SOURCE: “The Barber of Seville”and “The Rest Is Literature,” in Beaumarchais: The Man Who Was Figaro, translated by Roger Greaves, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1977, pp. 134-45, 203-10.

In the excerpt below, Grendel ponders the appeal of The Barber of Seville and provides background on Beaumarchais's life.

The Barber of Seville

Here we go. With this devil of a man, nothing is ever signed, sealed and delivered. There is always a reason for starting all over again. As he wrote to Gudin in 1774, ‘I have been alive for two hundred years.’ It would take a good couple of centuries, and innumerable books, to tell his life story. At this point in his labours, the author of this biography feels his mind reel. As he discovers the errors made by others, he realizes how many he has made himself. At every step he feels the urge to go back...