It was loosely based on the Latin comedy Aulularia by Plautus, from which many incidents and scraps of dialogue are borrowed, as well as from contemporary Italian farces.

Élise, Harpagon's daughter, is the beloved of Valère, but her father hopes to marry her to a wealthy man of his choosing, Seigneur Anselme.

The play also makes fun of certain theatrical conventions, such as the spoken aside addressed to the audience, hitherto ignored by the characters onstage.

[4] Harpagon's servants with minor roles include Brindavoine,[12] La Merluche,[12] and Mistress Claude, a cleaning woman with no lines.

[17] La Belle Plaideuse (1655) of François le Métel de Boisrobert furnished Molière with the father-as-usurer, and the scene in which a lender lends the borrower 15,000 francs, of which 3,000 is in goods;[18] several of these items appear in the list in The Miser.

[13] Jean Donneau de Visé's la Mère coquette (1665) gave Molière a father and son in love with the same young woman.

[21] In Italian commedia dell'arte there was already a tradition of depicting misers as the Pantaleone figure, who was represented as a rich and avaricious Venetian merchant.

[23] Jovan Sterija Popović, the founding father of Serbian theatre, based his Tvrdica (The Miser, 1837) on Molière's play.

In 1954, The Laird o' Grippy, a free translation into Scots by Robert Kemp, was staged by the Edinburgh Gateway Company, with John Laurie in the leading role.

[33] In 2012 the play was made into a Bollywood musical titled Kanjoos The Miser by Hardeep Singh Kohli and Jatinder Verma and toured the UK.