The Miser

The Miser or L'Avare is a satire written in 1668 by French playwright Jean Baptiste Molière. It is a comedy of manners.

It was first performed in 1668, in which Molière played the central role of the miser himself.

The Miser is the story of Harpagon, who is maniacally possessive about his own wealth. Always afraid that someone will steal it, he suspects everyone including his own children of wanting to rob him. His children, especially his spirited son, in turn despise him and want to get way from him.

I started off intending to read only a few pages of this play. But I ended up reading the whole thing in just two hours. The Miser is simply hilarious!

The situations in the play are all funny but some of the scenes are so funny that I show more would remember them for a long time to come. For example the scene in which the servant, Master Jacques, gives a statement to the police officer wishing to implicate Valère for the theft. Or the scene in which Harpagon and Valère have a very odd conversation about the theft and Harpagon’s daughter Élise.

Certain theatrical conventions are mocked in the play to a humorous effect. We often see that characters use asides to reveal their inner most thoughts to the audience, which the other characters in the play seem to ignore. But in The Miser, everytime a character uses an aside to reveal their inner thoughts, some other character demands to know what is it that they are saying!

Even the play’s end is farcical, in which almost half a dozen of the plays characters turn out to be related to each other. This, I presume, mocks the mandatory happy ending that we all seem to crave.

None of the characters stand out on their own, which is not a bad thing as they are all equally well written and important.

What can one say about Molière’s writing except that it is brilliant. The dialogues are very, very witty.

I loved reading The Miser. My only wish is to see a live performance of this play one day, if possible. show less

Harpagon, riche vieillard, fait subir à toute sa maisonnée sa passion aveugle et tyrannique pour l’argent. Son avarice fait obstacle aux projets amoureux de ses enfants, le pousse à soupçonner ses proches et donne envie à ses serviteurs de le tromper. Quand il apprend que son fils est son rival auprès de la belle Mariane et qu’une cassette pleine d’or lui a été dérobée, sa fureur est à son comble et frappe de stupeur tout son entourage…

Les grands personnages de Molière, M. Jourdain comme Argan, Alceste, Tartuffe ou les autres, ont tous dans leurs faiblesses quelque chose d'humain et de touchant qui nous empêche de rire sans retenue de leurs vices ou de leurs ridicules. A l'exception ! d'Harpagon. Celui-là n'est ni show more père, ni ami, ni bon ni mauvais, ni courageux ni craintif Rien qu'avare. Avare, pingre, ladre, fesse-mathieu, quoi qu'on fasse et quoi qu'il arrive. Grandiose, sublime, fou d'avarice. Les rires qu'il soulève ne sont pas près de s'éteindre. Mais Harpagon n'en a cure. Il n'est pas susceptible. Rien qu'avare, vous dis-je. show less

It was funny, it had some really good scenes and I quite enjoyed the story of a horrible miser and his long-suffering children - but the ending killed this story for me, it was so rushed and unbelievable. I wanted to like it more, unfortunately - only three disappointed stars.

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, show more 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. show less

Es una comedia en prosa en 5 actos, donde se analiza un defecto humano común y peligroso: la avaricia, encarnada en Harpagón.
La historia se sitúa en París en el siglo XVII, en el hogar de una familia acomodada, donde, sin embargo, los hijos sufren privaciones económicas y afectivas, a causa de la mezquindad de su padre. Harpagón está enamorado de Mariana y pretende casarse con ella a pesar de que su propio hijo se constituye en su rival, ya que también está enamorado de la joven.
El poder del protagonista radica en su dinero, con el que pretende comprar los sentimientos más puros, pero que se convertirá en su opresión y su ruina moral, ya que renunciará a todo por no perder lo material.

Jan. 2021:
Basically no change in my previous opinion. I have since discovered that this play was one of the few that Moliere wrote in prose rather than rhyme and thus was never translated by R. Wilbur. I do find that the word play is better in Moliere's plays that were written in verse...

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2015 review:
This French classic was my first experience of Molière and made me a lifelong fan. Unfortunately, the translation in this Kindle edition (my copy is from Project Gutenberg) by Charles Heron Wall isn't as good as the one I remember from years ago (Richard Wilbur's?). While easy to read, I miss the rhyming couplets and the word play isn't as sparkling as I expect from Molière.

Even with these flaws, I still had fun reading this. The show more ending reminded me of something from a Shakespeare comedy ("The Comedy of Errors" perhaps) but I love the fact that Harpagon stays miserly to the end. show less

Jan. 2021:
Basically no change in my previous opinion. I have since discovered that this play was one of the few that Moliere wrote in prose rather than rhyme and thus was never translated by R. Wilbur. I do find that the word play is better in Moliere's plays that were written in verse...

--------
2015 review:
This French classic was my first experience of Molière and made me a lifelong fan. Unfortunately, the translation in this Kindle edition (my copy is from Project Gutenberg) by Charles Heron Wall isn't as good as the one I remember from years ago (Richard Wilbur's?). While easy to read, I miss the rhyming couplets and the word play isn't as sparkling as I expect from Molière.

Even with these flaws, I still had fun reading this. The show more ending reminded me of something from a Shakespeare comedy ("The Comedy of Errors" perhaps) but I love the fact that Harpagon stays miserly to the end. show less