ABSTRACT
While novelists' tragic denouements echoed the fatalism of much religion and moral philosophy, playwrights offered ridicule as a means of deterring their audiences from following the misers' bad examples—while also gleefully acting out the revenge fantasy of dispersing their hoarded wealth. Comedies such as Henry Fielding's The Miser and Susanna Centlivre's The Busie Body, along with jokes and ballads, achieved lasting popularity by casting misers as deserving victims of assault, blackmail, fraud, and theft. The result was a sort of vicarious vigilante justice, which audiences could enjoy without committing any crimes against propriety or property themselves. By ephemerally upending class relations, these depictions enabled audiences to denounce the market economy's worst excesses without seriously challenging its basic assumptions. In marriage plots, the fact that the foiled protagonist happened to be a miser was often incidental to the outcome: this merely made it easier for audiences to side with the victors, who often betrayed vices to spare. Comedies more directly concerned with money, on the other hand, foregrounded the miser's covetousness, both to justify his failure to retain his riches and to provide the means of his downfall.
