ARTicles vol. 2 i.4b: Moliere’s Miser

A coughing sexagenarian whose every thought, word, and action is determined by greed, Harpagon is one of Molière’s most notorious characters. For more than three centuries, audiences have been charmed by the skinflint’s obsessive scrimping and disturbed by the consequences of his avarice. Harpagon’s frenzied antics give The Miser its comic momentum, but the character also casts a dark shadow on the play. His financial paranoia is as unsettling as it is entertaining. Harpagon is a descendant of the old curmudgeon Euclio from Plautus’ Pot of Gold – one of the many plays Molière borrowed from when he wrote The Miser. Molière grew up studying Roman drama at the Collège de Clermont in Paris, a prestigious Jesuit school where teachers encouraged their students to learn Latin by staging plays. While he was writing his adaptation of Plautus’ Amphitryon in 1667, Molière must have revisited Pot of Gold and seen in the Roman hoarder an opportunity to ridicule the bourgeois tightwads of his own day. Molière also modeled Harpagon on Pantalone, the tightfisted Venetian merchant of commedia dell’arte. Italian commedia was a performance style Molière knew well. Twelve years touring in the French provinces had brought him into contact with traveling Italian actors, and when he returned to Paris in 1658 Louis XIV granted Molière’s company permission to share the theatre at the Petit-Bourbon with a commedia dell’arte troupe. The two companies worked alongside one another for two years, until the Petit-Bourbon was demolished to make room for the expansion of the Louvre. Molière’s troupe then moved into the Palais-Royal, which became its home until the playwright’s death in 1673. In addition to being the company playwright, Molière was also one of the troupe’s leading actors. He created the role of Harpagon for himself, bringing to the stage his impeccable comic timing and a love for physical humor that he had inherited from the Italian actors. Molière was better known for his generosity than his parsimony, but a few of his friends must have noticed at least one similarity between the playwright and his penny-pincher. In the second act of The Miser, Harpagon confesses to the matchmaker Frosine that he’s worried his young bride-to-be, Mariane, won’t be attracted to a sixty-year-old man. Molière was experiencing similar marital anxieties when he played Harpagon. In 1662, the playwright had married Armande Béjart, an actress who was half his age. Problems developed quickly in the relationship. By the time Molière wrote The Miser, he and Armande were living in separate houses. She stayed in the city and he spent most of his time at a tranquil hideaway on the outskirts of Paris – they probably saw each other more frequently in the theatre than at home. Molière may have amplified offstage tensions in his casting of the play. It’s possible that Madeleine Béjart, Molière’s ex-lover and probably Armande’s mother, played the go-between Frosine and that Armande played the reluctant Mariane. The Miser premiered in September of 1668 at the Palais-Royal. Molière’s play George Dandin had been a flop earlier that year, and Tartuffe, his attack on false devotees, had been banned from the stage under pressure from a religious order. Clearly, the troupe needed a hit that season, but The Miser wasn’t the success the company hoped it would be, and the initial run ended after just four performances. The cool reception of the premiere is an aberration in The Miser’s production history. Over the past three and a half centuries, it has been one of the most frequently performed plays at the Comédie-Française – the national theatre Louis XIV created after Molière’s death, by merging his company of comedians with the tragedians from the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Henry Fielding’s English adaptation of the play, which renamed the lead character “Lovegold,” was one of London’s most successful plays when it premiered in 1733. Fielding’s adaptation was revived frequently in London in the eighteenth century and was even popular enough to be brought to the New World. In 1767 it was produced in Philadelphia by one of colonial America’s fledgling troupes. By the twentieth century, the Comédie-Française was so confident in the play that the troupe decided to use it as a fundraising vehicle. Convinced Harpagon’s greed would inspire charitable sentiments in the audience, the Comédie-Française brought its production of The Miser to London in 1922 to raise money for the Institut Français and the restoration of the Rheims Cathedral. Only Tartuffe is staged more frequently than The Miser today. It is difficult to ascertain why seventeenth-century Parisians didn’t admire the play as much as subsequent audiences have. One possibility is that they were frustrated by the language. Parisians were accustomed to five-act comedies written in verse, and The Miser is scripted entirely in prose. “What is the meaning of this?” an anonymous duke is said to have exclaimed after seeing the play. “Is Molière daft, and does he take us for simpletons to make us sit through five acts of prose? Did anybody ever see such nonsense? Is it possible that anybody can like prose?” But surely not all audience members were as adverse to comic prose as the offended duke. Perhaps the first audiences were also disoriented by the dark undertones in a play that had the surface appearance of a satirical romp. The extremity of Harpagon’s greed gives him an idiosyncratic charm. But his frugality takes on a violence that threatens to destroy everyone around him – especially his children. When the sycophantic Frosine compliments Harpagon on his health, she tells the cantankerous codger, “You’ll bury your children and your children’s children.” Determined to keep his son and daughter’s inheritance from their deceased mother for himself, Harpagon responds immediately, “Well, that’s good to know.” Harpagon’s son, Cléante, is a gambler who rebels against his father’s stinginess by wasting his money on fashionable apparel. Cléante is as devoted to spending as his father is to hoarding. The clash of economic interests, exacerbated by a conflict of romantic interests (Cléante and Harpagon both want to marry Mariane), keep the father and son at each other’s throats. They torture each other psychologically and emotionally, and by the end of the play each has wished the other dead. Goethe took the tension between Harpagon and Cléante quite seriously. “[Molière’s] Miser, where vice destroys all love between father and son, is especially great, and in a high sense tragic,” the German writer once remarked. Harpagon is devastated when he realizes his beloved strongbox that he buried in the garden has been stolen. Left alone on stage, Harpagon cries out in panic: “They’ve cut my throat! They’ve stolen my money! … Won’t somebody bring me back to life by returning my money or telling me who took it?” The critic Marcel Gutwirth has interpreted Harpagon as a symbol of death – an old man enamored of lifeless gold whose own life is buried in the ground from the beginning of the play. In The Miser, greed is not just a vice. It is a sickness that preys on the young, a deadly force that is only narrowly averted by the eleventh-hour arrival of a dubious deus ex machina. Death was certainly on Molière’s mind when he wrote and acted in The Miser. By 1667, the playwright had been infected with the tuberculosis that would take his life six years later. He was in very poor health around the time The Miser premiered in Paris. The forty-six year old playwright must have known he was seriously ill, but he tried to cover up his sickness by giving Harpagon a phlegmatic cough. Molière transformed his own malady into a stage gag, concealing death behind the mask of comedy. Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.