| The Miser | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Written by | Molière |
| Characters |
|
| Date premiered | September 9, 1668 |
| Place premiered | Paris |
| Original language | French |
| Subject | Avarice |
| Genre | Comedy |
| Setting | Paris, in Harpagon's house |
The Miser (French: L'Avare; pronounced [lavaʁ]; also known by the longer name L'Avare ou L'École du Mensonge, meaning The Miser, or the School for Lies)[1][2] 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.[3]
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.[4][5]
The miser of the title is called Harpagon, a name adapted from the Greek ἁρπάγη pronounced harpágay, meaning a hook or grappling iron (ἁρπάγη < ἁρπάζω = grab). 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” (5.1) 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.[6]
Harpagon's servants with minor roles include Brindavoine,[14] La Merluche,[14] and Mistress Claude, a cleaning woman with no lines.[15] In the last act appears a Magistrate[a] who investigates the theft of the cash-box[16] with his Clerk, who has no spoken part.[17]
Aside from the example of contemporary misers,[18] Molière drew from a number of ancient and contemporary sources for elements in his The Miser. The character of Harpagon draws from the Latin play Aulularia by Plautus in which the miser Euclio incessantly changes the hiding place of his pot of gold out of fear of having it stolen, and the miser's fourth-act[b] monologue exaggerating the loss of his pot was the basis for Harpagon's. Also from Aulularia Molière appropriated the love affair between Élise and Valère, Harpagon's inspection of the hands of La Flèche, and Valère's avowals of love for Élise that Harpagon takes as his confession to theft.[19] La Belle Plaideuse (1655) of François le Métel de Boisrobert furnished Molière with the father-as-usurer, and the scene in which a lender lends the borrower 15,000 francs, of which 3,000 is in goods;[20] several of these items appear in the list in The Miser.[15] Jean Donneau de Visé's la Mère coquette (1665) gave Molière a father and son in love with the same young woman.[citation needed]
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.[21] In England Thomas Shadwell adapted Molière's work under the title "The Miser" in 1672 and added eight new characters.[22] An even more popular version based on both Plautus and Molière was produced by Henry Fielding in 1732.[23]
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.[24] 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 (1817–55) as al-Bakhil. This was performed in Beirut in 1847.[25]
Jovan Sterija Popović, the founding father of Serbian theatre, based his Tvrdica (The Miser, 1837) on Molière's play. In this work, the Harpagon figure is represented as a small town Greek merchant.[26]
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.[27] 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.[28]
The earliest American production of a play titled The Miser was of Fielding's version in the years following 1766.[29] A Broadway production of a translation of Molière's play ran for only three nights at the Experimental Theatre in 1936[30] and there have been several revivals since in one version or another.
In 1954, The Laird o' Grippy, a free translation into Scots by Robert Kemp, was staged by the Edinburgh Gateway Company, with John Laurie in the leading role.[31]
An audio recording of the 1969 Lincoln Center production produced by Jules Irving and directed by Carl Weber was released by Caedmon Records (TRS 338). This recording of the adaptation by Ranjit Bolt is available at the Internet Archive.[32] The play itself ran at the Vivian Beaumont Theater for 52 performances.[33]
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.[34]
More recently in Britain, John Coutts' English-Scots version of The Miser was performed in 2009 under the title The Auld Skinflint.[35] 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.[36]
