The Miser

the miser a French comedy by Molière ....
Harpagon the protagonist, who spends most of his time guarding his money and searching for ways to reduce or avoid paying household expenses. At the end of the play, he is more concerned with his money than he is with the welfare of his children.
Cléante Son of Harpagon. He loves Marianne, the young woman he saved from drowning and to his bad luck his father wishes to marry,Élise Daughter of Harpagon and beloved of Valère. Against her wishes, Harpagon hopes to marry her to a wealthy man whom he choose.....

Harpagon is unable to see in himself the shortcomings for which he blames others. Harpagon criticizes Jacques for always thinking of money. Harpagon, of course, is the one who is obsessed with money.


HARPAGON. Tell me, can you give us a good supper?
JACQUES. Yes, if you give me plenty of money.
HARPAGON. The deuce! Always money! I think they have nothing else to say
except money, money, money! Always that same word in their mouth,
money! They always speak of money! It's their pillow companion, money!


( )

I realized that I´ve been stockpiling plays for some time now, and I thought that I´d read a bunch of them in a row, because I do love dialogue, and reading plays in Spanish and French from centuries past is a fun way to travel literarily to different eras when people spoke in different and interesting ways. Molière´s L´Avare is a comedy in five acts, where two children try and successfully maneuver their romantic desires around their father´s will, which runs contrary to their own. I really liked the intrigue between the characters in L´Avare, with all of the characters orbiting around the tyrannical and avaricious figure of Harapagon, the father. In the first and second acts, the conflicts are clearly presented: Cléante, Harapagon´s son, is secretly in love with Mariane and wants to marry her. He is just about to tell his father, who shocks him by declaring that he has decided to remarry (he´s a widower), and has chosen Mariane as his future wife. His daughter, Elise, wants to marry Valère and is also on the verge of declaring her intentions when her father tells her that he´s found her a sufficiently wealthy husband, an old man named Anselme whom Elise definitely does not want to marry. Beyond the marriage problems, Harapagon´s extremely thrifty ways put him in conflict with his children and his household servants. In the following acts the children, the servants, and a procuress named Frosine all try to get Harapagon to see things their way and get what they want out of him. The conflicts provide ample opportunity for comedy, and Molière delivers, with lots of cleverly devised arguments and funny moments. There´s often a tinge of tragedy in the way that Harapagon and his children interact, because they really do feel wronged by his miserly way of living, and I think that this helps make the comedy all the more effective, because it does tread that line while staying consistently funny.

I got into reading plays when I had a long commute to work on the train, and I enjoyed reading books that were more or less predictable in the amount of time they´d take to finish. Plays are constrained by the patience of the audience, and thus usually don´t take more than a few hours to read. I liked that, and ended up reading a fair amount of plays from Spain´s Siglo de Oro era. This play was written in the mid 1600´s, and I enjoyed a few aspects of L´Avare that reminded me of Spanish plays. The servants fall into a few archetypical categories common in both plays and novels of the era, such as the noble fallen on hard times who is working as a servant while wooing the woman he loves and hiding his true identity, or the greedy servant blinded by his desire for his master´s riches. Maître Jacques, Harpagon´s cook and coachman, is a great comic character, whose truthfulness with his master earns him Harpagon´s ire and a couple of beatings. Finally, the character of the procuress was quite familiar to me after reading Spanish plays, with the figure of the Celestina looming in my mind as I read her lines in L´Avare. I´m assuming that the audience of Molière´s time would place her immediately in context with other pieces that they had seen and enjoyed, because she is a minor character in this play who fits in perfectly as one more person who wants some of Harpagon´s tucked away riches. He wants her help in procuring marriage to Mariane, but obviously loathes having to deal with her. I enjoyed the similarities, and it was interesting to read a play from 17th century France and see how it related to the plays of 16th and 17th century Spain.

Molière´s play, on the other hand, was much more colloquial than a lot of my favorite Spanish plays, without the heady wordplay and complex manipulations of language that I enjoy in writers like Quevedo and Calderón. It was very accessible in its language and the plays on words and confusions between the characters were easy to follow while at the same time intelligent and well-crafted. There was one scene where two characters have an extended discourse where one is clearly referring to money while the other is clearly referring to a woman, and I really enjoyed the way that Molière was able to draw out the conversation to great length before either one realizes the confusion. There was one further difference between L´Avare and most Siglo de Oro plays: this play was written in prose, rather than in poetic form, which took me a while to notice, but seemed strange considering how much emphasis was put on form in those days. I´m often ignorant of what´s going on with meter and rhyme in plays, so maybe this wasn´t too out of the ordinary, but I certainly noticed it. I feel like La Celestina was in prose as well, but I think that most of the major Spanish playwrights wrote in poetic form.

One further thing I enjoyed about this play was my edition, which had text on one side of the page and photographs from a dramatic representation of the play on the other side. It was extremely helpful to see the characters and the clothes that they were wearing, because clothing was mentioned a lot in reference to the miserly or free-spending ways of the characters, and it´s always hard for me to fully understand what the array of strange 17th century tights, belts, ruffles and jackets actually would look like on a real person. Seeing Harpagon and the other characters on stage was really cool, and made me wish that some other books that I have read followed the same sort of format. ( )

French

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