, as when the miser's hoard is stolen. Asked by the police magistrate whom he suspects, Harpagon replies, “Everybody! I wish you to take into custody the whole town and suburbs” and indicates the theatre audience while doing so. The play also makes fun of certain theatrical conventions, such as the spoken aside addressed to the audience, hitherto ignored by the characters onstage. The characters of L'Avare, however, generally demand to know who exactly is being spoken to.

Roles and Original Actors

; Harpagon: Molière
; Cléante: Du Croisy
; Élise: Mlle de Brie
; Valère: La Grange
; La Flèche: Louis Béjart
; Master Jacques: André Hubert
; Anselme: Mr de Brie
; Mariane: Armande Béjart-Molière
; Master Simon: La Thorillière?
; Frosine: Madeleine Béjart
Harpagon's servants with minor roles include Brindavoine, La Merluche, and Mistress Claude, a cleaning woman with no lines. In the last act appears a Magistrate who investigates the theft of the cash-box with his Clerk, who has no spoken part.

Synopsis

; Act I
; Act II
; Act III
; Act IV
; Act V

Theatrical adaptations

Very soon after the play's first production in 1668, versions began to appear elsewhere in Europe. A German translation, Der Geizige, appeared in Frankfurt in 1670. In England Thomas Shadwell adapted Molière's work under the title "The Miser" in 1672 and added eight new characters. An even more popular version based on both Plautus and Molière was produced by Henry Fielding in 1732.
In Italian commedia dell'arte there was already a tradition of depicting misers as the Pantaleone figure, who was represented as a rich and avaricious Venetian merchant. However, Molière's play was eventually adapted to opera. Giovanni Bertati's libretto based on the play was set by Pasquale Anfossi as L'avaro in 1775 and in 1776 it was set again by Gennaro Astarita. Giuseppe Palomba also wrote a libretto based on the work which was set by Giacomo Cordella in 1814. In Russia, too, Vasily Pashkevich based his 18th century comic opera The Miser on Molière's play. Another musical adaptation in Arabic was pioneered by the Lebanese Marun al-Naqqash as al-Bakhil. This was performed in Beirut in 1847.
Jovan Sterija Popović, the founding father of Serbian theatre, based his Tvrdica on Molière's play. In this work, the Harpagon figure is represented as a small town Greek merchant.
One reason for so many versions must be the acknowledged fact that Molière's humour does not translate well and requires more or less free adaptation to succeed. The history of De Vrek, Taco de Beer's 1863 translation into Dutch provides another notable example. In 1878 he adapted this to Dutch contemporary life and an edition of that version found its way to Indonesia. There it was further adapted into Malay as Si Bachil and given a contemporary Indonesian background. In 1941 this production in turn served as basis for Tamar Djaja's novel of the same title, by which time the story had become all but unrecognisable.
The earliest American production of a play titled The Miser was of Fielding's version in the years following 1766. A Broadway production of a translation of Molière's play ran for only three nights at the Experimental Theatre in 1936 and there have been several revivals since in one version or another. An audio recording of the 1969 Lincoln Center production was released by Caedmon Records (TRS 338. To date this is the only known English recording of the play and there is no translator listed in the album liner notes.
An Australian musical theatre adaptation with the name Mistress Money premiered in Sydney in 1960. It had book and lyrics by Eleanor Witcombe and John McKellar and music by Dot Mendoza.
More recently in Britain, John Coutts' English-Scots version of The Miser was performed in 2009 under the title The Auld Skinflint. In 2012 the play was made into a Bollywood musical titled Kanjoos The Miser by Hardeep Singh Kohli and Jatinder Verma and toured the UK.

Film, television and audio adaptations

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