Ақшаға жалысқан адам

Person who is reluctant to spend

A miser '/m//aɪ//z//ər/// is a person who is reluctant to spend money, sometimes to the point of forgoing even basic comforts and some necessities, in order to hoard money or other possessions. Although the word is sometimes used loosely to characterise anyone who is mean with their money, if such behaviour is not accompanied by taking delight in what is saved, it is not properly miserly. Misers as a type have been a perennial object of popular fascination and a fruitful source for writers and artists in many cultures.

There were two famous references to misers in ancient Greek sources. One was Aesop's fable of "The Miser and his Gold" which he had buried and came back to view every day. When his treasure was eventually stolen and he was lamenting his loss, he was consoled by a neighbour that he might as well bury a stone (or return to look at the hole) and it would serve the same purpose. The other was a two line epigram in the Greek Anthology, once ascribed to Plato. In this a man, intending to hang himself, discovered hidden gold and left the rope behind him; on returning, the man who had hidden the gold hanged himself with the noose he found in its place. Both these stories were alluded to or retold in the following centuries, the most famous versions appearing in La Fontaine's Fables as L'avare qui a perdu son trésor (IV.20) and Le trésor et les deux hommes (IX.15) respectively. Yet another of La Fontaine's fables was the late addition, ""The miser and the monkey" (XII.3), used as a cautionary tale for financiers. Here a man keeps his hoard in a sea encircled tower until a pet monkey amuses itself one day in throwing the coins out of the window. In Asia misers were the butt of humorous folklore. One very early cautionary tale is the Illisa Jataka from the Buddhist scriptures. This includes two stories, in the first of which a rich miser is miraculously converted to generosity by a disciple of the Buddha; following this, the Buddha tells another story of a miser whose wealth is given away when the king of the gods impersonates him, and when he tries to intervene is threatened with what will happen if he does not change his ways. Two 16th century stories concerning misers are included among the witticisms attributed to Birbal during Mughal times. In one he extracts from a casuistical miser a fee for a poem written in his praise. In the other the miser is forced to reward a merchant who rescued his hoard from a fire with the whole of it. Arabs similarly made extensive use of misers in their literature. The most famous being the 600 page collection of anecdotes called Kitab Al Bukhala or Book of Misers by Al Jāḥiẓ. He lived in 800 CE during the Abbasid Caliphate in Basra, making this the earliest and largest known work on the subject in Arabic literature. When there was renewed European interest in Aesop during the early Renaissance, the Neo Latin poet Laurentius Abstemius wrote two collections of original fables, among which appeared Avarus et poma marcescentia (The miser and the rotten apples, fable 179), published in 1499. This was eventually translated into English by Roger L'Estrange and published in his fable collection of 1692. It concerns a miser who cannot bring himself to eat the apples in his orchard until they start to go rotten. His son invites in his playmates to pick the fruit but asks them not to eat the rotten ones since his father prefers those. The 18th century French fabulist Claris de Florian was to adapt the story in his "L'avare et son fils" (The miser and his son, IV.9). In this version the miserly father hoards his apples and only eats those going rotten. His son, upon being caught raiding them, excuses himself on the grounds that he was confining himself to eating just the sound ones. In 18th century Britain, when there was a vogue for creating original fables in verse, a number featured misers. Anne Finch's "Tale of the Miser and the Poet" was included among others in her 1713 Miscellany. There an unsuccessful poet meets Mammon in the guise of a miser digging up his buried gold and debates with him whether the life of wit and learning is a better calling than the pursuit of wealth. Eventually the poet is convinced that keeping his talent hidden until it is better regarded is the more prudent course. It was followed by John Gay's "The Miser and Plutus", published in his collection of fables in 1737. A miser frightened for the security of his hoard denounces gold as the corruptor of virtue and is visited by the angry god of wealth, who asserts that not gold but the attitude towards it is what damages the personality. While these are more or less original interpretations of the theme, French fabulist Antoine Houdar de la Motte harks back to the light hearted approach of the Greek Anthology in "The Miser and Minos", first published in his fables of 1719. Descending to the Classical underworld at his death, the miser is brought before the judge of the dead and is given the extreme punishment of returning to earth to witness how his wealth is now being spent. The Scottish poet Allan Ramsay adapted this into dialect two years later, and Charles Denis provided a version in standard English in his Select Fables (1754), reversing the title to "Minos and the Miser".

Misers were represented onstage as comic figures from Classical times. One of the earliest appears in the comic Phlyax plays developed in the Greek colonies in Italy during the 4th century BCE, which are known only from rare fragments and titles. They were also popularly represented on Greek vases, often with the names of the characters written above them. In one of these by Asteas two men are depicted robbing a miser. At the centre the miser Charinos has settled for sleep on top of his strongbox in the comfort of two blankets. He is rudely awoken by two rascals mishandling him in an effort to lay their hands on his riches. On the left, Gymnilos has already pulled away the blanket on top of him while, on the right, Kosios drags out the blanket beneath. On the far right, the miser's slave Karion stands with outstretched arms and knocking knees. Such stock figures eventually provided inspiration for the Latin dramas of Plautus. The character of Euclio in his Aulularia was to be particularly influential, as was the complicating subplot of a marriageable daughter. One of the earliest Renaissance writers to adapt the play was the Croatian Marin Držić in about 1555, whose Skup (The Miser) is set in Dubrovnik. Ben Jonson adapted elements from Plautus for his early comedy The Case is Altered (c. 1597). The miser there is the Milanese Jaques de Prie, who has a (supposed) daughter, Rachel. Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft and Samuel Coster followed with their very popular Dutch comedy Warenar (1617). The play is named from the miser, whose daughter is Claartje. Molière adapted Plautus' play into French as L'Avare (The Miser, 1668) while in England Thomas Shadwell adapted Molière's work in 1672 and a version based on both Plautus and Molière was produced by Henry Fielding in 1732. Among later adaptations there was Vasily Pashkevich's 18th century Russian comic opera The Miser and pioneering dramatic works in Arabic by Marun Al Naqqash (1817–55) and in Serbian by Jovan Sterija Popović. There were also independent dramatic depictions of misers, some of them being variations of the Pantaleone figure in 16th century Italian commedia dell'arte. He is represented as a rich and miserly Venetian merchant, later to become the father of Columbina. The Venetian characters who reappear in English drama include the Jewish moneylender Shylock in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1598) and the title character of Ben Jonson's Volpone (1606). In Aubrey Beardsley's title page for the latter, Volpone is shown worshiping his possessions, in illustration of the lines from the play, "Dear Saint, / Riches, the dumb god that giv'st all men tongues." A similar scene takes place in the second act of Alexander Pushkin's short tragedy Skupoi rytsar (1836). This concerns a son, Albert, kept short of funds by his father, the Baron. Under the title The Miserly Knight, it was made an opera by Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1906. In the corresponding act in the latter, the Baron visits his underground storehouse, where he gloats at a new addition to his coffers and moodily contemplates the extravagance of his son during a 15 minute solo. Following on from the continuing success of Molière's L'Avare, there was a spate of French plays dealing with misers and their matrimonial plans over the next century and a half. What complicates matters is that several of these had the same title but were in fact separate plays written by different authors. L'Avare Amoureux (The Miser in Love) by Jean du Mas d' Aigueberre (1692–1755) was a one act comedy acted in Paris in 1729. It is not the same as the anonymous one act comedy of the same title published in 1777. Another set of plays borrows a title from the Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni, who was working in France at the end of his life. He had already produced a one act comedy titled L'avaro (The Miser) in Bologna in 1756. In 1776 he produced in France the five act L' avare fastueux (The Spendthrift Miser). The same title was used by L. Reynier for his five act verse drama of 1794 and by Claude Baron Godart d'Aucourt de Saint Just (1769 1826) for his three act verse drama of 1805. The early 19th century saw misers become the subject of the musicals then fashionable in France. Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne collaborated on
L'avare en goguette (The miser's spree) in 1823, while Jean François Bayard and Paul Duport collaborated on the two act La fille de l'avare (The Miser's Daughter) in 1835. And on the other side of the Atlantic there was a stage production of Julietta Gordini:The Miser's Daughter, a verse play in five acts, which claimed to derive its plot 'from an Italian story'. Douglas William Jerrold's John Overy or The Miser of Southwark Ferry, (1828) also brings in a daughter whom the miser attempts to sell off as a mistress to her disguised lover. Earlier Jerrold had written a one act farce, The Smoked Miser or The Benefit of Hanging (1823), in which a miser tries to marry off his ward to advantage. Another farce produced in Canada, Major John Richardson's The Miser Outwitted (1841), had an Irish theme and dealt with a plot to trick a miser out of his money. The later Thomas Peckett Prest's The Miser of Shoreditch or the Curse of Avarice (1854) was based on a penny dreadful story by him; later he adapted it as a two act romantic drama set in time of Henry VIII. The popularity of these theatrical misers is evident from the number of paintings and drawings based on them, many of which were then adapted as prints. In 18th century England, it was Fielding's "The Miser" that attracted most attention. Samuel Wale's drawing of the second act was also made into a print. But it was principally depictions of various actors in the character of Lovegold, the play's anti hero, which attracted artists. Samuel De Wilde pictured William Farren in the role at the Theatre Royal, Bath. Several other works became plates in one or another book dedicated to English drama. James Roberts II (1753 – c. 1810) executed a pen and ink watercolour of Edward Shuter in character which was adapted as a print for the six volume play collection, Bell's British Theatre. Charles Reuben Ryley made a print of Thomas Ryder in the role for Lowndes' British Theatre (1788), while Thomas Parkinson's painting of Richard Yates as Lovegold was adapted for the 1776 edition of that work. In the following century, Thomas Charles Wageman's dramatic head and shoulders drawing of William Farren as Lovegold illustrated William Oxberry's collection of texts, The New English Drama (1820). From this time too dates the coloured print of Samuel Vale acting the part of Goliah Spiderlimb, the comic servant in Jerrold's The Smoked Miser. Molière's L'Avare was not altogether eclipsed in England by the work adapted from it. A drawing by William Hogarth of the play's denouement was included as a print in the translation of Molière's work and prints based upon it were made by various other engravers. William Powell Frith devoted one of his theatrical paintings to a scene from L'Avare in 1876 while the French actor Grandmesnil in the role of Harpagon was painted by Jean Baptiste François Desoria. In addition, the challenging and complex part of Shylock was favoured by English artists. Johann Zoffany painted Charles Macklin in the role that had brought him fame at the Covent Garden Theatre (1767–68) and Thomas Gray portrayed a confrontation between Shylock and his daughter Jessica (1868). Character portraits of other actors in Shylock's role have included Henry Urwick (1859–1931) by Walter Chamberlain Urwick (1864 1943), Herbert Beerbohm Tree by Charles Buchel and Arthur Bourchier, also by Buchel.