 1668 at the theater of the Palais Royal, during a difficult time for Molière, who was struggling with health and family problems, as well as with strong reactions from certain circles regarding Tartuffe and Dom Juan. [12] The Miser, despite its heavy farcical outlook, remains one of Molière’s “grand” comedies, in which he ridicules individuals who attempt to impose on others their own obsessions, thus harming not only themselves, but also their immediate circle and society at large. Harpagon, the protagonist, is a sexagenarian widower obsessively preoccupied with his money, “an early modern capitalist in action.” [13] Out of extreme thriftiness he is planning to marry his daughter to a rich widower, while he is yearning to wed for a second time choosing the beloved of his son as his ideal bride. During the play, we follow the downfall of the penny-pinching father, after his precious coffer is stolen by a coalition of disgruntled people, including his servant and his {210|211} children. The resolution is achieved when the miser concedes to marry his children to the companions of their choice, in exchange for his stolen coffer. The action takes place in seventeenth-century Paris and all the references to material wealth and money-lending involve the currency and habits of the French in the era of Louis XIV (who reigned from 1643 to 1715). Given the tendency to attribute such negative qualities as miserliness to other nations, the miser in Molière’s play is compared in three instances respectively to a Jew, an Arab, and a Turk, first by his dumbfounded son who discovers as an incognito customer the high interest rates his father charges, and second by his servant who tries to warn a matchmaker about his master’s unrestrained passion for money.
La Flèche. All useless here. I defy you to soften, as far as money is concerned, the man we are speaking of. He is a Turk on that point, of a Turkishness to drive anyone to despair, and we might starve in his presence and never a peg would he stir. In short, he loves money better than reputation, honour, and virtue, and the mere sight of anyone making demands upon his purse sends him into convulsions; it is like striking him in a vital place, it is piercing him to the heart, it is like tearing out his very bowels! And if...
Comedy is an imitation of a base and ridiculous act, which intends to cure vice painlessly and to teach virtue. In order to achieve this, comedy must imitate well the mores, rituals and the behavior of the nation for which it is produced. Without this national gain, the playwright cannot attract and move the readers or the spectators of his poem. Molière painted the Miser according to the practices of his compatriots. The Greek must paint him according to the habits of his fellow citizens. It is a necessity for theater to be national, and above all for comedy.
For that reason I often used sentences and opinions and proverbs and some scenes, which differ substantially from the original, so that I adapt the poem to the customs of my compatriots […] the cloths of Europe we cut them and sew them according to the habit of our compatriots.
[…] our spoken language is still very unruly and sullied by stains. Until it gets organized and enriched, we have to live with its imperfections. I used some dialects, for instance the common language of the lower classes of Chios in the language of Strovilis [servant of the miser’s son], and the vernacular of the Thessalians for Kyr Yiannis [the miser’s cook], as well as the vernacular of the Smyrniots for the character of Sofoulio [the matchmaker], and to an extent for the character of the barbaric rich Exintavelonis [very astute rendition of Harpagon]. […] The comic playwright uses dialects to represent n aiveté, lack of education, and the particularity of the person using the dialect.
[…] as if the other heavy expenses of our city were not sufficient, we want to collect money for schools too! And what on earth do we need schools for? 
In the prologue of his 1851 edition of Tartuffe, the thirty-two-year-old Skylitsis argues that the act of translation (as opposed to original creation) was of primary importance for the familiarization of the readers with high-quality drama. He mentions the example of other European countries (like Prussia), whose intelligentsia undertook massive translations of classical and European drama in order to cure similar shortages. He states clearly that there are plenty of major masters of drama whose works had not been rendered in Greek (“where are the good translations of Shakespeare, Schiller, Alfieri, Molière, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes?”). [32] He confesses: “one needs to toil hard, of course, and it takes time; but I don’t know of any difficulty which cannot be overcome by the perseverance of a sharp and hard-working translator.” [33] As Politis has shown, hardworking is one unquestionable characteristic of Skylitsis. As for his method in adapting Tartuffe, he says that he “reshaped [the play] according to the customs of the place, where the language of translation is spoken” (ibid.). It is interesting to see how he describes his decision to work on the play, as a true child of the Romantic era to which he belonged; speaking in the third person, he confesses that “he saw in front of him a river, a wide one indeed, but it seemed peaceful and shallow near the riverbed. He went in the river, and he advanced with bold and confident strokes, when he noticed that the river was becoming deeper, and that its flow was becoming more rapid” (ibid., 114). Nonetheless, he carried on and when he had translated the largest part of the play, he came across a copy of an earlier translation of the play by Konstantinos Kokkinakis, published in Vienna in 1815. He confesses that the evolution of the Greek language in the thirty-five years that separate the two translations was to his advantage, and that he chose a different kind of verse (with an unstressed last syllable) from his predecessor. He then goes on to attribute whatever value his translation has to the liberties he took with the text: “in order to make the soul of the writer understood by his audience, the translator changed the names, the places, altered the manners of people [because] it is impossible to translate comedy otherwise” (ibid., 116). His predecessor might have kept the setting and the habits of the original, but the “salt and the irony, which shines there is lost” (ibid., 117). To his rhetorical question “whom would the playwright embrace? {218|219} the one who translates him word for word fearfully, or the one who translates his spirit lovingly,” he explains that he followed the example of the translator of The Miser [Oikonomos], praising the renaming of Harpagon to Exintavelonis. Last, he admits that he censored some of Molière’s expressions “making them more decent, because he owed this to himself and to the public in front of which the play would be performed” (ibid., 119).
Skylitsis set the play in Constantinople, in the Phanari (present day Fener) area of town, and renamed the entire cast, giving them Greek names with a Constantinopolitan twist: for instance, Madame Pernelle of the original, the mother of Orgon, becomes “Kokona Soultanio,” his daughter Mariane becomes “Elengo,” Dorine (one of the sharpest and most entertaining characters of Molière) becomes “Drossí,” while Orgon becomes “Lemvikis.” Needless to say, Tartuffe becomes simply “Tartoufos,” because, as Skylitsis explains, the name had become synonymous with “hypocrite” in Greek (due to Kokkinakis’ earlier translation). In the text he often uses the hellenized versions of Turkish words like cübbe (robe worn by imams), mahkeme (Turkish court), etc.
And, M. 1963. A History of Theatre and Popular Entertainment in Turkey. Ankara.
Auerbach, E. 1974. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (trans. Willard R. Trask). Princeton. Fourth edition.
Farrell, J. 1996. “Servant of many masters.” Stages of Translation (ed. D. Johnston) 45–55. Bath.
Fischer-Lichte, E. 2002. History of European Drama and Theatre (trans. J. Riley). London and New York.
Gaines, J., ed. 2002. The Molière Encyclopedia. London.
Goldoni, C. 1935–1956. Tutte le opere di Carlo Goldoni, vol. 1. Milan.
Hadjipantazis, T. 2002. Από του Νείλου μέχρι του Δουνάβεως: Το χρονικό της ανάπτυξης του ελληνικού επαγγελματικού θεάτρου, στο ευρύτερο πλαίσιο της Ανατολικής Μεσογείου,